(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 29 August 2025 19:45, UK
It’s very rare that someone picks up a musical instrument without having felt a wave of inspiration coming from someone they admire or enjoy listening to, and even greats such as Neil Young will be able to attest to this fact.
In his early days on stage, Young took a lot of inspiration from Bob Dylan – especially the way he pushed folk into rock territory and stretched its limits well beyond the usual soft, pastoral sound people tend to associate with the genre. Dylan, in turn, had drawn heavily from artists like Pete Seeger and Hank Williams, who blended country and folk in a way that felt properly electric but still grounded in tradition.
It all becomes a long trail of influence, dating back as far as the history books will allow us to observe, and for people such as Young, it’s possible that he is now seen as the grandfather of several bands and artists in existence today, for having directly influenced those who are themselves considered to be guides. This will continue for as long as music remains a culturally dominant art form, and can be applied to many creatives who have felt a desire to create something after listening to a different artist.
However, there are certainly some figures within music whose abilities were far beyond being merely influential, and who could instantly convince audiences that they were actively reshaping the confines of what genre, technique, and creativity could theoretically encompass. At the same time, some of these virtuoso players can also make a listener give up all hope, making it seem that you’re never going to be worthy of standing on the same stages as them, or it can encourage them to become better and continue to push the envelope.
A prime example of an artist of this calibre was Jimi Hendrix, a complete live-wire of a guitarist whose technical ability was unmatched by most of his peers, and the directions in which he pushed rock music were frankly light years ahead of what anyone else was attempting to do. It’s fair to say that many guitarists who emerged in the 1970s would have heard the music that Hendrix released over the course of just three years and felt the desire to try and emulate his brilliance.
Young openly recognised how much Hendrix meant to the evolution of rock and roll, pointing out how guitar playing splintered into all kinds of new directions after Hendrix came on the scene. When he posthumously inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, he spoke about just how much Hendrix had taught him — not just about playing, but about the whole approach to being a musician.
“Guitar, you can play it or transcend it,” Young proclaimed, “Jimi showed me that. He was at one with his instrument. I just looked at it, heard it, and felt it and wanted to do it. Hendrix threw a Molotov cocktail onto rock & roll.”
There have, of course, been many other influential and virtuosic guitarists to have emerged in the years since Hendrix’s time on earth and beyond, but there are still few who possess quite the same levels of originality and understanding of what their instrument is capable of, and that’s why he remains one of the most exceptional players to this day.
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