The guitarist Ritchie Blackmore preferred to Jimi Hendrix: “He wasn’t a great player”
If music was all about technical skill, then we’d still be stuck listening to Mozart. David Bowie was a brilliant singer, but his pipes paled in comparison to Pavarotti’s. Bob Dylan might have an ear for a pretty melody, but he’s not quite top of the class when it comes to guitar skills. We listen to pop music, in part, because of the stories that it tells, and Jimi Hendrix, if nothing else, is one of the great storytellers of our time.
Was his guitar playing as unsurpassable as the modern narrative seems to suggest? Well, that depends on how you define the craft. “Although learning to play a Jimi Hendrix song for most contemporary guitarists may not pose a tremendous challenge, playing them just like Jimi has never quite been achieved,“ Steve Vai, a guitar maestro himself, recently told Far Out.
“His touch on the instrument, sense of groove, choice of notes and overall ability to control audio chaos in innovative ways was remarkable.” You might be able to play a Hendrix tune – maybe even note for note – but nobody can play them like Hendrix,“ Vai continued. One factor he missed from the list is a facet often dismissed as mere packaging: Hendrix was wholeheartedly cool.
Coolness is not some arbitrary asset defined by high school bullies, it requires an adriot artfulness that interacts with society. Hendrix had that in droves and it permeated not just his own music but an entire era of society, as Grace Slick suggests, ”He probably represents as an individual the sixties more than anybody else If you’re talking about rock and roll.”
”Jimi is the guy,” she said. ”The colour, the clothes, the fact that he flipped from being for the war in Vietnam to against it within a year, his music, his stunning guitar playing, his showmanship.” And that last point can’t be dismissed. It’s one thing to be able to play the guitar with technical prowess; it’s another thing entirely to be able to make a show of it. In Ritchie Blackmore’s opinion, it is here where Hendrix’s greatest strength lies.
The former Deep Purple guitarist commented, “I was impressed by Hendrix. Not so much by his playing, as his attitude – he wasn’t a great player, but everything else about him was brilliant. Even the way he walked was amazing. His guitar playing, though, was always a little bit weird.“ Granted, the typically contrarian English guitarist might be being a touch harsh on Hendrix’s deeply idiosyncratic command, but it is true that he often excelled more in terms of expression than strict musicality.
However, in Blackmore’s view, there was one virtuoso who could do both. “Hendrix inspired me, but I was still more into Wes Montgomery,“ he told Guitar Player. The American jazz guitarist sadly died just as Blackmore was breaking through in 1968, but he still had a lasting influence over many musicians. As Joe Pass put it, “To me, there have been only three real innovators on the guitar—Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, and Django Reinhardt.”
So, for those looking to discover something new on the guitar, Montgomery was the man to go to. And Blackmore was certainly always on the lookout for that. As Blackmore said in backhanded praise of the Fab Four, “I wasn’t listening to rock when I started out. The Beatles were around, but no one took that seriously — except for billions of record buyers! They’re still a great band, but you couldn’t learn anything instrumentally from them — pretty little tunes, though.“
Montgomery offered those alongside a smattering of swagger, showmanship, and the effortless cool that made Hendrix iconic, too. It’s just that in Blackmore’s opinion, he did it in a manner that had a bit more complexity and craft.
