Top 90 Hendrix Quotes

I watched Janis one time – we opened for her – and that’s the only time I ever saw her. We opened for Jimi Hendrix. I got to stand on the side of the stage and watch him for two hours and then he died. But I got the essence before they left.

At first, Hendrix went and became a superstar in London, but if he walked past the Apollo in Harlem, no one would know who he was. I’m the hip-hop version of him.

Hendrix was a different kind of guitar player. It was like, ‘Holy cow, this guy can sing, he can play all this weird stuff… what is this?’ It was a new kind of music.

I started off liking uptight music and then discovered Pink Floyd and Hendrix.

I also played with Jimi Hendrix. Jimi would come down and sit in with Retaliation and we would have a ball. He offered me the gig with him at 20 pounds a week, which at that point, was like 60 bucks.

When I first started writing songs, I looked around at the bands that were making it, and they all had the original material. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones – everybody was writing their own songs. That’s the way that you established your own identity.

I know about Woodstock probably as much as your average person who is over 30, where I’d know Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead.

Hearing Jimi Hendrix as a little kid and falling in love with everything that he did on guitar rewired my basic nature. To me, that was a normal thing that you should do: you should strive to be as innovative as Hendrix.

Jimi Hendrix came from the blues, like me. We understood each other right away because of that. He was a great blues guitarist.

When I first started singing in Paris, I sounded horrible: I was just singing to get some money to eat. And I wasn’t singing my own songs: it was Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix. Eventually, when I wrote my own music, my style just came out of my own place.

Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Electric Ladyland’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ those solos are just so cool.

There were people who went for serious mind enhancement, like Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon, although I didn’t really need to do that. I was blessed with an incredibly fertile imagination.

When I was a little bitty kid, I was listening to the stuff my parents were listening to. My mom was a huge Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige fan. My dad had a cover band that I sang with, and he loved Parliament, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, the blues, James Brown.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist. It’s a different world without Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Jones and the rest.

My fourth birthday, I was given a violin, and my fifth birthday, a guitar. I didn’t start to play until I saw Hendrix on TV. They showed him setting his guitar on fire and burning it for the Monterey Pop Festival.

I’ve been blessed. I grew up and played and worked and created with the Freddie Mercury, the Jimi Hendrix, the Keith Richards, the John Paul Jones of my generation.

So to compare the Beatles, obviously the Beatles are the Beatles, but in hip-hop terms, Tribe is the Beatles. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five are the Beatles. Big Daddy Kane is Jimi Hendrix. It means that much to people that grew up with it.

I’ve always loved the blues, John Lee Hooker, Janis Joplin, Hendrix.

I wanted to be the greatest woman guitarist alive. I had fantasies about being a female Jimi Hendrix.

I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.

I have a Stratocaster, which is part of my long, doomed ambition to become Jimi Hendrix.

I started listening to a lot of Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young when I was 8 or 9 years old – I had siblings that gave me good music instead of the crap that was on the radio in the ’90s.

You know, when Michael Jackson does the moonwalk, he’s showing off! When Prince or Hendrix do a guitar solo, it’s confidence! I would hate to be at a show and some nervous wreck is sweating up there and doesn’t feel like he deserves to be there.

The best thing I ever heard was in the ’60s. I heard Jimi Hendrix play ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ after a rehearsal, and it was brilliant.

All the really good guitar players – Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or even Bert Jansch or John Martin – I love all those people. But I didn’t start out thinking that I would be a guitar player. In the beginning, I played the guitar so I could sing. I mainly concentrated on my voice.

I have to have music playing constantly. It creates the tone and mood for anything you are doing. I specifically love rock, and Jimi Hendrix is one of my favorite artists. My favorite song is ‘Red House,’ because it’s heavy on the blues.

I was 17, and it was my first summer in London as a professional singer. One hot, humid evening, I heard that the Jimi Hendrix Experience was playing in a blues club above a pub in Finsbury Park. I was flat broke and couldn’t afford a ticket, so I went along just to stand outside and listen.

We soaked up everything from Beethoven to Chopin to Jimi Hendrix to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

I was listening to Jimi Hendrix; I just admire his artistry and creativity as an artist.

When you break out the acoustic guitar, the words are the focal point unless you’re the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar. So the words have to have meaning.

But people are now realising why I was playing bass with Hendrix.

Maybe it’s egocentric or whatever, but when I’m playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I’m making it up as I’m going along.

I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That’s how I saw him.

The ultimate part that I want to play in my life is Jimi Hendrix, so I guess I’m drawn to music even though I can’t sing or dance very well.

The Les Paul was more challenging because of the weight of it, but the tone was there that the Fender will never have and vice versa. So you have to make a decision as to what you’re going to have as your main instrument. After seeing Hendrix, I thought, ‘I’ll stick with the ‘Strat.’

I would love to play Jimi Hendrix.

Sometimes artists die young, and we don’t know exactly why. I think that, in life, you have these special individuals, whether it’s Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain. They’re on this journey – they’re on this earth to change things, to make things incredible – and then they’re not with us anymore.

The road has taken a lot of the great ones: Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Janis, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis.

You can talk about all the great guitarists you want Jimi Hendrix or whoever but as far as I’m concerned, Duane Allman is the best. No one ever played like him.

Hendrix rehearsed different drummers, before we met Mitch Mitchell.

What I wanted to do in rock ‘n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

Hendrix inspired me, but I was still more into Wes Montgomery. I was also into the Allman Brothers around the time of those albums.

The one area where I’ll say that Hendrix is underrated was his ability to use chord melodies. He used different inversions of chords and was able to make a three-piece band sound absolutely huge. From the moment Hendrix and the Experience came on the scene, power trios had their work cut out for them.

When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn’t get in trouble in his neighborhood.

Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it’s not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about – which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.

Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix… I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.

I was very influenced by Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom I had the pleasure of playing with and becoming friends with.

Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix.

I was the first guy to join the band with Hendrix.

Jimi Hendrix is one of the main influences on why I wanted to play guitar. He really shook me. I think it was his whole style – the look and what he did with the guitar.

I’m like a middle-aged person; when my friends go on about modern bands, I don’t know what they are talking about. I’m into rock n’ roll, like Jimi Hendrix. Not so much because of my parents, who used to play a lot of Nina Simone and older blues, but my brother and sister.

At first, I didn’t think playing guitar was the right thing for me to do. But after seeing Jimi Hendrix on television the day he died, I realized it was a really cool instrument to play and not wimpy at all, which was how I originally perceived it.