‘Little Wing’: Tom Morello hails the Jimi Hendrix song every guitarist will struggle to”get down”
In the summer of 1966, while with Jimmy James and the Blue Flames in Greenwich Village, Jimi Hendrix had an idea.
It wasn’t yet a song, but the beginnings of something that needed patience; needed the right event to come along and inspire it to greatness. Enter the Monterey Pop Festival 1967.
Over three days, Monterey Pop Festival’s iconic summer of love staple boasted all the names you could possibly think of: Janis Joplin, The Animals, The Who, Jimi Hendrix…the list goes on. The idea was to create the “best of everything” to give the people what they truly wanted, which was good music, good vibes, no funny business, and they stuck to their guns.
In the moments leading up to one of the most historicised moments in music history, Hendrix was building to one of the biggest songs of his career. It’d come up in waves, but it wasn’t until the festival that his inspiration blossomed into something headier. ‘Little Wing’ first came to the axeman during that one summer in ‘66, but the festival’s atmosphere is what became his muse, a pleasant experience so delicate it barely even existed at all.
“I was just looking at everything around,” Hendrix later recalled, “Everybody’s really flyin’ and they’re really in a nice mood”. He felt as though the fragility of it, the way “it will just fly away”, felt naturally pleasing, almost like a girl who looked out at the world with innocent wonderment. “I just took all these things and put them in one very, very small little matchbox,” he added.
But what really made the track fly was its arrangement; the guitar played so uniquely that countless other players have commended Hendrix’s style. Sharing some features with jazz, the whole progression is deceiving, drawing in both new and schooled guitar players, and neither being able to master it particularly well. According to Tom Morello, nobody will ever truly get there.
“It’s just this gorgeous song that, as a guitar player, you can study your whole life and not get down, never get inside it the way that he does,” he told Rolling Stone, explaining, “He seamlessly weaves chords and single-note runs together and uses chord voicings that don’t appear in any music books.”
Anyone with a keen eye for detail or cultural context will likely see that the issue ventures beyond the arrangement itself. ‘Little Wing’ taps into a specific experience, capturing a moment in time when everything felt simple yet complicated all the same. Hendrix even kept his cards close to his chest for a while, enjoying the fact that it’s open to interpretation, though that was likely another strain that kept other players from coming too close to it.
But that’s also the true nature of the song, too. An almost dismissive, “You had the be there”, yet it’s what keeps people coming back. Because as long as they can’t quite get it, they’ll keep trying. And trying.
