(Credits: Far Out / Marjut Valakivi / Public Domain)
Fri 5 December 2025 0:30, UK
Acid seemed to ooze from the rock and roll airwaves of the late 1960s, ushering in a kaleidoscopic world of musical revolution and far-out soundscapes, with the battered and burned guitar of Jimi Hendrix firmly at the epicentre of that collective trip.
In every note that Hendrix ever played, he seemed to imbue entire galaxies’ worth of mind-bending psychedelia that, in all the years since, has never really lost its lustre. Not only did the songwriter set a standard that would send many guitarists mad trying to replicate, but he also captured the revolutionary spirit of the counterculture era better than most – it is no surprise that the lasting image of that pivotal era is of Hendrix kneeling before his burning guitar at Woodstock Festival.
With his unbridled and utterly beloved reputation, it can be easy to view Hendrix entirely in a league of his own, as though he operated in isolation. Despite the individuality of his output, though, the guitarist always seemed to make an effort to keep abreast of what other artists were doing at the same time, which explains both his reinterpretation of Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’ and his infamous cover of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ only days after the album had been released.
Hendrix seemed to soak up some degree of artistic inspiration in everything that he consumed, even if – like ‘All Along The Watchtower’ – the product of that inspiration was worlds apart from the original, drenched in the technicolour of his psychedelic wailings. Back in 2018, with the release of Both Sides of the Sky, the world was exposed to one such acid-fueled rendering of the prevailing sounds of the 1960s, in the form of ‘$20 Fine’.
Recorded during a 1969 session at New York’s Record Plant, and kept locked away until far too recently, the song was beautifully described by Hendrix’s sound engineer, Eddie Kramer, who declared to the Associated Press, “It sounds like Crosby, Stills and Nash except it’s on acid, you know. Jimi is just rocking it. It’s an amazing thing.”
That comparison shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as Stephen Stills is a guest on that track, and Hendrix was a noted devotee of the archetypal supergroup and their counterculture-era output.
After all, they arguably reflected the pinnacle of American songwriting during that period, and even if their sound didn’t seem to have much in common with the legendary guitarist, that didn’t stop Hendrix from keeping their records on regular rotation.
On initial listening, it seems ludicrous that such a track would be kept away from the airwaves for nearly half a century. In fairness, though, it does mark something of a sonic departure from the typical output of either Hendrix or Stills, with the pair seemingly trying to meet each other somewhere in the middle. For starters, the guitarist doesn’t perform any vocals on the recording.
Those disparities aside, though, ‘$20 Fine’ is a brilliant reflection of Jimi Hendrix’s insatiable appetite for artistic exploration. Rather than remaining focused entirely on his own output, or whiling away his time on acid trips of increasing intensity, the guitarist and songwriter embraced all the fruits that the music industry had to offer during one of its most revolutionary eras.
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