Just wanted to create a thread on one of the greatest guitar players to ever play and would like to hear people's perspective on Hendrix. What's your favourite song/album, favourite youtube vid, where does he rank in your top guitar player list ect. Personally he is one of the bigger influences for our band and especially our guitar player who wrote this about him:
It is a Wednesday August the 10TH 2011 as I sit at the computer and write. A full 44 years since Jimi Hendrix came back to American soil to sacrifice his guitar at the Monterey Pop festival held in Monterey California on June 18th, 1967. 12 years since a school friend handed me a mixed cassette tape of Hendrix’s music on a hot summer day in Calgary Alberta. I was 15 and had a guitar in my company for about a year already but was ignorant of the possibilities of the instrument. That changed on that hot summer day.
I went home plunked the cassette tape that contained 6 recorded songs and no titles. I was floored at the sonic sounds that emitted from my hand me down Bose speakers. My quest was clear: I would find a way to do that. Like many before me, I became a Hendrix freak – anything and everything Hendrix I needed to find, hear, read and learn. Magazine articles, concert footage, music transcriptions, VHS tapes I acquired studied and digested. Then I would sit for hours with my guitar trying to emote with same gentle ferociousness that Hendrix seemed to just drip effortlessly. I found out right away that there is no way to be Jimi Hendrix, it is simply impossible but it is impossible to be anyone but you. However that doesn’t mean you can’t strive to be in the same league as someone. That is possible and is proven on a world stage time and time again in all fields, be it in art, entertainment, sports, cuisine or everyday life. Greatness or what is perceived to be great can be duplicated it just takes dedication and determination. That is the most important lesson I learned from Hendrix.
Hendrix was my gateway into music; I had always toyed with the idea of learning to play an instrument all through my younger years. I attended many schools and would always try to join the band program but was always told I was too far behind to join the class. They made Music seem like you had to be born right out of the womb plucking a walking bass line on your umbilical cord to even have a chance at being a musician. I also had no reference for music in general, what was good, what was bad, what I would even like. Constantly being blocked I took up drawing instead and didn’t pay much attention to music anymore, even after getting a guitar for my 13th birthday. I was ignorant and with no one to show me the way and not being inspired by the
music being pumped out on the radio and MTV at the time it looked like my minor infatuation with music would fade into the obscurity of my childhood. Good thing I got that cassette tape.
Reading about a young Jimi Hendrix I found out who influenced him. Who inspired him to play guitar. The sum of his parts that he was able to weave together to create his own inimitable sound. Through Hendrix I discovered the Blues, R&B, Soul, Funk, Folk and Rock & Roll. Jimi Hendrix was the friend with the unbelievable record collection that wasn’t around for me in the mid 90’s. With all of my peers and friends being influenced by the present and having no desire to look to the past I was left on my own to discover these works. I listened to the sounds that inspired Hendrix. B.B King, T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Hubert Sumlin, Howlin Wolf, Elvis, Bob Dylan, Buddy Guy – the list is endless. Through listening to these artists I was able to backwards engineer Hendrix’s sound. Once I had accomplished that I was also pleasantly surprised that Hendrix’s peers had the same influences. Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Mike Bloomfield, Peter Green, Johnny Winter – I was able to listen to a chosen player and more readily attack their music while compounding my own progress with more and more influences from other artists. Jeff Beck led me to country Mike Bloomfield to Jazz. However Hendrix is still the seed that the tree of my influences sprang from.
I put out a self funded album of original music with my brothers when I was 23. Going through that process we were able to learn that in today’s age the system that has been in place for an artist to create an album is more and more, by each passing day, falling into the hands of the artist. I think Hendrix would have revelled in the possibilities of today and had this technology been out in his time he maybe still would be with us today. I am now 27 the same age as Hendrix when he left, and finding out that my quest to do that voodoo that Hendrix do is never finished and always beginning in a constant state of ever changing refinement is as much of a welcome surprise as when I first heard the sonic twister of sound pouring out of my hand me down Bose speakers 12 years ago and as the stunned Monterey audience got to experience 44 years ago. Sing on Brother, play on Drummer.
So I will start it off with my favourite song being Cross Town Traffic, favourite album is Axis Bold As Love and my fav youtube vid: