Stone Free

A 1968 declaration of independence built on Hendrix's guitar doing things to a pentatonic blues scale that still sound like freedom in physical form, the notes bending and sustaining with a confidence that suggests the instrument has been waiting for exactly this player. The production is bright and slightly forward-mixed, Mitch Mitchell's drumming a crackling constant beneath the guitar's wandering, the whole thing moving with the loose authority of music made by someone who could do this in his sleep but has decided to pay full attention anyway. Lyrically it's a liberation song in the tradition: leaving a woman who ties him down, going wherever the road goes, owing nothing and answering to no one — the freedom fantasy that young men have always sung, but delivered with a vocal ease that makes the aspiration feel already realized rather than merely desired. Culturally it announces Hendrix's complete artistic autonomy at the start of his career, before the mythology accumulated around him. It plays best at the beginning of journeys, real or metaphorical, when the road ahead is still all possibility and the rearview mirror can be ignored.