The classic rock icons Jimi Hendrix initially hated: “Terrible”
The world changed the moment Jimi Hendrix made his indelible, tie-dye mark upon it.
With unbelievable prowess, grace and daring, he defined an era. As Grace Slick said when musing upon the make-up of the 1960s in retrospect, “He probably represents as an individual the sixties more than anybody else if you’re talking about rock and roll.”
The Jefferson Airplane star continued: “If you’re talking about rock probably Jimi is the guy. The colour, the clothes, the fact that he flipped from being for the war in Vietnam to against it within a year, his music, his stunning guitar playing, his showmanship.” The list could go on… especially when Slick is behind the wheel of an appraisal.
Indeed, if you were to distil that modern Renaissance period of the counterculture movement down to a single vignette, then it doesn’t get much more iconic than the image of Hendrix transubstantiating into a cultural god at Woodstock. He contained multitudes in a moment.
He was a visionary in an era of luminaries. As the Waterboys would later sing, he saw the whole of the moon. Jimmy Page was firmly in agreement with this, likening the ‘Purple Haze’ pioneer to another forward-thinking star, one Hendrix would soon come to dismiss. “Syd Barrett’s writing with the early Pink Floyd was inspirational. Nothing sounded like Barrett before Pink Floyd’s first album,” Page told Brad Tolinski.
“There were so many ideas and so many positive statements,” he continued. “You can really feel the genius there, and it was tragic that he fell apart. Both he and Jimi Hendrix had a futuristic vision in a sense.”
There was no doubting the experimentation that the pair shared. But in Hendrix’s early view, he figured that Barrett’s so-called musical alchemy was a psychic sham utilising the same old tricks rather than genuinely future-gazing and bringing something fresh to the table.
When Steve Barker asked the ‘Voodoo Child’ player about Pink Floyd and the coterie of psychedelic acts on the rise in 1967, he explained: “Here’s one thing I hate, man: When these cats say, ‘Look at the band – they’re playing psychedelic music!’ and all they’re really doing is flashing lights on them and playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ with the wrong chords – it’s terrible.”
In essence, he thought the Floyd flattered to deceive.Indeed, many of the band’s early underground shows were hailed by some as a more complete showcase of art rather than a regular concert. The music was blended with multimedia and innovative backdrop experiments. Seemingly, this didn’t impress Hendrix early doors, although he was also willing to admit that he had never seen them himself.
“I’ve heard they have beautiful lights,” he added, “but they don’t sound like nothing.” In truth, it’s easy to see how these frustrations were reflective of his own unfortunate disposition. He was a guitar god of unrivalled substance, but increasingly his own live shows had become hounded by folks seeking a spectacle.
He could shred a symphony hitherto unheard of on a humble six-string in human history, but all a legion of fairweather ‘fans’ wanted was for him to set his guitar on fire again. “Jimi was frustrated,” Eddie Kramer would comment. And one thing that continually drew his ire was the sense that there were now a swathe of bands who ccouldn’t tie his bootlaces claiming to be influenced by him, but the only element he could see reflected was performative flamboyance.
So, Hendrix grew to admire straightforward bands like the Pretty Things and grew cautious of anything claiming to be ‘psychedelic’ and ‘pioneering’, placing Pink Floyd right in his firing line.
Alas, while this might have been true for much of the bandwagon-jumping zeitgeist, causing Hendrix to quip that it was “just stupid” and not a patch on Bob Dylan’s “more earthy and live” groove, he would later come to realise that Pink Floyd did at least eclipse the peers that were trying to copy them.
A few years further down the line, when he had given enough time to their records for them to grow on him, he clarified: “They’re doing like a different type of music”.
Concluding: “You know, technically, they are getting electronics and all this. They do like a space kind of thing, like an inner space. Sometimes you have to layback by yourself and appreciate them.”
