How Jimi Hendrix inspired Paul McCartney to buy his “favourite guitar”
The presence of Jimi Hendrix was impossible to ignore in the mid-1960s. If you were a British rock musician, Hendrix was a revolutionary figure from the day he started playing in clubs around London – a black, left-handed virtuoso who manipulated sound in ways that had never been done before. Even the biggest groups had to pay their respects, including The Beatles.
When John Lennon and Paul McCartney went to see Hendrix in action at the Saville Theatre in London on June 4th, 1967, they weren’t the only ones. The Who’s Pete Townshend was in the audience too, as was Cream axeman Eric Clapton. To their collective surprise, Hendrix opened his set with a cover of The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.
“Jimi opened, the curtains flew back, and he came walking forward, playing ‘Sgt. Pepper’, and it had only been released on Thursday, so that was like the ultimate compliment,” McCartney recalled. “And we’re going, ‘Wow, that’s great! But we knew that he was now out of tune. Cause if you stretch the strings in those days, that would send you out of tune! And it’s his first number.”
“It’s still obviously a shining memory for me because I admired him so much anyway, he was so accomplished,” McCartney claimed. “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,” he added. “It’s a pretty major compliment in anyone’s book. I put that down as one of the great honours of my career. I mean, I’m sure he wouldn’t have thought of it as an honour, I’m sure he thought it was the other way round, but to me, that was like a great boost.”
McCartney even credits Hendrix for inspiring him to buy one of his favourite instruments. While looking for a guitar that could emulate Hendrix’s mastery of feedback, McCartney was convinced to buy a semi-hollow body Epiphone Casino. It wasn’t the Fender Stratocaster that Hendrix favoured, but it let McCartney play similar things.
“I have an Epiphone Casino, which is one of my favourites,” McCartney told GQ. “It’s not the best guitar, but I bought it in the 1960s. I went into a shop on Charing Cross Road [just around the corner from Denmark Street] and asked the guys if they had a guitar that would feed back because I was very much into Jimi Hendrix and that kind of thing.”
The timeline for the purchase doesn’t quite line up with history, however. Most estimations place McCartney’s purchase of his Epiphone Casino around 1964 or 1965. At the very latest, McCartney was playing the guitar during April of 1966, which was still five months before Hendrix first came to London.
“I loved that kind of stuff, and so I wanted a guitar that was going to give me feedback, as none of the others could,” he added. “So they showed me the Casino. Because it’s got a hollow body, it feeds back easier. I had a lot of fun with that. That’s the guitar I played the ‘Taxman’ solo on, and it’s also the guitar I played the riff on ‘Paperback Writer’ with. It’s still probably my favourite guitar.”
