The world changed the moment Jimi Hendrix made his indelible mark upon it. With unbelievable prowess, grace and daring, he defined an era. As Grace Slick said when musing upon the make-up of the 1960s in retrospect, “He probably represents as an individual the sixties more than anybody else if you’re talking about rock and roll.”
She continued: “If you’re talking about rock probably Jimi is the guy. The colour, the clothes, the fact that he flipped from being for the war in Vietnam to against it within a year, his music, his stunning guitar playing, his showmanship.” Indeed, if you were to distil that modern Renaissance period down to a single vignette, then it doesn’t get much more iconic than the image of Hendrix transubstantiating into a cultural god at Woodstock.
He was a visionary in an era of luminaries. As the Waterboys would later sing, he saw the whole of the moon. Jimmy Page was firmly in agreement with this, likening him to another forward-thinking star, one Hendrix would come to dismiss. “Syd Barrett’s writing with the early Pink Floyd was inspirational. Nothing sounded like Barrett before Pink Floyd’s first album,” Page told Brad Tolinski.
“There were so many ideas and so many positive statements,” he continued. “You can really feel the genius there, and it was tragic that he fell apart. Both he and Jimi Hendrix had a futuristic vision in a sense.” Yes, there was no doubting the experimentation that the pair shared. But in Hendrix’s early view, he figured that Barrett’s so-called musical alchemy was a psychic sham utilising the same old tricks rather than genuinely future-gazing.
When Steve Barker asked the ‘Purple Haze’ player about Pink Floyd and the coterie of psychedelic acts on the rise in 1967, he explained: “Here’s one thing I hate, man: When these cats say, ‘Look at the band – they’re playing psychedelic music!’ and all they’re really doing is flashing lights on them and playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ with the wrong chords – it’s terrible.”
Indeed, many of Pink Floyd’s early underground shows were hailed by some as a more complete showcase of art as the music was blended with multimedia and innovative backdrop experiments. Seemingly, this didn’t impress Hendrix early doors, although he was also willing to admit that he had never seen them himself.
“I’ve heard they have beautiful lights,” he added, “but they don’t sound like nothing.”
Alas, while this might have been true of much of the bandwagon-jumping zeitgeist, and it grated Hendrix no end with the rocker dubbing it “just stupid” and not a patch on Bob Dylan’s “more earthy and live” groove, he would later come to realise that Pink Floyd did at least eclipse the peers that were trying to copy them. A few years further down the line, he commented: “They’re doing like a different type of music”.
Concluding: “You know, technically, they are getting electronics and all this. They do like a space kind of thing, like an inner space. Sometimes you have to layback by yourself and appreciate them.”
