The musician Neil Young thought changed music: “At one with his instrument”
All this recent music talk about time-travelling got me thinking about Jimi Hendrix.
Allow me to explain. Recently, Janelle Monae confirmed she was either a genius or mad – if there is even a difference? – by claiming that she travelled back in time, to 1973, to watch Ziggy Stardust live.
Naturally, the internet sparked into a frenzy of humour, but here at Far Out, we wondered. Wondered who we would see if, by some divine miracle, Monae’s supernatural powers were bestowed upon us. It was up to me to draft a top five list, which, despite being immortalised in digital ink, is still a source of internal debate largely because I omitted one of the most iconic musical moments of all time and sorely regret doing so.
How could I possibly own a time machine, use it to travel backwards in the name of musical purity and not watch Jimi Hendrix play live, and more specifically, play The Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where he famously set his guitar on fire. A truly iconic moment for it displayed the master of the art, burning the instrument that he so masterfully had a grip over.
By 1967, with the release of his record Axis: Bold As Love, there was no doubt that Hendrix was a generational talent. He was the right musician, at the right time, who took this boiling pot of blues mastery and added something so explosive to it that the lid would fiercely fly off. He effectively gave music permission to move forward into this brave new style that would dominate the following decade. Would we really have had the monster riffs or self-indulgent guitar solos of the 1970s if it weren’t for Hendrix’s damn-near godlike innovations?
To a degree, Neil Young, who was considered one of the guitar masters of that decade, would argue we would not. “Guitar, you can play it or transcend it,” Young once said. “Jimi showed me that. He was at one with his instrument. I just looked at it, heard it, and felt it, and wanted to do it. Hendrix threw a Molotov cocktail onto rock & roll.”
He continued his praise elsewhere, claiming, “He was excellent. He was one with his instrument.”
Adding, “At that time, no one had pushed the electric guitar so far, and that goes for today, too. He was over everybody. Totally gone. So fluid, using the feedback to create such beautiful things. For a guitar fan like me, it was a revelation.”
While Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were all names mentioned in the discourse of guitar playing greatness in the years that followed, no one has ever come close to Hendrix. He played with a virtuosic style that those aforementioned names, among others, all similarly mastered. But, he did it with a heightened sense of feeling. Hendrix’s playing was as emotive as it was skilful, somewhere between soulful and raucous, and that combination is something that has rarely, if not never, been seen since.
