Rocktober '60s Song #14: "One Rainy Wish" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)

As you know, Tuesday was the 50th anniversary of the release of The Jimi Hendrix Experience's third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland.  Today, I bought tickets to see Experience Hendrix next March at the Chicago Theatre.  (If you enjoy Hendrix's music and want to hear it be played by some of the world's best guitarists, backed by other amazing musicians, I highly recommend you check it out if the tour is coming to a city near you.)

The cosmos seems to be suggesting that perhaps it's time for a Hendrix tune in this Rocktober tribute to '60s rock.  Amazingly, since I started doing my daily month-long celebration of music during October (way back in 2009), I have never featured a Jimi Hendrix song, album, or live performance.  This was almost as horrifying a discovery as when I found out Joe West was umping the Astros/Red Sox series -- and yes, you better believe I'm bitter about that should-have-been-a-home-run-but-was-called-an-out moment in last night's game.  Fuck Joe West.

But anyway, while I could spend a month (or several) posting daily instances in which Joe West made horrible calls, it's Rocktober, and not AugWest or SeptJoeWestemeber.  

The Jimi Hendrix catalog is a bountiful one that seems to get bigger by the year, as more and more unreleased tracks and sessions are unearthed and placed on media capable of consumer consumption.  That said, choosing a song for this wasn't too difficult because I'm just going to go with my favorite song, off of my favorite Jimi Hendrix Experience album, the band's 1967 sophomore effort, Axis: Bold As Love.

Recorded on my negative tenth birthday (which I just found out this morning), "One Rainy Wish" features my favorite Hendrix moment, which occurs at the end of the first verse, when the guitar kind of hangs on to a note and that then the chorus starts. I get chills every time I hear it and often when I'm just thinking about it. Seriously.  I like that moment and this song so much that I railroaded my now-wife into including the chorus lyrics on our wedding program ("I have never laid eyes on you / Not like before this timeless day / But you walked in and once smiled my name / And you stole my heart away").