The guitarist Jimi Hendrix compared Eric Clapton to
Jimi Hendrix was largely an unknown entity when he arrived in England for the first time in September 1966. So much so, in fact, that when he spent his first brief period in Chas Chandler’s hometown of Newcastle, he simply busked in the suburban town centre of Heaton and blew a few bewildered local’s minds. He ended up establishing himself so quickly on the shores of Blighty that his first proper performance on stage was with the most revered act in London.
“The first time I played guitar in England,” his diary reveals, “I sat in with Cream”. Consisting of Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, Cream were the premiere rock band in the world when it came to technical proficiency. Chandler had ensured the group that his new talent was good enough to jam with them, but when the spotlight swung his way, he all but eclipsed the lot of them. This left Clapton exclaiming to Chandler after the show, “You didn’t tell me he was that fucking good!“
Nevertheless, Hendrix was full of praise for the band. “I like the way Eric Clapton plays,” he wrote. “Eric is just too much. And Ginger Baker, he’s like an octopus, man. He’s a real natural drummer.” But Hendrix had proven himself to be almost a supernatural among them. Shortly after the show, his name was uttered in whispers as though there was a new numen.
“I couldn’t work too much because I didn’t have a permit,” Hendrix writes. “If I was going to stay in England I had to get enough jobs to have a long permit. So what we had to do was line up a lot of gigs. Chas knows lots of telephone numbers. He helped me find my bassist and drummer and form the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It was very hard to find the right sidemen, people who were feeling the same as me.”
This predicament of finding the right band is indicative of Hendrix’s distinctiveness. It is also the reason he hated comparisons to Clapton when his international fame soon arrived. As he told music journalist Jay Ruby in 1968: “That’s one thing I don’t like at all. First of all, they [compare me to Clapton], and then they say, ‘OK now, blues first of all.’ And we just say, ‘We don’t wanna play blues all the time.’ We just don’t feel like it all the time.”
“The blues is what we’re supposed to dig. But you see, there are other things we can play, too,” Hendrix told Ruby, voicing pointed words about the comparisons to Clapton. “And we just don’t think alike. Sometimes the notes might sound like it, but it’s a completely different scene between those notes.”
All that being said, he did feel like there was one artist whose style was comparable to Clapton’s. As his diary reveals: “His solos sound just like Albert King.”
It’s unlikely that King would’ve found this complimentary, though, because King seemingly loathed comparisons, too. In fact, one fateful night, he even decided that it was about time the mighty Hendrix was taught a lesson when the pair found themselves jamming at a blues club. “He put out that song ‘Foxy Lady’, that wasn’t the blues,” King once cuttingly recalled.
What did Albert King think of Jimi Hendrix?
The esteemed ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ bluesman continued: “Everybody says, ‘Well, he’s a hell of a blues player.’ No way, man. We played many shows together, and that night, I taught him a lesson about the blues. Now I could’ve very easily played his songs, but he couldn’t play mine.”
While Hendrix was not strictly a blues player, he occasionally ventured into the traditional style, but Albert bashed even this. “‘Red House’? I think I heard it one time,” he said of Hendrix’s blues outing. “[It was lacking] oh yeah, oh yeah.”
It was Albert King’s opinion that his rock had the show but not enough of the core. “Big tall amplifiers stacked up on one another. He’d punch a button and get some smoke, punch a button and get something else, take his guitar and set it on fire, ram it through his amplifier. But I know what he was leaving out. He was leaving out the basic part of the blues,” he said.
Hendrix, however, didn’t want to play the blues. “I’m just playing the way I feel and if that sounds like blues well you can call it anything you want, but it’s no revival kit. Why go back into the past?” he questioned.
Continuing: “Why go back there and drag out ‘Blue Suede Shoes‘ just because you want to be hip to be defined rock which is a drag in the first place because those people aren’t offering you anything this very instant are they?” This desire to bring something new to guitar playing is an element that made his illuminating ways soar. And, if anything, made him just about the most incomparable guitarists in history.
