The one band Jimi Hendrix preferred to The Beatles
“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit,” the late, great writer Kurt Vonnegut once proclaimed. “I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did.’” And Jimi Hendrix knew it.
Without The Beatles, in fact, the greatest instrumentalist the world has ever known may well have faded into obscurity. Rather inexplicably, Hendrix had been gigging for years before anyone ever thought about signing him. He was growing weary, too. But The Beatles inspired him to keep going despite the muted returns that were presently greeting him. Fate, however, would soon intervene and transform his fortunes… thank god.
“I couldn’t believe nobody had picked up on him before because he’d obviously been around. He was astonishing,” Linda Keith told The Guardian when recalling the first night she witnessed Hendrix perform. “The moods he could bring to music, his charisma, his skill and stage presence. Yet nobody was leaping about with excitement. I couldn’t believe it.”
Puzzled but unperturbed by this reaction, she quickly told her future boyfriend, the Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler, about this extraordinary talent who he simply had to see. Producer Bob Gulick tells the best tale of what happened next. “I look over at Chandler,” he told Guitar Player, “And his mouth is hanging open.”
He continues, “And when Jimi started playing with his teeth on ‘Hey Joe,’ Chandler’s drink fell from his hand and spilled all over his lap. I saw it happen. I’m sure Chandler knew what we did at that moment – that Jimi had mopped the floor with every guitar player the guy had ever seen before.” Chandler signed him.
It was less than a year later when Hendrix took to the stage in front of half of the Fab Four and blew their brains out. As Paul McCartney recalled, “I remember him opening at the Saville on a Sunday night, 4th June 1967. Brian Epstein used to rent it when it was usually dark on the Sunday. Jimi opened, the curtains flew back and he came walking forward, playing ‘Sgt. Pepper’, and it had only been released on Thursday so that was like the ultimate compliment.”
It was also the ultimate show of skill. To use the horrid parlance of our times, the ultimate ‘flex’, perhaps? The song had only been out for three days, and yet here he was transcribing the mind-bending complexity of the orchestral collision of rock band and a full ensemble that The Beatles had mustered, down to something he could rattle off single-handedly with a little help from The Experience after merely a quick backstage run-through.
While this is absolutely not to say that he had ‘moved on’ from The Beatles, he loved them from the start, right through to his untimely death, but in the short span of time since getting signed, he was certainly expanding his musical horizons. In a whirling blend of psychedelia and classical, he was looking to blend the compositional complexity of George Frideric Handel with the power of rock ‘n’ roll.
The Beatles were a key factor in inspiring this outlook, not just for Hendrix, but the whole world, for that matter. As the late philosopher Mark Fisher explained, “The Beatles basically trained people to expect things to get more and more experimental the more popular they got.” And The Beatles were damn popular.
Hendrix was rapidly rising, too. “What they mainstreamed was this psychedelic consciousness, with its key notion of the plasticity of reality,” Fisher continued. In other words, everything could change, develop, and move on. It was, therefore, almost the inevitable duty of The Beatles to hand over the mantle to someone.
“Hey, shake my left hand, man, it’s closer to my heart.”
For Hendrix, it wasn’t quite handed over but more so seized upon by King Crimson. For the ‘Purple Haze’ icon, these were the new defining force of rock ‘n’ roll’s exultant potential. As the story goes…
“The single time I met Jimi Hendrix was at The Revolution Club in Mayfair (London) when [King] Crimson were playing in 1969, and it was the first time I sat down,” Robert Fripp recalls. They’d only been a band for a matter of months at this stage. Nevertheless, they were undaunted by the genius in their presence.
After the show, Hendrix made his way towards the band. Fripp stuck out a hand for Hendrix to shake, at which point the luminary said, “Hey, shake my left hand, man, it’s closer to my heart.” For a while, that was Fripp’s proudest moment. But years later, Hendrix’s appearance at the show would be revealed to be even more consequential when Fripp bumped into the sister-in-law of King Crimson’s first drummer, Michael Giles, in a bookstore.
She was in attendance on the momentous night that Hendrix shook his hand, and, as fate would have it, she was sitting at the table next to him. “He was jumping up and down,” she told Fripp, shouting: “THIS IS THE BEST GROUP IN THE WORLD!’” She asserted that he bawled this several times over the booming stereo. “In all due modesty,” Fripp concludes the story. “That is one of the best calling cards any working musician is ever likely to be able to present.”
Hendrix fell in love with King Crimson that night, and in the brief window of his life that remained, he continued to adore and study them. The psychedelic experience was, inherently, a live one, and with The Beatles unable to offer that anymore, he saw in King Crimson the symphonic development of rock towards something that could truly envelop a listener. Electrifyingly, their sound embodied the fateful epithet of the day: Turn on, tune in, drop out.
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