Inside Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix’s beautiful friendship
The friendship between Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix was a short but intense one. The two guitarists were well aware of the other’s power with the instrument, and before Hendrix’s tragic death, it was clear the two artists were kindred spirits. However, their first meeting wasn’t quite so simple. Regardless, it was a juncture that changed music forever. The moment when counter-culture saviour Jimi Hendrix arrived on the grey shores of little old England in 1966.
Britain was not ready to experience the wild brand of spiralling, kaleidoscopic musical wonder that the young American was about to unleash on the public. Hendrix’s first appearance on English shores saw him shake up the system and immediately win over the country’s current guitar royalty, Eric Clapton, who watched on as he was effectively dethroned. The fact that Clapton, a known competitive player, was happy to allow Hendrix to rule the roost shows the immense respect he held for him and the friendship they would share. It all began in a dingy London polytechnic.
On September 24th, 1966, Hendrix took up an offer from The Animals’ bassist, Chas Chandler, and set sail for an exciting new life in London. Chandler immediately began recruiting members for a band that would get the best out of Hendrix’s remarkable ability, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was born. At the time, nobody knew who Hendrix was when he arrived in London, but that would quickly change within a matter of days. As soon as the musician stepped off the plane – and even before he’d even got around to playing a headline show – Hendrix’s swirling confidence began to infiltrate the music scene. Clapton’s band Cream was sitting at their deserved place at the mountaintop of the London scene prior to the arrival of Hendrix, and quite frankly, nobody else was on the same level as Clapton.
Exactly a week after he agreed to move to London, Hendrix was already on the stage. While his official live debut wouldn’t be for another few days, Hendrix was ready to put the scene on red alert. Chandler brought Hendrix to the London Polytechnic at Regent Street, where Cream were due to take to the stage but, more importantly, it was the night that Hendrix and guitarist Eric Clapton first met. Clapton later recalled how Hendrix wasn’t shy upon their first meeting: “He asked if he could play a couple of numbers. I said, ‘Of course’, but I had a funny feeling about him.”
Halfway through Cream’s set, Hendrix took to the stage and performed a manic version of the Howlin’ Wolf song ‘Killing Floor’. Years later, in 1989, Clapton described the performance: “He played just about every style you could think of, and not in a flashy way. I mean he did a few of his tricks, like playing with his teeth and behind his back, but it wasn’t in an upstaging sense at all, and that was it… He walked off, and my life was never the same again”.
Clapton added: “It was funny, in those days, anybody could get up with anybody if you were convincing enough that you could play. He got up and blew everyone’s mind. I just thought ‘ahh, someone that plays the stuff I love in the flesh, on stage with me. ’I was actually privileged to be (on stage with him)… it’s something that no one is ever going to beat; that incident, that night, it’s historic in my mind but only a few people are alive that would remember it”.
On this night, a special friendship between the two pillars of rock began. Together, they would share an incredible bond right up until Hendrix’s tragic death on September 18th, 1970. The whole world of rock ‘n’ roll was united in mourning following the passing of their poster boy. It left fans, artists and everyone in between trapped in a state of disbelief that he was gone, that there was now an enormous Hendrix-shaped hole in the hearts of music fans that would never be filled. But it arguably hit Eric Clapton the hardest.
Clapton later reflected on the immense pain he felt when losing his friend and how they had plans to hang out together on that devastating night that Hendrix passed. Clapton said: “After Jimi died, I was angry. I was incredibly angry. I thought it was, not selfish on his part but just erm, a lonely feeling—to be left alone. And after that, I kept running into people who kept shoving him down my throat ‘Have you heard this one he did, this one’s never been on record before’.”
“To see these young kids playing the guitar coming up and saying ‘Have you heard this one’ or ‘I can do all this’. Forget it, mate. It’s been done,” concludes the grief-stricken guitarist. “It’s the same with Robert Johnson. I won’t listen to Robert Johnson in mixed company. I won’t put him on, I won’t listen to him if there’s anyone there who don’t feel it. And that’s how I feel about Jimi,” Clapton added before painfully noting, “I knew him, I knew him and I played with him and I loved his music. But I don’t ever wanna hear anything said about him again.”
From that moment on, Clapton is left with the question about what would have happened to Jimi if he had managed to meet him like planned on the night of his death and whether things would have turned out differently. “The night that he died I was supposed to meet him at the Lyceum to see Sly Stone play, and I brought with me a left-handed Stratocaster. I just found it, I think I bought it at Orange Music. I’d never seen one before and I was gonna give it to him.”
Adding: “He was in a box over there and I was in a box over here. I could see him but I couldn’t… we never got together. The next day, whack! He was gone. And I was left with that left-handed Stratocaster.”
The tale of Jimi Hendrix is one that is soaked in sadness, and the grief has stalked Clapton over the last 50 years. It’s been hard for music fans to come to terms with Hendrix’s death, let alone an artist like Clapton, who played such a key part in the story of Jimi Hendrix. He helped him become the talk of London, he enabled him to assimilate into a new country, and he happily relinquished his platform so that Hendrix could play. It’s hard to know how impactful Hendrix would have been without Clapton and equally as hard to gauge just how big an impact Jimi’s loss was on Eric. Just like Hendrix’s music, the friendship they shared cannot be tainted by time.
