Jimi Hendrix knew he could never match Bob Dylan: “I really dig him”
His lyrical pen isn’t the first thing that springs to mind when considering Jimi Hendrix’s titanic legacy in rock and pop.
As is well-known, Hendrix’s virtuosic fretwork places him in the typical top three of any given list of greatest guitarists, usually seen battling it out for the top spot with Eric Clapton and more often than not reigning supreme. But his diehard fans know he possessed a songcraft to match. Just as chromatically electric as his one-stage flaming theatre or innovative use of feedback was his impressionistic and breezily poignant grasp of psychedelic poetry.
“Anger, he smiles / Towering in shiny metallic purple armour / Queen Jealousy, envy waits behind him / Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground.” It’s an evocative opener to 1967’s ‘Bold as Love’ that transports just as radiantly as its lysergically-flanged crescendo, Hendrix able to bottle the era’s kaleidoscopic stir with pertinence over mere fantasy escapism.
Then there’s his penetrative reach into the soul. ‘Fire’s “I have only one burning desire / Let me stand next to your fire,” hits with smouldering impact just as swelteringly hard as any of his netherworldly riffs. Such verses flicker and bristle with as much teeming life as the textured sparks flying from his Fender Stratocaster.
Like much of his generation, there was one lauded songsmith Hendrix never felt he could ever scale the heights of. Not that he ever tried, or needed to, but the Experience frontman’s praise of Bob Dylan revealed a magnanimous moment of humility when assessing the folk revival icon’s impression on him and much of the 1960s counterculture.
Speaking to journalist Steve Barker in early 1967, Hendrix cast his mind back to the days before decamping to London, when he crossed paths with Dylan in Greenwich Village’s The Kettle of Fish, to share a joint and generally share a stoned laugh.
“People have always got to put him down,” Hendrix mused. “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.”
Perhaps there’s no greater praise? “I could never hope to reach such lyrical peaks, so I won’t even try” – the fact is, Hendrix imbued his own dazzling work with that unmistakable spirit that burns so potently in his guitar attack, all things inquisitive, colourful, uncomplicated, and tinctured with that glittering magic swirling around the Experience sound.
But Dylan towers over the decade with a titanic presence, showing that rock and pop could grapple with sophisticated lyrical efforts beyond ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. The two would enjoy a twinned echo in music for decades onwards, Hendrix famously tackling ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and summoning a Dylan cover so defining that even the Vagabond himself would deploy the Experience band’s arrangements when playing the number live.
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