The guitarist Eric Clapton stood in awe of: “I fell in love with him”
London has never needed a reason to be regarded as one of the best cities on the planet.
As a true melting pot of culture, it has always been on the verge of creativity, be it art, fashion or most importantly for us, music. But, in the mid to late 1960s, it was celebrating one of the most vibrant blues scenes in history, led by none other than Eric Clapton.
Clapton, along with Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green, was a pioneer of grungy blues rock. Bouncing between the dingy clubs of the capital, these burgeoning rock gods would celebrate blues rock with such an exciting sense of innovation that it became the talk of the global music scene.
Naturally, the city’s growing reputation attracted some of the best talent from across the pond to come over and check it out. In 1966, they didn’t get any bigger than Jimi Hendrix, the virtuosic guitar hero who arrived in the glittering streets of hippie London to shake up the city’s blues scene and guide the remaining guitarists into rock immortality.
“I fell in love with him,” Clapton remembered, as he recalled Hendrix’s impact on the scene. “I think Ginger and Jack felt threatened because they could see he was going to corner the market, for sure, but I felt an incredible sense of relief that there was somebody else on the planet who was as devoted to that music as I was… Of course, he was a showman, but he knew what the blues was about.”
He continued, “I was really keen to get to know him and spend time with him, but he was an elusive guy, and he wasn’t that available for friendship. I still don’t know what the real deal was with him or what his motives were or what the long-term plan was, or even if he had one…. He definitely pulled the rug out from under Cream, though. I told people like Pete Townshend about him, and we’d go and see him at different clubs, and I wondered how he was going to make what he did work on record.”
Adding, “Then we went off to America to record Disraeli Gears, which I thought was an incredibly good album. And when we got back, no one was interested because Are You Experienced had come out and wiped everybody else out, including us. Jimi had it sewn up. He’d taken the blues and made it incredibly cutting-edge. I was in awe of him.”
It was on September 26th, 1966, at the Scotch of St James when Hendrix made his debut in London, changing the history of the scene forever. The rumour mill began to churn that a true great had descended upon the capital, and within a week, Hendrix was introduced to Clapton, and that same night, Jimi joined Cream onstage for the performance of ‘Killing Floor’, which set the precedent for live shows thereafter.
Knowing that he had found something of a spiritual home, Hendrix stuck around for nearly a year, delivering blues rock shows that slowly diverted musical belief in The Beatles and prepared the world for an expansive era of rock and roll, which would soon spark at the beginning of the 1970s.
