The songs Jimi Hendrix used to make other tracks: “He did all the dirty tricks”
$40 was all it took to change the course of music history forever. That’s the amount Jimi Hendrix needed to borrow to get a flight from the States to the UK and change guitar playing forever. He was one of the first musicians to rise to the top alone through word of mouth, as his live shows became notorious and people were utterly infatuated with everything about him.
It wasn’t just how Hendrix played the guitar; it was the fact that he was cool. He had a demanding stage presence but also wasn’t too in the audience’s face about it. He was charming, had a nice voice, and had a warm atmosphere surrounding him. He was a presence that was hard to deny, and he became the guitarist that everyone aspired to be.
Jeff Beck, considered one of the best guitarists in the country at that point, knew the first time he saw Jimi Hendrix that he was going to be something big. “I saw him at one of his earliest performances in Britain, and it was quite devastating,” he said.
“He did all the dirty tricks – setting fire to his guitar, doing swoops up and down his neck, all the great showmanship to put the final nail in our coffin,” admitted Beck, “I had the same temperament as Hendrix in terms of ‘I’ll kill you’, but he did in such a good package with beautiful songs.”
One of the most captivating things about Jimi Hendrix was his ability to improvise. He had a lot of songs written, and crowds would gather to hear them, but when it came to soloing within those songs and how he could blend one into the other, people didn’t get the same thing every night. Hendrix would dance around the fret, making the pentatonic scale look like it was developed with his guitar in mind, as he moved around notes effortlessly and gave people something different at every show.
His improvising didn’t just mean that he played different music every night; it also meant that he would stumble upon other riffs that he could use in songs when playing. It was common for Hendrix to improvise something and then realise that he could potentially make another track out of those improvised notes. There are two songs in particular where this can be heard.
The first is on the song ‘Ships Passing Through The Night’. It would be common for Hendrix to play shows where he would expand upon that song to go into ‘Night Bird Flying,’ as the former inspired the latter. That’s also the case with ‘Lullaby For The Summer’ and ‘Ezy Rider’. You can hear elements of those songs within one another, as ‘Lullaby’ was a big inspiration for ‘Ezy Rider’.
There have been a lot of posthumous Hendrix albums released following his death, and it’s purely because there was so much music he recorded that could be drawn from to make new material. This was his writing process in life. It’s easy to hear in much of his music when you listen out for it.
