Jimi Hendrix on the musicians who were playing “20 times better than Chuck Berry”
Jimi Hendrix is the greatest guitarist of all time. There is a multitude of reasons behind that, and his ability is merely one of them. He bent the blues into a progressive new psychedelic realm and while puritans at the time might have questioned him for this, in time his trailblazing ways prove way far more illuminating than any of his contemporaries.
In an ear that was hung up on a notion of what was termed authenticity but was more akin to conservatism, an act that didn’t adhere to the tenets of musical origin were open to questioning. You had folk lovers saying Bob Dylan should never have gone electric, and when Hendrix veered always from the 12-bars he faced the same slings and arrows. However, he was savvy enough to know that it was something that had to be done.
“I’m just playing the way I feel and if that sounds like blues well you can call it anything you want, but it’s no revival kit. Why go back into the past?” he questioned. “Why go back there and drag out ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ just because you want to be hip to be defined rock which is a drag in the first place because those people aren’t offering you anything this very instant are they?” This desire to bring something new to guitar playing is an element that made it soar.
As he continued: “There’s so many musicians playing right now who are playing 20 times better than any Chuck Berry or any Death Stone. I’m not putting these people down; I’m just saying that the music is better now and people just don’t even know it. It’s right in their faces. They just don’t know how to accept it because it’s so much better. They have to have gimmicks and imagery to go by. If they don’t have these things on their mind, well, then they don’t know nothing about music. That’s the way some people think which is a big fat drag sometimes.”
In fact, it seemed like part of the reason that the mid-1960s came with a stalling air was that the times were a-changing a little too fast for some. That can be a scary proposition even in culture. If you were loving Little Richard and all of a sudden you had to get on board with Hendrix bringing Bach-like tonality in the blues then things could get a bit bewildering.
However, what Hendrix is forecasting with humble prescience is that rock ‘n’ roll had to keep rolling. And the beauty is, he doesn’t even seem to realise the weight of that himself. As Pete Townshend once said: “What Jimi was doing was sublime. It was an epiphany in the actual dictionary definition of the word. You felt pained because in his presence and in the presence of that music, you felt small. And you realised how far you had to go,” he proclaimed.
However, he had to regretfully add: “What was also painful was to meet him afterwards and realise that he didn’t know what he was doing. I knew he was going to burn out very, very quickly because he was so insecure and shy, a sweet guy, a really nice guy.”
