The guitarist Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page both called the greatest: “Incredible stuff”
It’s impossible to imagine that two guitarists like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page have the same origin story in many respects.
Both of them got started in the blues, and while each of them went in wildly different directions after they were established on their own, their time in The Yardbirds was the perfect breeding ground for them to find their feet as players. But even when they found their own sound later down the line, neither of them could accept the status of being the greatest guitarist the world had ever known.
Hell, even when he left The Yardbirds, Clapton wasn’t even beginning to scratch the surface of what he could do with a six-string in his hand. He felt that The Yardbirds only held him back in a lot of ways, and while he did find a way to go back to the heart of the blues with John Mayall, he knew that music had to be taken further. And when he hooked up with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, he finally found a home for pushing himself forward with Cream.
Then again, Cream were always on the verge of chaos in many respects. All of them were willing to jam their hearts out every single time they performed, but they were far from the first to dip rock and roll in acid. The Beatles had done it before on Revolver, and while Clapton definitely kept his ears close to the ground, he wasn’t prepared for what would happen when Jimi Hendrix joined them onstage.
Other blues legends had been held in high esteem all throughout England, but Clapton knew that what Hendrix did was exactly what rock and roll needed at the time, saying, “His tastes were exactly what I would want in another musician. [Both] the blues and where it came from. He had a fantastic imagination for what he could do with it.” But whereas Clapton was a colleague, Page could only look from afar half the time.
By the time Hendrix was making Electric Ladyland, Page was already knee-deep in making the first Led Zeppelin record, which seemed to take a lot of the showmanship that Hendrix had and filtered it through something a lot heavier on tracks like ‘Dazed and Confused’. So when the guitar god passed away, Page knew that it was about more than losing a great player; it was the death of a rock and roll god.
Page knew that he was operating on another level half the time he played, and the world was bound to be a much darker place without him, saying, “We’ve lost the best guitarist any of us ever had and that was Hendrix. I thought they were excellent. Oh yeah. Jimi’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell was also a man inspired. He never played drums like that before or since. He played some incredible stuff!!”
If Hendrix was no longer there to preach the good word of guitar, ‘Slowhand’ and Page were bound to leave their own mark while paying tribute to him. There’s a certain mystical quality to the way that Page looked on those later Zeppelin records that was like a dark inverse of Page, and while Clapton was content to keep his mission of spreading the blues everywhere, his way of turning the guitar into a voice was a lot more in line with what Hendrix was doing in the last few years of his life.
Nothing that they say will ever be able to bring Hendrix back, but we all should be lucky that we got as much material from him as we did. He might have been on this Earth for far too short a time, but sometimes the shooting stars are the ones that shine the brightest when looking back on them.
