“When it came to playing the blues”: the guitarist Jeff Beck called the closest to Jimi Hendrix
Four years in the mainstream was all it took for Jimi Hendrix to dominate mainstream music completely. He borrowed $40 and flew to the UK, which changed his life forever. While he had some level of success in the US, very few managers were interested in signing him. There was clear talent there, but whether or not it was marketable was another question entirely.
“I couldn’t believe nobody had picked up on him before, because he’d obviously been around,” said Linda Keith, Keith Richards’ fiancée, when discussing the talent of Hendrix. “Jimi was astonishing – the moods he could bring to music, his charisma, his skill and stage presence.”
It wasn’t until The Animals bassist, Chas Chandler, discovered Jimi Hendrix that a manager was ready to give him a go. Chandler was stepping away from making music and stepping into the world of management. As such, when he saw Hendrix, he wasn’t asking himself whether or not the guitarist was marketable and instead just saw a musician unlike anything he had previously witnessed. He told Hendrix to make his way to London, where he was discovered by the likes of Paul McCartney, Jeff Beck and other musicians who he went on to inspire.
“I was embarrassed because I thought, ‘God, that should be me up there’,” said Jeff Beck when he was discussing the first time that he saw Jimi Hendrix live. “I just hadn’t had the guts to come out and do it so flamboyantly, really. He just looked like an animal, played like an animal, and everybody went crazy.”
His words reflect the opinions of many people who saw Jimi Hendrix during this period. His music was great, there was no denying that, but there was something more to him. He played the guitar like a man possessed, as if the fret was an extension of himself. When he stood on stage and improvised over various pentatonic scales, the notes came as easily as words do for poets, as his fingers danced up and down the six-string seamlessly.
Even now, decades after he initially flew to London and after his four-year run in the mainstream, people still consider Hendrix one of the greatest guitarists to ever take to the stage. Very few people come close to him both as a guitarist and someone who could improvise so easily. However, despite being overwhelmingly impressed by Hendrix, Beck recalls one other guitarist he saw who he thought came close: Stevie Ray Vaughan.
“I met him at a CBS convention in Hawaii in 1981,” recalled Beck. “He was a little worse for wear. He was eating KFC out of a box and then ate the box as well.”
While this meeting might not have been the most glamorous, when Beck and Vaughan toured together, it became apparent that he was a real talent when playing the blues. “We went on the road together in ’89. He’d got a beautiful new girlfriend and he was as straight as a die. We were on the road for about three months,” said Beck before mourning the loss of Vaughan, which came far too soon.
Concluding, “Then the tragic story was when he went in that helicopter, he didn’t want to get on it. The people around him talked him into it by saying: ‘Look, Eric [Clapton] has just got on one’. So off he went and never came back. I think Stevie Ray was the closest thing to Hendrix when it came to playing the blues.”
