Now that the Grammys are over and the winners are crowned, perhaps now is the time to address this topic: Every year there are plethoras of features on the web that highlight “classic rock” artists — particularly those from the 1960s — that never won Grammy Awards. This is the result of a bad habit of some journalists of judging the past by the standards of the present. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences give out the Grammy Awards every year for this purpose, “to honor excellence in the recording arts and sciences. It is truly a peer honor, awarded by and to artists and technical professionals for artistic or technical achievement, not sales or chart positions.”

The item among Jimi Hendrix’s scant output of just four original albums that seems most eligible for a Grammy nod, it would seem, would be the first one, Are You Experienced? Released in the U.S. in August 1967, it would have been considerable for a 1967 Grammy — awarded at the Tenth Annual Grammy Awards Ceremony, held in 1968, of course. The Tenth Grammys was a highly unusual affair, as it represented the first year that Grammy voters even showed much of an interest in rock music. The Beatles won Best Album for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, and Jimmy Webb’s song “Up, Up and Away” as recorded by the 5th Dimension got the nod for Record of the Year; just the previous year, Frank Sinatra had taken both of these categories. Artists like Sinatra dominated the early Grammy Awards — after all, the awards only started in 1958 — and would continue to dominate them right up through 1967. Although the choices would seem conservative by the standards of today, the artists who won in the years immediately following — Blood, Sweat & Tears, the 5th Dimension (again), Simon & Garfunkel (especially), and the Carpenters — were like revolution come down to the Grammys.

It all comes down to the nature of “peerage,” and in 1967 a guy who plunked down an amp, plugged in, and played “Louie Louie” wasn’t really a “peer” to the scores of industry people voting for Grammys back then. The “recording industry” of 1967 consisted of scores of engineers, arrangers, song pluggers, publishers, radio personnel, and musicians that belonged to unions. Any project made by a “talent” — at least in the major record industry; the Columbias, the RCA Victors, Capitol, Reprise, Decca, Warner Bros., etc. — would have large groups of these people working on it, or promoting it when it was done. The concern for professionalism was very high; in most session photos of the period, engineers and many musicians are seen wearing ties and suit pants even in a “casual” mode. EMI’s engineers in Britain wore white lab coats like doctors at the time the Beatles began recording there. “Pros” these people were — a session man from Decca once remembered that arranger Sy Oliver could produce eight arrangements in a day. The rock format, with its comparatively small group of guitars, bass, drums, and singers represented a challenge to this industry and all its people. Resistance to rock in the major record industry was strong throughout the early 1960s; the majors viewed rock as a game played by small labels until the Beatles proved just how much money was potentially in the game.

Sometimes the established system would collide with rock in unusual ways: Lee Michaels did not play any of the keyboard parts on his 1967 debut album for A&M, Recital, as at age 16 he was too young to join the musicians’ union. Michaels demonstrated all of his keyboard parts to a union man, who “played them exactly as I did. It was amazing,” he later remembered, “but I was still crushed.” The early Grammy Awards for rock, or rock-flavored pop, apart from the Beatles and Sam & Dave, were awarded to artists that utilized these resources of additional musicians — backing singers, choruses, orchestras, and arrangers. The Fifth Dimension used such resources in a big way, Simon & Garfunkel to a lesser extent, and so on. This would be the norm for quite some time to come.

It is a tribute to Jimi Hendrix’s visionary spirit that he was so ahead of his time that he couldn’t have been considered for a Grammy during his lifetime; the Grammys themselves were still “young” and simply not ready for him. Neither was the audience that saw him on his first American tour, made in 1967 in support of the Monkees; Hendrix and the Experience were spinning the heads off little girls and terrifying their parents; this mismatched bill didn’t last long. In the retrospective view, Hendrix revolutionized electric guitar playing and his small body of work remains central to “classic rock” radio. However, in 1967, he was mainly an FM radio artist — not everyone then necessarily even had an FM radio — and one doubts that even he would have approved of winning the Grammy over Sgt. Pepper’s. Like it or not, Jimi Hendrix just simply wasn’t on the Grammy radar screen, and he did not stick around long enough to register a blip there. That same condition applies to so many artists active in the late 1960s that seem like icons to us now — Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Doors, the Velvet Underground, and others mentioned in these internet “think pieces” that did not win Grammys. Perhaps instead we should be asking why the Monkees didn’t win; of all the pre-1970 rock acts who fit the Grammys’ admittedly still-emerging requirements, a Grammy nod would have helped the “Prefab Four” the most.