Hendrix was a perfect guitarist. And that’s all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around.
As a roadie for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, I learned that I should give up being a guitar player.
I’m the youngest of three boys, and my oldest brother was super into Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and played guitar. I wanted to be like him, so I asked for a guitar of my own for Christmas in ’93.
And in fact, one of the central reasons why I never got involved with any drugs or anything is that I remember talking to people in maybe 1975 who saw Hendrix but couldn’t remember it. I was like, ‘How could that be?’
I love rock and roll. Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong decade because I love Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and… those are my bands.
Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Dead, Zeppelin, the Beatles – I paint to this music all of the time.
Jimi Hendrix, he was a rock star. But he played guitar; I don’t. I’ve just found ways to use words to make my mark in this history book.
It was Jimi Hendrix that I first got into when Betty Mabry turned me on to him.
I liked the Beatles because there was so much melody. Jimi Hendrix is still one of my heroes.
I have been involved in music since 1972 when I started managing two artists from The Jimi Hendrix Band. My family has been involved in music for years, so it’s kind of in my blood. I just wish I could sing!
Here’s something weird, though: I loved Jimi’s music so much that I would never perform it for people. Throughout my teens and playing in various bands, I refused to play Hendrix songs. I know that sounds strange, but Jimi’s music was so special to me that it was like works of art that shouldn’t be touched or altered.
I don’t think there’s any music that you hear on the radio today that would be possible without Jimi Hendrix. Rock, blues-rock, heavy metal, any guitar stuff when you get right down to it – Jimi did it. He’s certainly the guy who basically invented the blues-rock genre for guitar players.
When I think of artists that I would have loved to work with, it’s Jimi Hendrix. And Steve McQueen. He’s not a rock star, but he’s kind of a rock star to me.
I’ve heard the stories. Like, Eric Clapton said he wanted to burn his guitar when he heard Jimi Hendrix play. I never understood that because, when I went and saw a great drummer or heard one, all I wanted to do was practice.
Richard Lloyd of Television is one of my favorite guitarists. His mentor was Jimi Hendrix when he was just 14. Jimi was always pounding everything he knew into that kid.
I just want to be an inspiration. I’m a rock star, I’m Future Hendrix.
I am a leader. Leaders always get heat. They’re always going against the grain. Jimi Hendrix got heat; Bob Marley got heat; Miles Davis got heat. Every great artist got heat. Heat means you’re doing something right.
You can take things that Jimi Hendrix took, from Curtis Mayfield or from Buddy Guy for example, because we are all children of everything, even Picasso. But if you want to stand out, you have to learn to crystallize your existence and create your own fingerprints.
I was very friendly with Jimi Hendrix because my boyfriend at the time, Tommy Weber, was making a film about him, so I would go to all of his shows.
I remember my brother was always a jerk to me. One time, he bought Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Smash Hits,’ and he gave it to me because he didn’t like it, thinking it was a punishment.
I really thought I was pretty good before I saw Hendrix, and then I thought: Yeah, not so good.
Lauryn Hill, P-Funk, Marvin Gaye, Public Enemy – I have a very diverse palate for music. I can go from Judy Garland to Jimi Hendrix to Stevie Wonder to Rachmaninoff. I just love great music.
I love Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain. I really do. It doesn’t matter what style they had – whether it was pin-up or whatever – it just worked for them, and it looked effortless even though it was fabulous. I like anything that just looks effortless.
I liked back in the sixties where you’d turn on the radio and go ‘Oh that’s Hendrix, that’s Creedence Clearwater, that’s The Doors, there’s The Grass Roots, The Monkees, there’s Big Brother.’ You could just instantly hear it and tell. But in the eighties and nineties there’s no way you could do that.
Im a product of my influences, and those are the 60s. All analog. I loved the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Stones – and then later on, of course, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix.
And um, when I came back to England I put a very complex soundtrack on it, featuring everyone from Jimi Hendrix, right through to Neil Diamond, you know, everybody that was kind of popular who was kind of popular at that time.
I grew up in that era of Hendrix and Joplin and The Doors, and the Summer of Love and Haight-Ashbury, and even the Panthers. That was my era; that’s what I was into.
I’m not like other guitar players. In fact, I’m not even like most acoustic players because I use the nylon-string acoustic. I do play steel-string and the electric guitar, too, because I love rock ‘n’ roll and guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. But my bread and butter has always been the nylon-string.
My dad used to listen to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, and my mom liked Michael Bolton and Roy Orbison. She was pretty big into country music, too. So there was a wealth of music being played in the house, and I kind of took it all in.
I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.
But then there was Hendrix, man. Jimi was really the last cat to freak me. Jimi was playing all the stuff I had in my head. I couldn’t believe it, when I first heard him. Man, no one can ever do what he did with a guitar. No one can ever take his place.
In 1974, when I started working with the material that became ‘Horses,’ a lot of our great voices had died. We’d lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Jimi Hendrix is a classic example of a player in which everything he did, it was all in his hands.
I listen to country music. I listen to jazz. I listen to R&B. I listen to Jimi Hendrix a lot.
I’m pretty sure I was about the only kid in school who knew who Jimi Hendrix even was. Through my older siblings, I was getting turned on to all the great music that was happening at the time, and I really loved Hendrix.
Hendrix was a natural genius who played many beautiful styles. Talent as great as his doesn’t come through life very frequently. Hendrix was one in a billion.
My greatest influence is Jimi Hendrix, and if he’s been reincarnated, or if he’s looking down, sideways, or looking up, I just wanted to tell him that I love him and thank him for opening doors for me. I just wanted to make it beautiful for him.
My own personal melting pot has no room for Hendrix or heavy metal, filled as it is with European ancestors such as Debussy, Sibelius, Bartok, Lutoslawski, and Ligeti.
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