Guitarists I Admire: Jimi Hendrix

I imagine that most of the small crowd that reads this blog knows that I play guitar. It’s the great pleasure of my life, and “musician” is a key part of my identity. I’ve been playing guitar for about 20 or so years now, and I’ve come a long way in terms of ability. While I don’t consider myself anywhere close to being a virtuoso or even an expert, I’m pretty comfortable with my instrument and can play pretty much anything I hear in my head, electric or acoustic.

Part of being a serious musician is having and acknowledging your musical influences. I am no exception. Certain guitarists have influenced and inspired me since I was a kid of 14 just learning to plink out a few hesitant chords on my mom’s nylon string guitar. I can’t say that all of what I liked when I was a kid has stood the test of time (Mark loves to give me crap for liking crap like Whitesnake and Britney Fox in the 1980s), but over the past two decades, there are certain artists/bands/guitarists whose influence upon my style and taste in music has proven durable and deeply influential to me. And, given the fact I am a total music nerd who can talk for days about music that I dig, I feel like sharing what inspires me.

So, this is Part One of what I plan to be a occasional, long series on guitarists I admire. I’ve been drawn to loud rock n’ roll from a pretty young age, so it shouldn’t be surprising that most of the guitar gods you’ll read about in this series come from that tradition. It’s not that there aren’t fantastic guitarists that I like in other genres such as jazz (Django Reinhart, Pat Metheny, Stanley Jordan) or classical (John Williams, Andre Segovia), etc., it’s just that rock n’ roll is the family of music that has left a lasting mark on my musical personality.

As I’ve often said, my tongue only half in my cheek, “I was born to rock!”

First up in the series of Guitarists I Admire: Jimi Hendrix

This is kind of a no-brainer. A cliché too. I mean, what fan of rock music doesn’t consider him among the greats? But I have to weigh in, because Jimi Hendrix’ music was very important to me as a formative musical influence.

I think I first heard Hendrix on a tape that my friend Nat gave to me when I was a sophomore in high skool. The first song? “Are You Experienced?” It was mind blowing for my 15 year old adolescent brain, that thick, hypnotic, incredibly complex, sidewinding electric guitar figure that comes in over the trippy backwards drums, and a guitar solo recorded backwards in the middle, too. I listened to that tape over and over again… I think I actually still have it somewhere.

Hendrix was a man of many and immense talents. To this day he is primarily known for his guitar solo pyrotechnics (literally… at one famous show he set his guitar on fire before smashing it to bits) and his liberal, revolutionary use of fuzz tone. And it’s true that his abilities in this arena have rarely been equaled, before or since. He had a naturally flowing, lyrical style to playing guitar solos that made them seem effortless. His vibrato technique was among the most expressive and instantly recognizable anywhere. And he pioneered guitar sounds that are still admired all these years later, even though the technology for producing them was quite crude by today’s standards (slashing speaker cones to make them sound “dirty”, first generation fuzz boxes, arcane guitar effects like the Echoplex and Univibe).

The band he became famous for fronting, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, consisted of himself and two seasoned jazzmen, Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass. Indeed, it’s difficult to separate his own talent from that of the phenomenal talents of his “sidemen”, both of whom, while being slightly lesser known than Hendrix, have nearly equal status in musician’s circles. Mitchell, in particular, is considered to be one of the greatest of all rock drummers and is certainly responsible for much of the magic of Hendrix’ early albums. Prime examples of this band firing on all cylinders are “Manic Depression”, “Red House” and of course his first big hit “Hey Joe”. None of these are particularly musically complex (“Red House” is in a standard 12 bar blues form), but they are prime examples of what master musicians can do with simple ideas.

These guys were so talented that they would record entire albums with minimal rehearsals, sometimes recording tunes that Hendrix had written the same day. That is a significantly different aesthetic than modern recording techniques, which are far more sophisticated and time consuming. The primitive techniques they used resulted in some timeless music, and didn’t rely on technological gimmickry to sweeten them up.

But to label Hendrix as merely a great guitar player does not really do justice to his multifaceted talents. He was also a first rate songwriter. “Castles Made Of Sand” is a melancholy, somewhat simple song that nonetheless shows of some tastefully understated guitar chops. The chord progression to “Little Wing” is a beautiful example of the ideas that sprang from him, lilting and longing. Though his voice was not particularly good by traditional standards and he used a sort of “speak/sing” technique on most of his work, it was nonetheless expressive and well suited to his compositional ideas.

On later albums such as Electric Ladyland, he toned down the flashy guitar solos and focused more on songwriting and use of recording techniques; although this being Hendrix, flashy guitar work is in abundance.. The result was, predictably, great music. Psychedelia just doesn’t get much better than a song like “In 1983 A Merman I Should Turn To Be”

Hendrix eventually parted ways with Mitchell and Redding and formed a new band, the Band Of Gypsys. While not quite as legendary as the Experience, they were more than capable of backing Hendrix and his music. And my favorite Hendrix tune of all, “Machine Gun”, dates from this era. The song was recorded live and is famous for both its politics (a Vietnam War protest song) and the stuttering palm-muted guitar technique that Hendrix used at the beginning to imitate the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun.

But what really makes it stand out is the guitar solo in the middle. Beginning with a single, sustained note that he holds for a ridiculous length to build suspense, it then carpet bombs everything in its path for the next couple of minutes with liquid napalm. All other electric guitarists before and since are felled by this solo. I hereby proclaim it The Greatest Electric Guitar Solo Of All Time!

You think I’m kidding? No. That’s not hyperbole at all. Okay, maybe the caps were a bit much. But if you really want to know why Hendrix is worshipped by musicians to this day with such reverence, listen to this song and your question will be answered. I get goosebumps just remembering it in my head now. Also, "Machine Gun" is an excellent example of what the aforementioned Univibe effect sounds like.

I still like to pull out some Hendrix once in a while, even though his music, particularly his big hits like “Purple Haze” and “Crosstown Traffic”, has been nearly over played to death on classic rock radio. But he was a genuine rock and roll pioneer. His huge impact on later generations of musicians, including myself, means that it makes no sense to write about great rock guitarists without a hat tip to Hendrix. RIP Jimi.