The 1968 song Jimi Hendrix wished he could have written: “It comes from you”
Every generation usually has one or two artists who seem to stop the world whenever they emerge. Rock fans, for instance, can often recount where they were the first time they saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Similarly, every 1990s kid likely remembers the moment when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ premiered on MTV, revolutionising the music world. Jimi Hendrix was certainly in that league when he burst onto the scene with ‘Purple Haze’. However, he admired Cream’s ‘White Room’, feeling it was a song that epitomised the sound he aspired to achieve.
At the same time, it feels slightly unfair to think of Hendrix in terms of one rock genre. It’s easy to look at him clad in his bandana and pastel-coloured clothes and throw into the psychedelic movement, but every single track that he ever put out tended to have a completely different tone.
That versatility became one of Hendrix’s defining qualities. Rather than committing himself to a single movement or scene, he treated genres as tools that could be blended together in pursuit of something entirely new.
Yes, he did have his rock chops and wasn’t afraid to show them off, but he could also reinterpret the blues on tracks like ‘Red House’, play soulful ballads like ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and ‘Little Wing’, and even touch on new territory that bordered on jazz on half of Electric Ladyland. Before Hendrix became a guitar legend, people thought that Eric Clapton was God.
While ‘Slowhand’ was tame compared to what Hendrix was doing, it’s not like he couldn’t still throw down whenever he strapped on his guitar. His licks have been the blues vocabulary of over half a century’s worth of blues players, and a lot of that comes down to what Cream did on songs like ‘White Room’.
The tune fits snuggly into the pop song format, but this wasn’t just some blues connoisseur’s idea of a hit. It was about making something experimental for the time, and everything in the track is a hodgepodge of what made the power trio tick musically, from Clapton’s bluesy solo to Jack Bruce’s soulful vocal to Ginger Baker’s borderline-prog-sounding opening in 5/4 time.
The song’s appeal lay in its balance between accessibility and experimentation. It retained the structure of a hit single while incorporating ideas that were far more adventurous than mainstream audiences were accustomed to hearing.
Even though Hendrix would eventually put everything he learned into his own music, Bruce remembered him saying that he should have got to ‘White Room’ first, telling Forbes, “The inspiration for the music came from meeting Jimi Hendrix and his approach to playing. In fact, he came to the recording session of that in New York and said to me, ‘I wish I could write something like that’. I said, ‘But it comes from you!’”
Hendrix may have still been humble when it came to his guitar playing, but Electric Ladyland took all the concepts that ‘White Room’ played with and blew them wide open. Since he didn’t rely on radio singles, a lot of the greatest moments on the record come from jam sessions, like the solo on ‘House Burning Down’ or finding sounds no one thought of on ‘1983’.
Cream was on the cutting edge of music in the late 1960s, but Hendrix didn’t care about making something that fit in with the psychedelic movement. This was about making music of the future, and as much as he looked the part at the time, his guitar playing is something that even seasoned veterans still haven’t caught up with.
Although Hendrix would ultimately forge a sound unlike anyone else’s, his admiration for ‘White Room’ reveals how closely he followed the evolution of rock music around him. The song represented the kind of creative ambition he valued most: musicians taking familiar ingredients and reshaping them into something unexpected. It was an approach Hendrix would adopt throughout his own career, helping him become not just a participant in rock’s revolution, but one of its defining architects.
