(Credits: Wikimedia)
Sat 13 September 2025 0:30, UK
There is no way for anyone to adequately explain what Jimi Hendrix did for the guitar.
People might have an idea of what a rock and roll guitar player is supposed to sound like nowadays, but a lot of the techniques that most people take for granted today were first brought out when Hendrix began, whether that was playing the guitar with his teeth, behind his head, or using feedback in just the right way. There’s already a lot of spectacle around Hendrix that it’s sometimes easy to forget about the musicianship that he brought to rock and roll.
Sure, he wasn’t the first person to play the blues in a rock and roll context, but whereas Eric Clapton was chasing his blues heroes, Hendrix wanted to transcend them. Are You Experienced has certain elements of the blues legends like Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, but there’s also the soulful beauty of Curtis Mayfield in the mix, the tuneful singer-songwriting tunes like ‘May This Be Love’, and even genres that didn’t even have a name yet on tracks like ‘Manic Depression’.
That’s because Hendrix didn’t exclusively look at genres like barriers whenever he played. Music was a wide spectrum that he could pull from, so it wasn’t out of the question to switch up his styles whenever the time called for it. He could definitely put his own spin on everything, but considering the cerebral moments on Electric Ladyland, he could easily have made a jazz record with the greats and still held his own.
A lot of that came from Hendrix listening to everything, but a lot of that adventurous attitude came from what The Beatles had already been doing. Everyone knew the teenybopper band that they had started out as, but that was a caricature. They were musical thinkers by the time Hendrix came along, and while the guitar legend did give a lot more energy to ‘Sgt Peppers’ when he played the tune live, he was still paying attention to whatever they were doing next.
Because, really, The Beatles were the only true reference point for a band that wanted to shake things up. Frank Zappa may have come from a similar mind with The Mothers of Invention, but whereas that music almost seemed designed to challenge you, The White Album took the listener down several musical avenues and yet found a way to make nearly every one of them sound fantastic.
A lot of the Fabs looked up to Hendrix, but he admitted that there was no way to come close to what they did, saying, “I think it’s good. They’re one group that you can’t really put down because they’re just too much. Paul McCartney was the big bad Beatle, the beautiful cat who got us the gig at the Monterey Pop Festival. That was our start in America. Everything was perfect.”
Although Hendrix may not have signed to Apple Records at the time, it was clear that all of them knew they were witnessing something special when he performed. A lot of it was indebted to the early rock and roll that they loved like Little Richard and Chuck Berry, but this was a man who was painting with a much broader set of musical colours, and by the time the 1960s came to an end, both he and the Fab Four had given the world a road map to what could be done with the genre.
It’s a tragedy that we will never know what Hendrix could have done had he been able to make it through the 1970s, but given how The Beatles were moving in their own directions, chances are he would still be innovating on his own. Because whether it was with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Band of Gypsys or on his own, the beauty of Hendrix is putting on a record and never knowing what you’re going to get.
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