(Credits: Far Out / Marjut Valakivi / Public Domain)
Mon 2 February 2026 18:00, UK
Jimi Hendrix’s mystique was built around his live performances.
Even before The Experience had released any LPs, the guitarist was always amassing a reputation among the most otherworldly, mind-expanding musicians on the live circuit. Yet, at one stage, he abandoned his life craft entirely, just to get a glimpse at one of his own guitar heroes.
Strolling down the famously swinging streets of 1960s London, bedecked in hippie threads and a Hussar’s jacket, Jimi Hendrix might as well have arrived from outer space. Both his look and his sound were completely alien to the post-war landscape of Britain, and folk across the land would turn up to his concerts if only to catch a fleeting glimpse of this rock and roll alien. That is not to say, however, that the guitarist’s playing style was forged from the ether.
Once you strip back all the psychedelic haze and wall of wah-wah pedals from Hendrix’s sound, he is, at his core, an incredibly talented R&B guitarist, building upon the extensive experience he picked up as a travelling session musician during the early 1960s. It is no surprise, then, that Hendrix’s own body of influences was dominated by this world of old-school blues and R&B, even if his countercultural contemporaries were forging an entirely new world of rock and roll expression.
That perhaps shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though, given that virtually all rock and roll, since the dawn of the genre, has led back to American blues eventually, which is why trailblazing players like Buddy Guy have never really gone out of fashion. A titan of the Chicago blues style and a key influence on Jimi Hendrix, along with everybody else from Eric Clapton to John Mayer, Guy carved out sounds like no other, and even a player as gifted as Hendrix could only watch in awe.
Hendrix was such a devotee of Buddy Guy, in fact, that he ended up adopting the guitarist’s wild onstage antics. “After I played 1967 Newport Jazz Festival, I got invited to play in New York, and I’m on the stage putting on this show, trying to play with my teeth and throwing the guitar,” Guy once recalled, per Guitar World. “Somebody put a spotlight on me, and I missed the guitar coming down after I threw it. When it hit the floor, I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ so I just jumped down on it, and everyone thought I did it on purpose.”
Seasoned guitar obsessives will recognise virtually all of those stage stunts as being integral to the spectacle of Hendrix’s own live performances in later years, albeit with the exception of setting his guitar alight and kneeling over its smouldering corpse.
“I heard somebody with real taste was sitting in front – Jimi Hendrix,” Guy continued.
Not only had Hendrix gone out of his way to witness his blues guitar hero, but he had actually abandoned one of his own scheduled performances to be there. “They [introduced] us and he said, ‘I cancelled a gig to come watch you play, could I steal some licks from you?’ That’s when we got to know each other, and we finally got to jam – I can’t [remember] when, but it was in New York.”
Seemingly, then, Hendrix’s decision to cancel one of his own gigs paid off, as it provided him with the opportunity not only to expand his own performance style but also to jam with one of his ultimate heroes; one of the figures who had spurred him down the path of guitar heroism in the first place.
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