The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Purple Haze

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  General Comment:OK. EAT A HIT AND TELL ME ITS NOT ABOUT ACID...Otherwise STHU!!

  Flag BigDave100on March 13, 2013   Link

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  General Comment:I refuse to look through a whole bunch of people whining about drugs... this song is about being in a daze whether from drugs or something else.. but I would assume it refers to being a stoner. who cares.. Jimi Hendrix was good. He played Woodstock bombed on LSD.

  Flag PTCGAZon December 22, 2012   Link

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  General Comment:Sounds like he was describing some kind of contact with a UFO. It explains the warbled voices around the part after "end of time".
  
  
  "Excuse me, while I kiss the sky"
  
  Hendrix often portrays his "love interest" as cosmological beings in various songs, such as Hey Baby, Angel and Little Wing. Although the way he addresses these women increasingly makes them sounds less as his lovers and more of some kind of powerful caretaker of his. But then again many people feel angel is a song about his mother. But isn't it curious that he wills them to fly on, and in hey baby he begs her to take him with her. However in the last verse, she tells him "We're gonna go across the Jupiter sand/ and see all your people one by one/ You gotta help your people out right now/ That's what I'm doing it all about". That sounds more like a guide then a lover, albeit a guide that both mystified and infatuated Hendrix who ends the song with a cry for her to take him with her "Please take me!"
  
  I know that this sounds far-fetched but if you look at his body of work you will see that this type of imagery is pretty consistent. I'm not saying all of his songs are about UFOs, but many are, in subtle ways. Jimi was a smart guy. He knew to be subtle about stuff like this.
  
  I know I'm supposed to express what I think purple haze is about, and we may never know Jimi's true intent, but if you look at this song with a more open mind and relate it to the imagery in other songs, the lyrics themselves become pretty self explanatory. Jimi first describes how his perception has changed and how he has lost control of himself to us. Then he sees something that surprises him ("oh no"). After some lines he says "Something's Happening!" Then the song turns into a conversation between Jimi and some woman. He asks for help, and then tells the woman how she's blowing his mind. With some mind blowing information maybe?
  
  Jimi was fascinated by UFOs and there are a couple of stories of UFO's flying over his concerts. He spoke of the cosmos heavily in all his music
  
  I love all his music. It really is from the soul. The fact that all of us are trying to get to the bottom of these lyrics is a real testament to how great his mind was.
  
  P.S. I am not a UFO nut, although I do think it is very possible for life to exist outside of our realm, and I feel it is very vain of us to think that there can be nothing greater than us.

  Flag jashjon February 18, 2012   Link

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  General Comment:Shit why are 99% of the people so close minded...
  
  This song in not about drugs, is not about a girl, is not about a dream, is not about an acid trip...
  
  It's about all that! It's about a state of mind, a "purple haze" state of mind! It's about his madness, his passion!
  
  Who cares if he was a stoner or not. He was one of the wildest, greatest musicians ever, that's all that matters to me.

  Flag BrokenDickon January 13, 2012   Link

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    Perhaps because the online definition of purple haze is as follows: "Slang for either LSD or purple cannabis. originally meaning LSD (according to dictionaries and drug resources)."

    Flag pocketfullofposieson January 13, 2012  

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    Many of the people posting here are very closed-minded, I agree. I hope you don't think I'm one of them. The closed-minded dumbasses are the ones that either declare, "Everyone saying it isn't about drugs are retarded" or "everyone saying it's about drugs are retarded". The first thing I said was that the issue is far more ambiguous than either side is willing to concede, and that's the damn truth. You say, "It's about a state of mind, a 'purple haze' state of mind," and that is also the damn truth. It really doesn't matter how he was inspired to express this state of mind in the genius way that he did, HOWEVER...as long as the closed-minded dumbasses are flinging insults at one another with very little to back them up, I thought it would be constructive to analyze the debate using facts and knowledge. Essentially, Hendrix consistently denied the song was about drugs, but he was undeniably, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a major acid head, and there was a very popular strain of acid called Purple Haze that was already circulating before the song was written. So it's hard to tell, but the most important thing I should re-iterate is this: it really doesn't matter what people think it means as long as they can appreciate this fantastic song. A song's meaning should be left arbitrary unto the listener; I think Jimi would agree.

    Flag nashk49on June 16, 2012  

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    Fuck, I accidentally +1ed my own stupid comment. Looking for a delete option, and there was a computer glitch.

    Flag nashk49on June 21, 2012  
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  General Comment:Anyone that takes acid and enjoys it wont take it only once, they will ALWAYS go back for more, and because it was the 60s acid was widely availible. I knew hendrix took acid many times without even reading about it, his music is so psychedelic its stupid to think he would base a large section of his career (and life) on a chemical he only tried once. stop being so stubborn people.
  Hendrix did take heroine, it was becomming very popular going into the 70s (and it was very popular in the 70s when acid was dieing out) but i wouldnt say he was a heroine addict. Just cos someone takes heroine it dont mean their an addict, I drink alcohol but im not an alcoholic.
  

  Flag mrmoo232on January 29, 2009   Link

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    This issue is far more ambiguous than either side is willing to concede. The people who claim it wasn't about drugs have a very powerful asset to support their claim: the word of the artist himself. Jimi is quoted in Rolling Stone as saying that Purple Haze, "had nothing to do with drugs." On at least one separate occasion each Jimi said it was about a dream he had, a science fiction story, and "just another love song", but never, to the media, that it was about weed or acid. Does this mean that we can all be 100% certain it really wasn't about either of those? No, and you're a gullible idiot if you think otherwise. Charles R. Cross, author of the most accurate Hendrix bio yet, talks about how Jimi was frequently less than eager to discuss his drug use with the media, usually dodging the question in interviews. You also have to remember that censorship was crazy in the 60s. Jimi could have easily been put on the spot at an unexpected time and rashly fibbed because he didn't want to look like a singing commercial for drugs, or influence others negatively, or get some of his music banned from mainstream access, like the Byrds or Bob Dylan in the previous year; or the MC5, but that was a couple of years later. And once you say something it's hard to go back on it. Just listen to the damn song-"Purple Haze, all in my brain"-the place where acid does its work. "Don't know if I'm coming up or down"-that could very easily be explicit drug slang. "You got me blowin', blowin' my mind"-so could that, ask anyone who was a hippie back then. "All in my eyes" could suggest hallucination, "Don't know if it's day or night", "Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?" Doesn't that sound like acid? Doesn't the music sound pretty trippy too? Being friends with a number of weed experts, I'm more than convinced that the strain was named after the song-sure, it existed then, but was apparently called something else. The acid, however, is different. Owsley did indeed have an acid called Purple Haze as early as '66. Though Jimi was in England and Owsley in California, it is perfectly feasible that he could have come across acid with that name. Oh yeah, and I noticed someone said "he wasn't a liar" as if to say Jimi was above typical human fallacies such as a harmless white lie. I hate to burst your bubble, but Jimi told every journalist in the world, throughout his career, that he got out of the army by faking an injury, when he really faked being gay. Never ONCE admitted to that publicly. Each little piece of evidence I talk about would mean nothing individually, but when you put them all together, I think the intelligent, open-minded person would have to concede that the issue is ambiguous. But it really doesn't matter what people think it means as long as they can appreciate this fantastic song. A song's meaning should be left arbitrary unto the listener; I think Jimi would agree.

    Flag nashk49on March 17, 2011  

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    I have to mention one more thing: arguing about whether or not Jimi took Purple Haze at Monterey is really, really retarded, because Jimi started writing the song on December 26, 1966, and it was first released to the public, as we know it, on March 17, 1967 as the A-side to his second British single. Monterey Pop happened in June of the same year, I believe 16th through 18th, making this totally irrelevant. Owsley himself commented some 40 years later in a rare interview that Hendrix took Monterey Purple, NOT Purple Haze: "I cannot speak of acid today, but in our time, acid of this quality is not the kind of thing which would attract the term ‘haze’. To call it that would have been misleading. it was CLARITY-squared." However, Owsley was almost two years into his acid-dealin' career by the beginning of'67, and some of his most popular strains were White Lightning, Blue Cheer...and Purple Haze. I'm just saying, Hendrix could have easily come across some, or at least some given that name. R.I.P. to Jimi, dead 40+ years, and Owsley Stanley, who died two weeks ago.

    Flag nashk49on March 29, 2011  
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  General Comment:I like how so many people refer to "acid" and "LSD" as different drugs. LSD: lysergic acid diethylamide. Acid is LSD, not a hard concept to grasp. Furthermore, Hendrix lived in an era that was extremely different from the world of today. Purple Haze is known today as a potent form of marijuana, but the marijuana of today is much more potent than it was in the '60s. Purple Haze, the marijuana, obtained its namesake from this song, I would assume. The Purple Haze that Hendrix would have known was LSD on purple blotter paper.
  
  I hope this erased some ignorance from the lives of...well, the ignorant.

  Flag lovefromasofaon January 03, 2009   Link

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  General Comment:Ok, to the idiot that said Hendrix didn't do hard drugs, are you a fool? He used to cut himself on the forehead and put an acid tab on it and cover it with his headband before he went on stage so that he would absorb the LSD while he was sweating on-stage, now THAT is heavy drug use.
  
  As for how Hendrix died, no, he didn't OD, he took 9 sleepings pills and somehow ended up dead, covered in red wine, the red wine was all over him, even in his hair, but the only place that it wasn't, was in his blood stream, which means he hadn't even drunk it, it had been forced down his throat.
  
  HENDRIX WAS MURDERED. His manager was involved with the mafia, and Jimi was planning on ditching that manager, the manager was to get 2 million dollars out of a contract if Hendrix died under his management, so his manager sent his goons over to finish the job while Jimi was asleep, and he couldn't fight back because he was knocked out on the pills. Then they silenced his girlfriend and she eventually couldn't take it and killed herself as well with an OverDose. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was murdered, it is not humanly possibly for him to have had 9 sleeping pills in his system and then for some reason pour red wine all over himself and into his lungs without it going into his bloodstream, somebody else did it. That's as stupid as thinking that Kurt Cobain lifted that shotgun with 3 lethal doses of heroin in his system, damn, why don't cops look into these things...I'll tell you why, because Hendrix was part of the black movement and the government hated that he was getting so much praise and attention, so they made sure his death was just wiped aside as unimportant, and Cobain's death was wiped aside because Courtney Love paid off the police force of Seattle and most likely sucked off a couple of them.

  Flag KurtKazuoon October 22, 2008   Link

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  General Comment:Basically..none of us will ever know 100% what this song is truly written about, but we can use the information that is available to weed out the dumbasses. here are the facts.
  
  Purple haze is acid= Owsley Stanley created the purple acid in 1966 and originally it was called Montery Purple..after he dosed a bunch of people at the Montery Pop Festival, including Jimi.
  
  Purple Haze is also weed= A very potent strain of cross-bred weed. The song is not ABOUT this type of ganja because it was not even synthesized until years later.
  
  I won't go so far as to say the song isn't influenced heavily by his drug use..but to say the song is about drugs i think is just dumb. Jimi was a very deep thinker and a poet who believed his " sky church music" could unite people and bring peace. For him to then write a song like this with little to no real meaning behind it doesn't make sense to me.
  
  In the end all we have to really go on is what Jimi himself said the song was about. He said he was inspired by a dream where he was walking under the sea. In the dream, he said a purple haze surrounded him, engulfed him and got him lost. It was a traumatic experience, but in his dream his faith in Jesus saved him. An early song manuscript has the title "Purple Haze, Jesus Saves". He also mentioned that the song's colorful imagery came to him in the dream. "I dream a lot and I put a lot of my dreams down as songs" in a 1969 interview. He also stated the song was inspired in part by Night of Light; a short novel written by Philip Farmer in which a gas in a "purplish haze" begins infecting the minds of the characters.
  
  Now from that information and how much i think Jimi believed in the power of music..i see no reason do doubt his explanation. I think its more reasonable that his song would be some convoluted dream/metaphor than a catchy song about some weed he smoked.
  
  THe beautiful thing about music is it means something different to every person. So whatever meaning you take out of a song depends on how deep you choose to look. Good song though..

  Flag ridethesnake06on October 14, 2008   Link

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    You beat me to it, sir. Thank you.

    Flag lovefromasofaon January 03, 2009  
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  General Comment:wow you guys who think its about drugs are retarded its not i think itsa about him having a haze or cloud around him at the time due to what he was going through like a haze of depression and he wants to kiss the sky and leave everything bad behind

  Flag thepinkfloydsoundon September 30, 2008   Link

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  General Comment:lol damn some of you people make me laugh its a common fact that in the stoner community that one of the tastiest and hardest hitting haze is purple haze for all of you who say that its about a dream or an acid trip have no idea.

  Flag XdisorderlykillrXon September 10, 2008   Link

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