The five favourite musical artists of Jimi Hendrix
In his short life, Jimi Hendrix epitomised everything wonderful about rock ‘n’ roll. The extraordinarily gifted guitarist shaped rock music from the 1950s and early ’60s rhythm and blues tradition into his own heavier and unique style, earning him praise as one of the greatest to ever pick up the instrument.
Since his untimely death in 1970, when the prodigy was just 27, Hendrix has become almost mythical in status, much like his contemporary Jim Morrison. Besides the strange romanticism of his tragic early death and the ’27 Club’, Hendrix has remained an elusive figure of history because his stage persona was so far removed from his ostensibly subdued and introverted off-stage persona.
Dave Davies of The Kinks once described in an interview with Classic Rock: “In real life, Jimi Hendrix was nothing like the wild guy that he portrayed on stage. He was a quiet, introverted guy like Ray [Davies] was. He was explosive on stage but very softly spoken off it.”
As a humble creative, Hendrix would much sooner praise the artists he admired than blow his own trumpet. Beyond complexity, which was clearly his forte, Hendrix had an eye for creative impact, which didn’t always demand abject virtuosity.
“I remember once sitting next to [Jimi] on a plane bound for Stockholm,” Davies added while speaking to Classic Rock. “After a while, we got talking a little, and he suddenly said to me: ‘Y’know, that guitar riff you did on ‘You Really Got Me’ was a real landmark.’ You can imagine how I felt. To be endorsed by Hendrix was really something. It was a great compliment.”
Hendrix clearly had a soft spot for The Kinks and their pioneering sound. It was an admiration reciprocated by Davies’ iconic distorted lead solos and his brother Ray’s unique lyrical skills. However, Hendrix was particularly enamoured with five key artists through the ’60s. All of the below inspired Hendrix in a different way and helped to shape his immortal legacy.
Jimi Hendrix’s five favourite artists
King Crimson
During a Q&A event as part of Patricia Fripp’s Compelling Stories: The Inside Secrets documentary, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp was asked whether it was true that Jimi Hendrix shook his left hand. “Yes, he did,” Fripp answered. Hendrix allegedly said, “Hey, shake my left-hand man; it’s closer to my heart.”
Fripp explained that this first meeting had occurred after Hendrix attended a King Crimson gig on June 2nd, 1969. He enjoyed it so much that he simply had to shake the hand of the innovative guitarist. Many years later, Fripp bumped into the sister-in-law of Michael Giles, King Crimson’s first drummer, in a bookshop. She was in attendance on the evening of Hendrix and Fripp’s handshake, sitting at the table next to the American guitar hero. “He was jumping up and down,” she told Fripp, shouting: “THIS IS THE BEST GROUP IN THE WORLD!’”
“In all due modesty,” Fripp concluded the story. “That is one of the best calling cards any working musician is ever likely to be able to present.”
The Beatles
It will come as no surprise that The Beatles had an impact on Hendrix. Through the 1960s and indeed up to the present, very few musicians can claim not to have been inspired by the Liverpool band in some small way, whether directly or indirectly.
Despite growing up in the US, Hendrix found fortune and fame in the UK after The Animals’ Chas Chandler coaxed him to London to establish The Jimi Hendrix Experience. In Britain, Hendrix joined the winning side of the British Invasion and became close with the movement’s key players, including The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
“Oh, yes, I think it’s good,” Hendrix told Steve Baker in 1967 with regard to The Beatles’ recent material. “They’re one group that you can’t really put down because they’re just too much. And it’s so embarrassing, man, when America is sending over the Monkees – oh, God, that kills me!”
“I’m so embarrassed that America could be so stupid as to make somebody like that. They could have at least done it with a group that has something to offer. They got groups in the States starving to death trying to get breaks, and then these fairies come up.”
Hendrix was a particular fan of The Beatles’ 1967 psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In honour of the album and the herculean group responsible, Hendrix performed a cover of the title track during one of his first UK gigs, where Paul McCartney was in attendance.
“It would be one of his first gigs in London,” McCartney recalled in a conversation with Stephen Colbert. “Jimi was a sweetie, a very nice guy. I remember him opening at the Saville on a Sunday night [June 4th 1967]. Brian Epstein used to rent it when it was usually dark on the Sunday. Jimi opened, the curtains flew back, and he came walking forward, playing ‘Sgt. Pepper’, and it had only been released on the Thursday so that was like the ultimate compliment.”
“It’s still obviously a shining memory for me, because I admired him so much anyway, he was so accomplished,” he continued. “To think that that album had meant so much to him as to actually do it by the Sunday night, three days after the release. He must have been so into it, because normally it might take a day for rehearsal, and then you might wonder whether you’d put it in, but he just opened with it.”
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan was one of Hendrix’s most obvious luminaries. As for so many other artists through the ‘60s and beyond, Dylan inspired other musicians from an intensely lyrical perspective. Hendrix was frequently moved by his songwriting and often commented on his love for the artist.
“All those people who don’t like Bob Dylan’s songs should read his lyrics. They are filled with the joys and sadness of life,” Hendrix told Steve Barker in 1967. “I really dig him, though. I like that Highway 61 Revisited album and especially ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’!
“He doesn’t inspire me actually, because I could never write the kind of words he does. But he’s helped me out in trying to write about two or three words ’cause I got a thousand songs that will never be finished. I just lie around and write about two or three words, but now I have a little more confidence in trying to finish one.”
“When I was down in the Village, Dylan was starving down there,” he added. “I hear he used to have a pad with him all the time to put down what he sees around him. But he doesn’t have to be stoned when he writes. Although he probably is a cat like that – he just doesn’t have to be.”
Though Bob Dylan covers were a common feature of Hendrix’s live shows and jam sessions, his most memorable nod to the Nobel Prize winner was his 1968 cover of ‘All Along the Watchtower’. The song was originally released on John Wesley Harding, Dylan’s album of December 1967, but Hendrix’s reimagined version made the biggest impression. It reached the top 20 in the US and UK and remains The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s most successful single.
When Dylan was named the Person of the Year in 2015 by MusiCares, he took the chance to pay tribute to Hendrix. “We can’t forget Jimi Hendrix,” Dylan said with a smile on his face. “He took some small songs of mine that nobody paid any attention to and brought them up into the outer limits of the stratosphere, turned them all into classics… I have to thank Jimi. I wish he was here.”
Cream
As Hendrix joined the burgeoning psychedelic rock scene in London in the late ’60s, he became close with some of its most prominent proponents. Cream were one of the most transient yet impactful psychedelic rock groups of the time. The core trio consisted of bassist and vocalist Jack Bruce, guitarist Eric Clapton, and drummer Ginger Baker. While the group only lasted three years, they released four albums that would help lay the groundwork for the subsequent prog-rock era.
Hendrix famously had a mutual admiration for Clapton, whom he befriended and occasionally jammed and performed with. Most famously, Clapton invited a pre-fame Hendrix to the stage during a Cream performance in October 1966.
“Jimi done a TV show once. Stopped and went into playing [Cream song] ‘Sunshine’ [of Your Love]. You know, he really dug Cream,” Baker once recalled. “Hendrix and us basically had created this very large audience of people who were turned onto instrumental, vocal, loud – whatever you wanna call it – music. Rock ‘n’ roll, I guess, with Blues in it. I was very proud to be a friend of Jimi Hendrix, and he encouraged me a lot. I think he is not with us because nobody cared about him enough and I think nobody cared enough about us then either.”
In 1969, The Jimi Hendrix Experience were coincidentally invited to perform on BBC television on Happening For Lulu on the same day Cream split up. Following a performance of ‘Voodoo Child’, Lulu asked the band to perform ‘Hey Joe’, but just a few bars into the track, Hendrix stopped the music to announce: “We’d like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to the Cream, regardless of what kind of group they may be in. We dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.”
The Experience then launched into a cover of Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’. While the cover drew a positive reaction from the audience, the BBC producers were upset with the unruly behaviour. “Afterwards, [producer Stanley] Dorfman refused to speak to us, but the result is one of the most widely used bits of film we ever did. Certainly, it’s the most relaxed,” Noel Redding of The Experience recalled in his memoir, Are You Experienced? The Inside Story of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The stunt saw Hendrix and the band banned from the BBC for life but lives on as a truly iconic moment in rock history.
Muddy Waters
As the leading figure in electric blues music throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, Muddy Waters was unsurprisingly one of Hendrix’s early heroes. As the so-called ‘Father of Chicago Blues’, Waters was a crucial piece of the puzzle that lay the foundation for rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks are among the legendary acts to hail the iconic guitarist.
“The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters,” Hendrix told Rolling Stone in 1968. “I heard one of his old records when I was a little boy, and it scared me to death because I heard all of those sounds. Wow, what is that all about? It was great.”
Hear Hendrix’s cover of Muddy Waters’ ‘Mannish Boy’ below.
