What would the world be like if Jimi Hendrix never existed?
If Jimi Hendrix’s music were deleted from history, the world would sound terrible, and that’s the common consensus, of course, so let’s explore why.
This might sound like a silly hypothetical to you, but for a while, there was a real chance that Jimi Hendrix’s music wasn’t going to find an audience. He was in America performing and blowing the minds of everyone in earshot, and yet, nobody was signing him, not because people didn’t recognise he was great; anyone with a brain could see as much, but they just weren’t sure whether he would sell records, because, crucially, Hendrix was a live performer.
When he took to the stage, he would play the guitar behind his head, with his teeth, and move his hand up and down the fret as if it were an extension of his body, bringing a raw, animalistic element to music, and that meant that everyone who went to his gigs was blown away by what he did.
When Jeff Beck saw him for the first time in London, he was so in awe of what Hendrix was doing that he started to question whether or not he could even call himself a guitar player anymore, who recalled, “It was probably one of the first shows he did [in London]. It was in a tiny downstairs club in Queensgate. It was a fashion club, mostly girls, 18 to 25, all dolled up, hats and all. Jimi wasn’t known then.”
He continued, “He came on, and I went, ‘Oh, my God’. He had the military outfit on and hair that stuck out all over the place. They kicked off with [Bob Dylan’s] ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and I thought, ‘Well, I used to be a guitarist’.”
While he might have been recognisable as a good live artist, someone being good onstage doesn’t necessarily equate to someone selling records. It was for this reason that labels and managers daren’t sign him, with even Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham unable to see a commerical potential, and after watching him live, he recognised his talent but decided not to go ahead with a working relationship.
So, there is another life where Jimi Hendrix never takes off, left to be a live artist, and the world is deprived of his recorded music. It’s certainly not a world I want to visit any time soon, but what would it actually sound like? Well, there would be no Hendrix, that’s a given, but also, the way that he influenced music as a whole would also fall by the wayside, and that would have a lot more ramifications than you realise.
There are different approaches that people take to a guitar solo. The first is that people want to channel something romantic, which doesn’t necessarily mean in the sense of love, but rather, using an instrument to convey an emotion. Regardless of whether that’s happiness, sadness, lust, love, longing or whatever else, there are artists who try to convey as much in the music that they make.
You hear this most predominantly in the blues, as guitarists will play solos that might not be technically complex, but do wonderfully convey different ranges of emotion. BB King could play a piece on the guitar which consisted of the same three notes, and it would be enough to melt the thorniest of hearts.
Of course, then you have other musicians who play in a bid to show off. It’s less about trying to make the listener feel a certain type of way, and instead is just using their instrument in a bid to flex their musical muscles. You saw this kind of sound come into force most aggressively in the 1970’s, as rock music became one of the biggest styles in the world, and artists tried to see how much they could push it.
Jimi Hendrix was one of the driving factors behind people trying to play the guitar in this way. As a musician, he was a strange combination of both braggadocious and romantic, because when he played, he did so in a way that was largely improvised; it was just him, his guitar, and whatever notes spilt out. As such, his method was pretty honest, but it was also very boastful and animalistic, which is what really got guitarists wanting to up their game.
Beck’s sentiment of “I used to be a guitarist” was shared by a lot of music makers at the time. They wanted to try to emulate what Hendrix was doing, both in terms of what he was playing, how he was playing it, and his onstage persona. Essentially, they became hell-bent on channelling that grey area between being a romantic and a show off. He took the guitarist to a whole other level, as they were no longer backing musicians; people were going to watch rock bands and get more excited about seeing the guitarist than the singer.
When you look back at some of the great rock music that was made in the ‘70s and ‘80s, your mind goes towards some of the excellent solos that people were playing. Songs like ‘Hotel California’, ‘November Rain’ and ‘Eruption’ are all quintessential parts of this style, and musicians likely wouldn’t have felt the need to push themselves so much if it weren’t for a guitarist like Jimi Hendrix setting the bar so high.
If you were to take his music and delete it from history, the knock-on effect would be that a lot of other great guitar solos would simultaneously be deleted. Read the interviews of the guitar greats and see how long it takes for them to cite Jimi Hendrix as one of their biggest influences, and I guarantee you won’t get far down the page.
A world without Jimi Hendrix, simply put, doesn’t bear thinking about, as rock music not only wouldn’t be the same, it might have struggled to reach such a dominating stature in the first place.
