If Six Was Nine

You are tuned to THE ZOO, and the record on the deck is the one that closed side one of Axis: Bold As Love with a shrug and a stomp. The Jimi Hendrix Experience called it "If 6 Was 9." Some of you still hear it as "If Six Was Nine." Either way, it is the longest cut on the album, five minutes and thirty-two seconds of acid blues, stereo chaos, and a declaration that the world can turn upside down and the man holding the Strat will still not copy you.

James Marshall Hendrix was born Johnny Allen Hendrix in Seattle on November 27, 1942, later renamed by his father, Al. He taught himself guitar after a busted broom became a make-believe instrument, left the Army 101st Airborne as a paratrooper who had already found the instrument more interesting than the jump, and spent the early sixties as a sideman for the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, and King Curtis. Chas Chandler of the Animals caught him at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village in 1966, flew him to London, and built the Experience around Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. Are You Experienced arrived in 1967 and rewired electric guitar. Axis: Bold As Love, the second album, was cut while that first record was still climbing, and it showed a writer who had already moved past the hit single.

Sessions for Axis opened at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London, on May 4 and 5, 1967, with Chandler producing and Eddie Kramer engineering on the new eight-track machines. The band jammed what became "If 6 Was 9" in two pieces, logged on the tape box as Section A and Section B. The second half was later retitled Symphony of Experience. Hendrix and Mitchell went back at the rhythm, cut fresh drum and guitar parts, and built the rest on top. Hendrix later told the story plainly. He adored the track. It was a complete jam, and the words went on afterwards. He called it a great feeling of blues.

The words are the individualist anthem of the album. If the sun refused to shine, he does not mind. If the mountains fell in the sea, he does not mind. If six turned out to be nine, he does not mind. He will not copy you. He has his own life to live. White-collar conservatives pointing fingers and hippies cutting their hair get the same shrug. Let them be. He is the one who has to die when it is time for him to die, so let him live the way he wants to. Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek heard a nod to Hopi creation myth in the falling mountains, drawn from Frank Waters' Book of the Hopi, a volume that fed a lot of Hendrix imagery. Numerology fans later tried to hitch the nine to the date of his death in September 1970. The man who wrote the song was talking about labels flipping and none of it mattering.

The sound is the other half of the argument. A blues riff opens it, then the arrangement goes free. Hendrix doubles the vocal with a guitar line an octave under the voice, a blues trick pushed through fuzz, slap echo, and heavy reverb. The solo pans hard from one speaker to the other, a studio stunt that still startles on a good system. Kramer has said the whole guitar stack, rhythm and lead, had to live on one track once the four-track reductions were done. Bass and drums shared a pair. Gaps in the vocal got filled with whatever else would fit. Out of that squeeze came one of the wildest codas of 1967.

The coda is where the guests walk in. Hendrix bought a beat-up recorder from a London street vendor and played it himself. He told interviewers it was him on the flute. Graham Nash, who had shared a flat with Mitch Mitchell, and Gary Leeds of the Walker Brothers were invited down to Olympic. Hendrix asked Nash if he could walk. Nash said of course he could walk. Hendrix put a piece of plywood on a drum platform and told them to walk in rhythm. Nash, Leeds, Hendrix, and Chandler stomped the fade. Hendrix credited Chandler's big feet on the way out. Nash, better known for a harmony stack than a percussion part, ended up in the pocket of a song that has nothing to do with the Hollies.

Then the master vanished. Near the end of the Axis schedule, Hendrix left the side-one mix reel in the back of a London taxi. It has never turned up. With the label clock running, Hendrix, Chandler, and Kramer remixed the seven songs of side one in a single stretch of about eleven hours. They could not match the lost mix of "If 6 Was 9." Noel Redding had a rough copy on tape for reference, wrinkled and falling apart, recorded at seven and a half inches per second. Kramer ironed the creases flat, transferred it to fifteen inches per second, and that ironed dub became the master you hear. Kramer has said they never got the original quality back. Hendrix was not happy about the rush either. The song that survived is the one that would not be rebuilt.

Track Records held the British release until December 1, 1967, so it would not collide with Are You Experienced. Reprise issued the American album on January 15, 1968, with a different cover and a slightly different sequence, "If 6 Was 9" still closing the first side. Roger Mayer's effects boxes, already part of the Hendrix sound, color other Axis cuts, but this one leans on echo, fuzz, and the room. The album art, painted by Roger Law and David King from a photograph by Karl Ferris, put Hendrix among the Hindu imagery of the title, bold as love, and the song at the end of side one is the one that refuses the costume.

Two years later the track walked into a movie. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda used it on the Easy Rider soundtrack in 1969, sitting it next to Steppenwolf, the Band, and the Byrds, and a lot of people met the song there before they met the album. It turned up again on the Point Break soundtrack in 1991. Beautiful People reworked it as "If 60's Was 90's." The Experience themselves did not treat it as a single. It was an album cut that outlived the marketing plan.

Put Axis on and you hear the band in the short window when they were still three. Redding's "She's So Fine" sits on the same record. Mitchell plays with the jazz ears that made him the right drummer for a guitarist who would not stay in the box. Hendrix was already writing "Little Wing," "Castles Made of Sand," and the title track in the same rooms. "If 6 Was 9" is the one where the jam won and the lyric caught up. Wave the freak flag. Fall in the sea. Point the finger. He does not mind.

The catalog lives with Experience Hendrix, the family company Al Hendrix set up, and the music is still being mixed and pressed. Dig the story, the sessions, and the records at the official home, jimihendrix.com, and on the official pages at Facebook, Instagram, and X. Session researchers keep a deep archive of dates, tapes, and early photographs at Early Hendrix. And when you want the deep cuts without the commercials, you already know the address: THE ZOO. If six was nine, we would still play it.