The prog-rock band Jimi Hendrix helped launch to stardom
Not every band can make their way to the top without a little bit of help.
For every band that seems to have the magic from the moment they play music together, it takes hard work for any casual record executive to take notice, but whenever Jimi Hendrix spoke, people listened intently to what the musical wizard had to say.
Thanks to the success of Are You Experienced, Hendrix had become one of the biggest names in music because of how different he sounded. No matter how many people had thought that Eric Clapton was God at the time, ‘Slowhand’ was tame compared to what Hendrix was doing half the time. He was reinventing the idea of guitar, and for all of the softer rock bands out at the time, the fact that ‘Purple Haze’ rocketed up the charts made every record executive change their way of thinking.
Rock and roll didn’t have to be strictly for the pop market anymore, and even if Hendrix had a taste for some soulful music, he was also looking for the next strange collaboration that wouldn’t necessarily fit in with the radio format. In fact, looking at the way that Hendrix constructed songs, he was on the verge of becoming a prog-rock artist around the time of his death as well.
Not every song had the same kind of punch as King Crimson, but Electric Ladyland is a guitar odyssey half the time, and when listening to the version of ‘Machine Gun’ that turned up on Band of Gypsys, there are wisps of fusion jazz sprinkled in the mix. But even with many legends like Miles Davis wanting to work with Hendrix at the time, the guitar visionary was also attuned to what was going on in the underground.
He had already helped launch Arthur Brown to stardom when he suggested that radio stations start playing the song ‘Fire’, but a lot of the progressive musicians he saw were in their embryonic stages half the time. Still, it didn’t take Hendrix long to hear the potential in a band like Jethro Tull when he casually heard them playing in between some of his later gigs.
Despite being worlds away from Ian Anderson’s jaunty version of prog, the frontman remembered Hendrix being one of the first people to champion them, saying, “Jimi Hendrix was one of the reasons that Jethro Tull got noticed in much of Europe. Because he was, I think, slightly impressed by Jethro Tull when we were the opening act for him in Stockholm early in 1969. He then told our German promoter of this band that he’d seen and recommended that we might be an act that was worth booking.”
It may have taken Tull a few more months to hit the ground running, but chances are he heard where the band was heading with their unique approach to rock and roll. Although a lot of the blues that Hendrix loved would be slowly eased out of their sound over time, Anderson never forgot that sense of innovation that Hendrix had, though, practically being able to switch genres midway through any one of the band’s songs.
There’s no telling what Hendrix would have been doing had he lived to see age 28, but judging by his taste for expansive music, it’s not out of the question to think he would have been ingrained in the world of prog. After all, the elements of fusion were all there on those first few albums, and with three masterpieces under his belt, it was up to him to either take it to a higher plateau or go to another area that no one could have touched on.
