When Jimi Hendrix first performed in London, he blew everyone’s minds – and seemingly every player worth their salt has since claimed to have been there for those changemaking early shows. Eric Clapton was certainly there. And while he recognized Hendrix as a generational talent, he also believed that the guitarist’s original backing band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, was “a mistake.”

Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were three of the hottest guitar players in London when Hendrix arrived on British shores, and the American guitarist quickly found himself at the center of the scene. One of his first performances was an impromptu jam with Cream in October 1966, just days after his arrival.

His introduction to the British music scene quickly became the stuff of legend. Beck has said Hendrix changed the game; Paul McCartney has recalled watching the then-unknown guitarist play to an empty club; and Robert Fripp considered him something more than a mere guitarist.

By the time of his death four years later, Hendrix had released four landmark albums, written some of the most iconic riffs and solos ever committed to tape, and helped kickstart an electric-guitar revolution. Yet Clapton’s assessment of the trajectory of his career makes for interesting reading.

“I think the best I knew him was at the beginning,” Clapton said in a 1973 interview uploaded to YouTube by Quentin Melson.

Upon the recommendation of the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, the Animals’ bass guitarist Chas Chandler became Hendrix’s manager and brought him to London. Chandler had ambitions of creating a backing band that would spotlight Hendrix’s virtuosity while introducing him to a British scene that was becoming increasingly adventurous and technically accomplished.

The result was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, completed by bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. But Clapton didn’t believe the lineup was necessarily the best possible vehicle for Hendrix’s talents.

“I thought it was a bit of a mistake,” he said. “I thought it was a hype really; I felt from the first that he should have had at least an American band, whether they were white or black didn’t matter, as long as they knew the music they were playing.”

Hendrix’s approach to the blues was indeed different from what British audiences – and many British musicians – were accustomed to hearing. But Clapton believed Chandler had assembled the Experience in a hurry.

“I felt that Chas had really just picked up two free musicians who were in the rock field loosely,” Clapton explained. “I think Mitch, before that, was playing with Georgie Fame and was more into the jazz thing,” while Redding had been playing pop and rock in bands including the Loving Kind.

It’s easy to understand why Clapton felt Chandler might have been trying to put square pegs in round holes in a bid to capitalize on Hendrix’s extraordinary talents. But, as Clapton acknowledged, the results quickly spoke for themselves.

“They really got into it very quickly,” he said. “I thought at first that it could have been a better band, or a bigger band. But it worked in the end, obviously. He’d been in London for about a week when he got the Experience together, and he had the whole club on its feet. They couldn’t believe it. He could have been up there on his own; he didn’t need anyone else.”

Hendrix had crossed the Atlantic to make his name after struggling to establish himself in the United States. His early career had included stints backing Little Richard, although his relationships with the singer and other bandleaders were complicated by his growing reputation as a ladies’ man.

Clapton, ultimately, wanted the best for Hendrix because he understood just how high the guitarist’s ceiling was. In that same 1973 interview, he compared Hendrix to Howlin’ Wolf. And years later, he recalled one of the first times he saw the guitarist play.

“We were playing at the London Polytechnic the day Jimi arrived in England, and Chas Chandler brought him to see us,” Clapton told Uncut in 2012. “He got up and played Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’. Even today I don’t know many people who can play that. It’s a very, very tough piece of music. But Jimi did it, and then he put the guitar behind his back, and I thought, ‘My god, this is like Buddy Guy on acid.’”

Hendrix’s dazzling showmanship actually scuppered Clapton’s plans for a “solo odyssey,” forcing him to focus instead on life in a band.

Yet while Beck was reportedly so overwhelmed by Hendrix’s arrival that he briefly considered retiring, Clapton’s response was far less apocalyptic.

“I fell in love with him,” he said. “I think Ginger [Baker] and Jack [Bruce] felt threatened because they could see he was going to corner the market, for sure. But I felt an incredible sense of relief that there was somebody else on the planet who was as devoted to that music as I was. Of course, he was a showman. But he knew what the blues was about.”

Hendrix would ultimately become the barometer against which trailblazing guitar playing was measured. Leslie West, for example, said he knew he was onto something with Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” when the song won Hendrix’s approval.

Maybe Chandler simply got lucky with the band he assembled. Or perhaps Hendrix was destined for success with just about any musicians behind him. Either way, Clapton’s early doubts about the Experience didn’t diminish his awe at the man at its center.

“He could have been up there on his own,” he said. “He didn’t need anyone else.”

Billy Gibbons was just 19 when Jimi Hendrix famously called him America’s best young guitar player. It was a compliment that carried enormous weight. But by then, Gibbons had already earned Hendrix’s respect.

The pair first met in 1968, when Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top band, the Moving Sidewalks, landed the opening slot on a U.S. tour by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Looking back, Gibbons still isn’t sure how the young Texas psychedelic-blues outfit got the gig.

“It’s a great mystery,” he told AXS TV.

What wasn’t a mystery was Hendrix’s impact.

“We had only recently discovered Jimi Hendrix, and we quickly came to learn that here was a guy who was doing things with the Fender Stratocaster that was turning it inside out in ways the inventors never even imagined,” Gibbons recalled with a laugh.

Offstage, Hendrix was reserved. Onstage, he was transformative.

“He was a bit shy offstage, but once the lights went on, he came a-glowing,” Gibbons said. “And man, he would set about doing things with that guitar that were just otherworldly.”

For the Moving Sidewalks, every night on tour became a masterclass. The relationship took an unexpected turn when the band realized it didn’t have enough original material to fill its 40-minute opening set. Their solution was audacious: play two Hendrix songs — “Purple Haze” and “Foxey Lady” — in front of Hendrix himself.

“Dare we play this in front of Hendrix?” Gibbons remembered asking his bandmates.

The gamble paid off.

“As we wrapped it up, I remembered passing by, being spun around, and this guy grabbed me by the shoulders, and smiling, he said, ‘Man, I wanna meet you. You got a lot of nerve. I like that.’”

By the end of the tour, the musicians were spending evenings together in Hendrix’s hotel room, listening to records and talking guitars. During one listening session, Hendrix reportedly asked Gibbons how Jeff Beck produced some of the sounds heard on the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth.

Gibbons’ answer put Hendrix’s influence into perspective.

“Jimi, it would probably surprise you to know that Jeff Beck is probably listening to your record, trying to figure out what you’re doing at the same time!”

The lessons Gibbons absorbed during that tour stayed with him long after Hendrix’s death in 1970. In fact, one of Hendrix’s guitars helped shape a key ZZ Top recording nearly a decade later.

“When we recorded that song, I was playing the Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix gave me when we were traveling together,” Gibbons told Music Radar of ZZ Top’s “A Fool for Your Stockings.” “For some reason, the guitar wasn’t working through the amp. We wound up plugging the guitar straight into the board, and that’s why it’s such a clean tone on that track.”

Hendrix’s influence extended beyond gear. The Experience’s three-piece format helped inspire ZZ Top’s own lineup, though Gibbons later admitted it took years for the band to find an identity beyond the blues tradition Hendrix had so radically expanded.

Even today, the Strat Hendrix gave him remains part of Gibbons’ arsenal. Speaking to Premiere Collectibles in 2020, he revealed that the guitar “still gets a good whoopin’ in the studio every once in a while.”

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first encounter with Jimi Hendrix didn’t come from some carefully curated record collection or a mentor’s recommendation. It came out of a trash bin.

As Vaughan recalled to Guitar Player in 1989, his brother Jimmie returned from a gig in Dallas one night with a discarded Hendrix album he’d found behind a club.

“The first time | ever heard Jimi’s name was when my brother brought home a record of his. | guess it was around '67, and Jimmie had found it in a trash bin. He recognized it because he'd seen a short paragraph about Jimi Hendrix in a magazine, and he knew he was supposed to be something really happening.”

“He put it on the record player, and what could you do but say ‘Yeah!’” Stevie laughed. “It really knocked my socks off.”

At the time, Vaughan was still a teenager — barely 15 — and like so many of his generation, he learned guitar the hard way: by listening repeatedly until the music gave up its secrets. Hendrix’s records became a private master class in his room.

“I remember getting my little stereo — an Airline with the cardboard satellite speakers — and I would mic that up with a Shure PA that I had in my bedroom.

“For some of my first gigs, I’d rent four separate reverbs, and I’d have all this set up in my room. Of course, the parents were at work. I would go in there and floorboard it—dress up as cool as I could and try to learn his stuff.”

No instruction — just repetition, obsession, and a willingness to chase every nuance of the music on his electric guitar.

But Hendrix wasn’t just another technical hurdle. For Vaughan, he was proof that the blues could be something larger.

By the time SRV was famous and speaking publicly about Hendrix, he was pushing back against the idea that his music was untouchable. In his view, Hendrix wasn’t an outsider to the blues tradition — he was one of its most radical extensions.

“Some people don’t see that Jimi Hendrix was a blues player,” he said. “I hear it in the way he approaches things. Even though he wasn’t ashamed at all of doing some things differently, I still hear the roots of the old style.”

That perspective carried directly into SRV’s playing. Hendrix material wasn’t something he kept at arm’s length; it was part of his live arsenal. And he never treated that decision as controversial.

“For some reason, there seems to be a thing about it being sacrilegious to play Jimi Hendrix’s music. I think he would call bullshit on that,” he said from a London limo in 1988. “I may be wrong, but it seems he would want his music to be out there, just as accessible as anyone else’s.

“Hendrix was not scared to take [his] influences and incorporate them into his music,” he added. “Now, some people look at that as ripping people off. If it’s added to, and it comes out as yourself… it’s still got a new bite to it.”

Which is exactly what SRV did throughout his career. He honored Hendrix while cutting his own path as he stunned both David Bowie and Eric Johnson, and left Jeff Beck to compare him to his old friend Jimi.

Fittingly, Hendrix never left Stevie’s setlist. Vaughan’s final live performance closed with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” a full-circle moment that underscored how deeply the connection ran.

The estates of Jimi Hendrix’s former Experience bandmates have lost a lawsuit seeking back royalties for their work on his recordings, after a High Court judge ruled that the relevant recording agreements clearly assigned copyright to the producers.

Bass guitarist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience with Hendrix in 1966. The trio went on to perform on Hendrix’s first three albums — Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland — as well as a range of singles and non-album tracks that helped define the electric guitarist’s breakthrough career.

The lawsuit, brought against Sony Music Entertainment UK, alleged that Redding and Mitchell were excluded from royalties during their lifetimes and “died in relative poverty,” despite the continued commercial success of Hendrix’s catalog. It further claimed that their successors were entitled to a share of ongoing revenues but had been excluded by the administrators of Hendrix’s estate.

Redding died in 2003 at age 57, and Mitchell died in 2008 at age 62.

Sony Music’s legal team argued that under the original recording agreements, copyright in the master recordings was held by the producers rather than the performing musicians.

The High Court of Justice rejected the estates’ claim. In a ruling issued April 28, Mr Justice Johnson said the contractual language was “clear and unequivocal.”

“The producers and the band members agreed that the producers would have the copyright throughout the world in the recordings,” he said. “There was no temporal or territorial limitation to this agreement.”

In the ruling, the court effectively upheld Sony’s interpretation of the agreements, finding that the contractual terms governed ownership of the recordings and left no scope for the claims advanced by the estates.

Following the decision, Janie Hendrix, sister of the late guitarist and chief executive of Experience Hendrix, said she had “nothing but positive memories of Noel and Mitch.”

“Experience Hendrix’s longstanding relationships with both reflect a consistent commitment to honoring and supporting the musicians who were part of Jimi Hendrix’s history,” she said.

The case also underscores the stark contrast between Hendrix’s financial position at the time of his death and the subsequent value of his catalog. When the electric guitar innovator died in 1970 at age 27, he reportedly had around $20,000 in his bank account and outstanding debts. Today, his estate is estimated to be worth more than $175 million, driven by ongoing royalties, licensing and merchandising.

At the start of 1969, Jimi Hendrix was not a regular fixture on British television. In fact, his last appearance had come more than a year earlier, on August 24, 1967, when the electric guitar trailblazer made his fourth and final turn on Top of the Pops.

So when it was announced that Hendrix and the Experience would perform live on the January 4 edition of Happening for Lulu, anticipation ran high. The program, hosted by Scottish pop star Lulu — then best known in the U.S. for her 1966 hit “To Sir, With Love” — was hardly an obvious platform for one of rock’s most unpredictable acts. That mismatch would prove decisive.

The booking would result in Hendrix’s final appearance on British TV — and one of the most notorious. By the end of the broadcast, he had effectively ensured he wouldn’t be invited back.

The flashpoint came in the form of an unscripted tribute to Cream, the then-recently dissolved power trio featuring Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker.

Hendrix opened with a blistering, wah-drenched take on “Voodoo Chile,” then moved into “Hey Joe,” the song that had introduced him on record in late 1966. According to bass guitarist Noel Redding, producers had proposed bringing Lulu back onstage to share the final verse — an idea the band rejected outright.

Instead, just as the performance seemed to be concluding, Hendrix abruptly derailed the format.

“Well, let’s stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to Cream,” he told the audience. “Regardless of what group they might be, I’d like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.”

With that, the Experience launched into an impromptu version of “Sunshine of Your Love.” It was loose, loud and — crucially — far longer than the show’s tightly controlled running time allowed. Producers made the decision to cut the show off in the middle of the performance, rather than run past their allotted time.

For the BBC, it was a breach of protocol they didn’t take lightly. Hendrix was subsequently barred from further appearances on BBC television and effectively shut out of its radio platforms.

He would die less than two years later, in September 1970, making the Lulu broadcast both his last British TV performance and a fitting encapsulation of his refusal to be contained by format, expectation or authority.

Looking back, Lulu has suggested the incident did more to enhance Hendrix’s legend than diminish it. Speaking years later, she recalled that the ban only amplified his appeal: the sense that anything might happen when he picked up a guitar — even, or especially, on live television.

“They wouldn’ta play him on the radio, then they wouldn’t put him on any television shows,” she recounted incorrectly, “but I think it made him more popular than ever.”

Others have framed Hendrix’s impact in similarly seismic terms. Jeff Beck would later say his arrival fundamentally reshaped the instrument’s possibilities, while Joe Walsh has ranked him alongside Beck and Clapton when naming the greatest guitar soloists — a measure of how enduring that brief, chaotic TV moment has proven to be.

In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the late Duane Allman as the second greatest guitarist of all time, bested only by Jimi Hendrix. Decades earlier, Hendrix's music had inspired the guitarist to go in a new direction, and it would define the rest of his tragically short-lived career.

The story comes from folk guitarist Jeff Hanna, who first discovered Allman’s talents when he and his brother Gregg were plying their trade as Allman Joys. For a while, Hanna — a cofounder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — lived with the brothers during a brief stay in Nashville, and later that year, when the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first album was released, Allman began a journey that would take him down a new musical path.

“Duane was the first electric guitar guy I ever knew because I was an acoustic folky guy,” Hanna says in conversation with Otis Gibbs. “He played a Telecaster with a Strat neck at the time, and it had a fuzz box, I think it was a Fuzz Face, inside the guitar. He could sit in a room and play, not plugged in, and it was spellbinding. He was that good.”

However, he says the band didn't amplify his guitar playing in the right light, which is perhaps why the freedom of Hendrix's power trio arrested him as it did.

After a while of living together, he says that Duane Allman grew tired of their communal living situation and sourced his own apartment with Dirt Band drummer, Jimmy Fadden. Hanna was a frequent visitor.

“We were sitting in Duane’s apartment,” he recounts. “Are You Experienced had just come out, and we're all just going deep in marijuana. And I think we were there for, like, two days just getting stoned to listen to this record.

“After about the fourth or fifth playing of this album, Duane's got this little stinky amp and a Strat, and I'm going, ‘Well, that's not Jimi playing.’ It was Duane playing that stuff back at us, and we're all just going, ‘Damn.’”

It was a moment that exemplified just how special the guitarist’s talents were. And just like how seeing Buddy Guy’s trio play in London inspired Eric Clapton to leave the Bluesbreakers and form Cream, Are You Experienced inspired Allman to form his own trio.

“He said, ‘Guess what I'm doing? I'm going to leave. I'm going to get a trio together!’ And he's just killing it, man. That was pretty ballsy to be playing the record, first off, and then saying ‘I can do that’ [laughs]. He loved Hendrix.”

However, unlike Clapton on the other side of the Atlantic, Allman’s trio dreams never quite materialized. In 2007, Dickey Betts told Guitar World that the trio — which included future Allman Brothers Band members Berry Oakley on bass, and Jai Johanny "Jaimoe" Johanson on drums — even secured a record deal with Atlantic, with early recordings captured at Muscle Shoals.

“Their group was supposed to be a power trio, like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream,” he explains. “But Duane had to sing, and Jaimoe doesn’t play drums in that style at all.

“Berry brought back some demos of the stuff they were doing, and even though it was good, they weren’t going to be able to stand up next to Hendrix and guys like that.”

Allman instead found his calling in the much more expansive instrumentation of the Allman Brothers Band, carving his name into southern and blues rock folklore in the process.

Indeed, Betts once said he hated having to tackle Duane Allman’s slide parts, but knew he had to persevere if his band, continuing after he died in 1971, was going to honor him in the right way.

Later, his connection to Clapton became far more literal as he starred on Derek and the Dominos' only album, forming a remarkable partnership with Slowhand that embodied the blues tradition.

And elsewhere, Derek Trucks, who would become part of the Allman Brothers Band lineage years later, has named the slide player who was just as influential as Duane in making him a better slide guitar player.

Jimi Hendrix's bandmates signed away their rights to the music they created with the guitarist. But that hasn't stopped their estates from attempting to sue Sony Music Entertainment U.K. (SMEUK) over lost revenue.

Now London's High Court has cleared the way for their suit to commence.

The complaint states that bass guitarist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell have been “consistently excluded” from royalty payments over the years. Sony counters that both artists relinquished their right to the work in the 1970s — Redding earned $100,000, while Mitchell received $247,000 — which excludes them from further revenue shares.

Prior to Hendrix's death, the guitarist took 50 percent of the band's royalties, with Redding and Mitchell splitting the rest evenly. In forfeiting their rights to the work, the two musicians signed away their right to file future lawsuits. Their estates are seeking a royalty share in line with the group’s original split.

Hendrix, Redding, and Mitchell formed the Experience in the late 1960s as the virtuoso guitarist pivoted away from his session player days, which included stints with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers.

Together they produced three albums — Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968) — before Hendrix formed Band of Gypsys with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles.

Despite their success, Redding and MItchell died in “relative poverty” says Simon Malynicz KC, a specialist copyright lawyer who is representing the artists' estates.

Malynicz accuses Sony of being “a major multinational which refuses to recognize or remunerate their copyright and performers’ rights.”

He is fighting, he says, to “ensure not only that justice is done to the memory of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, but it can also give effect to James Marshall Hendrix’s wishes.”

“Surely,” he argues, Jimi Hendrix, ”would have wanted his fellow musicians to receive everything to which they are entitled.”

Representing Sony, Robert Howe says the copyright for the group's’ three albums belongs to the producers, not the musicians, and adds that Redding and Mitchell had relinquished their rights to earnings when they sold their share of the rights in the 1970s.

He says neither artist prevented Hendrix’s estate from using their recordings in various ways while they were still alive. However, Redding threatened to sue for £3.26 million in lost earnings shortly before his death in 2003. Mitchell died in 2008

The Hendrix catalog has proved extremely profitable in the decades since it was created. Earnings have come through reissues, licensing and streaming, the latter of which did not exist until the mid 1990s via internet services. Today, streaming is the dominant format globally for music consumption.

A look at Spotify shows that the group's most-streamed song is "All Along the Watchtower," which has racked up over 827 million streams. With Spotify paying out roughly $0.003 per stream, the song may have generated as much as $2.48 million in revenue since Spotify launched in October 2008, just a month before Mitchell’s death.

Last year, London’s High Court ruled that the lawsuit could be filed despite the duo signing away their rights more than 50 years ago.

“No one is denying that Jimi Hendrix was one of, if not the, greatest guitarist of all time.” said Lawrence Abramson (via the Guardian), the lawyer who initiated the action by sending a cease-and-desist letter to Sony in late 2021. “But he didn’t make his recordings alone, and they could not have achieved any success without the contributions of Noel and Mitch.”

The case is expected to run until 18 December, with a written judgement to come some time after its conclusion.

Eric Clapton earned the moniker "God" with a Gibson Les Paul Standard in his hands. It was his guitar of choice during his mid-1960s stint with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, and the Gibson brand remained close to his heart as he transitioned into Cream and began playing a Gibson SG alongside a Cherry Red ES-335 and a Firebird.

But glance through Slowhand's early solo catalog and you'll find him make a decisive shift to the Fender Stratocaster in 1970. There's one right there — his "Brownie" Strat — between his legs on the cover of his self-titled solo debut from that year, and it's there again on the back cover of Derek and the Dominos' Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

You might think Jimi Hendrix was responsible for that shift. After all, Clapton was, like many of his peers, enamored of Hendrix and his flamboyant style.

But in fact it was Steve Winwood — Clapton's Blind Faith bandmate — who led him from Gibson to Fender, simply by showing up onstage with a Strat hanging from his shoulders.

Without a doubt, Clapton's affinity with the Les Paul ran deep. His Les Paul Standard had a starring role on the back cover of the Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton album, helping to secure that model's place as a desirable and highly collectible vintage guitar. (His triple-humbucker 1958 Gibson Les Paul Custom meanwhile, which is now in the possession of Albert Lee, has a smorgasbord of its own stories to tell.)

Yet is was Winwood's influence that led him to the more workmanlike Strat.

But why Winwood? In the late 1960s, he had established himself as a talented singer, keyboard player and guitarist before he was out of his teens. His work with a pair of influential bands — the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic — had made him a star and brought him to the attention of notables like Hendrix, who recruited the then 19-year-old multi-instrumentalist to play organ on "Voodoo Chile," on Electric Ladyland.

He was on Clapton's radar as well, and he took note of Winwood's guitar of choice: the Fender Stratocaster.

“I saw Steve Winwood playing one, and something about that really did it for me," Clapton told Guitar World in 1994. "I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.

“I went to see him at the Marquee in London, and he was playing a white-necked Strat, and there was something about it.”

Traffic played the Marquee a few times in 1968, and it's likely that this is when Clapton saw the now 20-year-old performer using a Strat.

Clapton and Winwood connected to form Blind Faith in 1969, but the guitarist hadn't yet moved fully away from his Gibsons. Although he played a Fender Telecaster — the model he mostly played during his tenure with the Yardbirds — at Blind Faith's concert in London's Hyde Park on June 7, 1969, he didn't make the switch to his "Brownie" Strat until early 1970, when he began performing with Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, who in turn supported him on Eric Clapton.

But while Brownie figured in the Derek and the Dominos sessions, Clapton wouldn't become a committed Strat player until after the death of Jimi Hendrix in September 1970. Hendrix's impact on the British blues scene was monumental and deeply affected the careers of Clapton, it Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend.

As Clapton detailed in a 1994 interview with Guitar World, the virtuoso’s passing made him consider the Stratocaster in a deeper way.

"Once he wasn’t there any more, I felt like there was room to pick it up," he said.

It was shortly after Hendrix's death, while the Dominos were touring, that Clapton went all in.

“I was in Nashville and I went into this shop called Sho-Bud where they had stacks of Fender Strats going for virtually nothing because they were so unfashionable and unwanted,” he told MusicRadar in 1994.

“I bought a big pile of them all for a song — they were really cheap, like $300 or $400 each — and I took them home and gave them out. I gave Steve [Winwood] one, I gave Pete Townshend one, I gave George Harrison one and I kept a few, and I made Blackie out of a group of them.

“I took the pickups out of one, the scratchplate off another, the neck off another and I made my own guitar, like a hybrid guitar that had all the best bits from all these Strats.”

Clapton would go on to wield Blackie for much of his solo career, including at his iconic Live-Aid performance, until it was time to retire it. “Yeah, I wore it out," he told Music Radar. "It’s pretty well inaccessible now.”

In related news, Martin Guitars, meanwhile, has reissued the acoustic he used for his MTV Unplugged performance which helped change the luthier’s fortunes. There's also a cheaper version for those who can't afford the $10,000 asking price.

Billy Gibbons was 20 years old when he formed ZZ Top, and the power trio has defined his life ever since. With the dawn of the ‘70s just over the horizon, Gibbons had shaped his band around two of his biggest influences ± Cream and Jimi Hendrix — in 1969, and his legacy might not still be being talked about today if it weren’t for the way they inspired the bright-eyed guitarist.

“Make no mistake, ZZ Top didn’t just happen upon becoming a trio because it was easier; it’s a lot more challenging,” he tells Classic Rock of the band’s origins. “Hendrix and Cream were at the top of the chart as far as ZZ Top’s book was concerned, and it was through those early influential days of attempting to emulate those sounds and styles that brought us together.”

The band’s foundations were laid while he was still strutting his stuff in his pre-ZZ outfit, Moving Sidewalks. Before the British blues explosion had properly ignited, Gibbons was turned on by the psychedelic sounds of Roky Erikson’s 13th Floor Elevators, molding a very similar sound. Their less-than-subtle nod of a single, "99th Floor," paved the way for a change-making touring opportunity.

“That release led to additional airplay and touring opportunities, including teaming up with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, who became our friends and mentors,” he told Guitar Player last year. “As I remember it, I played a Fender Jazzmaster through a Vox Super Beatle, and a Hohner harp through a Fender Bassman.”

Seeing Hendrix up close sparked something in Gibbons. It’s an experience he relives with CR.

“We toured with him in 1968. It was a real mind-bender and eye-opener, to say the least,” he remembers. “As most now know, Jimi Hendrix, either consciously or subconsciously, made a decision to invent things to do with a Fender Stratocaster that it had not necessarily been intended for. He did it very well, too.

“I was 18 at the time,” he details, “and somehow the organizers saw fit to book us in the hotel room across the hall to his room. That was convenient to ask him the obvious question: ‘How do you do that?’

“I remember that this was a long time before hotels had stereos in their rooms, and each day there would be the delivery of a rather heavy and cumbersome hi-fi console player that was the size of a small Buick. It was dutifully installed for Hendrix to be able to listen to his favorite discs.

“The one I really remember him playing the ass off,” Gibbons goes on, “was the first Jeff Beck Group album, Truth. Hendrix was mad about it, totally OTT [over the top] about Jeff’s playing.”

There’s a strange bittersweet irony in Hendrix’s Beck obsession. In search of a more receptive audience, he soon traveled to the UK and proceeded to blow everyone who laid eyes and ears on him away. So much so that Beck, a man who the guitarist was humbly obsessed with, considered quitting the business entirely.

“Oddly enough, Hendrix was all too willing and ready to include blues licks in his arsenal of guitar offerings, which had fallen out of favor in the States with most black entertainers,” Gibbons adds. “I got to play onstage with him at the time, but it was what went on behind the scenes that really captured the magic of the moment.”

And so, by the time the Moving Sidewalks disbanded a year later, Cream were at the height of their powers, and Hendrix was making serious waves on the other side of the Atlantic. Gibbons was keen to channel some of that energy into his new endeavor, with the things he learned from his hangs, on and of the stage, with Hendrix stuffed tightly into his back pocket.

Eric Clapton’s ZZ Top legacy can be seen slung around Gibbons’ shoulder every time he steps on stage; his ‘59 ‘Pearly Gates’ Les Paul. Seeing Clapton’s Sunburst Gibson Les Paul on the back cover of his Bluesbreakers record prompted him to track down the out-of-production guitar and own one for himself.

He too had taken a leaf out of Clapton’s book and decided to grow his fingernails, and that left its mark on his beloved electric guitar.

“What I hadn’t counted on was that the fingernail of the little finger started digging into the pickguard, leaving scratches,” he says.

Today, the Reverend is still going strong and says new music from ZZ Top – the first since bassist Dusty Hill’s passing – and his solo project, the BFGs is on the way. Without Hendrix and Cream’s influence, Gibbons may have never hopped off the psychedelic rock train and be the man that is so celebrated today.

Ozzy Osbourne made a bold decision when he hired a then-unknown Zakk Wylde as his third permanent guitar player in 1987, but there was method to his madness.

Randy Rhoads' fiery talents helped launch Ozzy's post-Sabbath career, presenting the world with a brand-new guitar hero in the process. Bassist Bob Daisley said he instantly knew Rhoads was destined for greatness after their first jam together. Such greatness, though, was ultimately cut short when Rhoads passed following a plane crash in ‘82.

Jake E. Lee, hisi successor, had previously established himself with Ratt and Rough Cutt. He never caught on with fans in the way Rhoads did, even though Lee believes he and Rhoads out-gunned one another in different aspects of their playing.

After two records, Lee departed the band, and competition for the vacant spot was fierce. Neoclassical shredder Chris Impellitteri — then at the height of his powers — auditioned, but Ozzy took a shot in the dark when he offered a 20-year-old Wylde the gig instead. It would prove to be a magical pairing, similar in many ways to what the singer enjoyed with Rhoads.

Indeed, Wylde not only became a veritable guitar hero to millions — he also helped Ozzy write some of his biggest hits, starting with his very first attempt.

“The first riff I wrote for Ozz was 'Miracle Man,' ” the guitarist says on his YouTube channel. “And I got the fingering from 'Foxey Lady.' And that's how that came about, just from messing around with it.

"Like everybody always says, something comes from somewhere. And Jimi Hendrix probably would have said, 'Yeah, Zakk, I got that from this thing.'"

As Zakk has explained, in addition to playing his riff faster, he added "some 16th notes and some Marshall chunk, and next thing you know it’s 'Miracle Man.'" Played in Eb standard (half a step down), the riff relies on chugged bass notes on the low E string, and a variety of double- and triple-stops on the higher strings, much like "Foxey Lady." It gives the riff a greater dynamic and octave-spanning range.

Beyond that, as Zakk's recent chat with Guitar Player attests, was a deep-set appreciation for the talents that came before him and whose legacy he was continuing to honor.

“I’m obviously aware of some of the great rhythm guitar parts that have been laid down in the past, like Jake E. Lee’s work on 'Bark at the Moon' and Randy Rhoads’ on 'Crazy Train,' ” he says. “Those songs are part of my education as a guitarist. If I’m learning covers, I’m going to nail those rhythm parts or else I’m not really playing the song.”

The way Wylde attacks "Miracle Man" with the almost galloping rhythms is instantly reminiscent of the main riff to "Bark at the Moon" and the chunky verse riff in "Crazy Train."

“It’s like a cocktail or a new dish,” the guitarist says. “You use the ingredients that you have on hand to mix up something new that’s your own. I felt like my job as Ozzy’s guitarist was to bring something that held all the elements of the song together the way those parts did. All the things I absorbed like a sponge found their way into my own playing.

“The 16th-notes rhythm guitar part was informed by my ability to play those rhythm lines from Randy and Jake,” Wylde continues. “I’m pouring little elements of a whole bunch of things into the mix and coming up with something new that I probably wouldn’t have created if I hadn’t spent the time working out what those great players had done.”

The song, which Ozzy and Zakk co-wrote with Bob Daisley, pokes fun at televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who blamed the 1985 suicide of a teenager Ozzy fan on the singer’s depravity. Swaggart was later caught with a prostitute and confessed to a pornography addiction that saw him rightly branded as a hypocrite.

The song’s music video took Wylde and company to a U.K. cathedral, with Ozzy dressed as a televangelist and surrounded by pigs for what was a fairly transparent narrative. However, while the guitar world would fall in love with Ozzy’s new plucked-from-out-of-nowhere guitarist, the pigs were less enamored by his noise-making.

“When the music went on, the pigs all took a massive shit at the same time, because it was so loud in there,” Ozzy recalls. “The playback started and they all went pfft! Sixty pigs shitting! I had a pair of brand-new suede boots on, and I never wore them again. I couldn't get the smell out of them!”

Wylde, who has capitalized on Ozzy's retirement from touring to join Pantera, has played on six of the Prince of Darkness’ studio albums. That includes 1995’s Ozzmosis, which included writing contributions from Steve Vai, and 2022's Patient Number 9, on which Jeff Beck made two standout guest appearances.

Wylde would leave the band on a number of occasions, one of which provided Alex Skolnick the opportunity to take his place, although his stint lasted just one show.

Meanwhile, Wylde has hit out at those who have criticized his picking technique, citing two greats who defied convention with their oddball methods.

Vernon Reid spent time away from the dinner table this Thanksgiving to revisit Jimi Hendrix’s back catalog. Since then, he's come to the defense of a song he feels doesn’t get the plaudits it deserves.

While Hendrix tracks like of "Purple Haze," "Voodoo Child" and his astonishing cover of "All Along the Watchtower" — complete with one of rock’s most iconic solos —routinely earn accolades, Reid says one song from his catalog shows Jimi's relevance beyond his guitar talents.

“'Manic Depression' doesn’t get nearly enough respect for what a groundbreaking song it STILL is,” the guitarist wrote on X.

“It describes struggles with mental illness directly, not via metaphor. It was unprecedented in rock history. It laid a roadmap for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to expand upon.”

Reid's point is especially relevant given the norms of the era in which Hendrix wrote the song. The subject of men's mental health was rarely breached when Hendrix and the Experience released the song on their seminal album, 1967's Are You Experienced. Today, pop stars are much more quick to express their vulnerabilities.

In that respect, Reid sees Hendrix as a trailblazer who did more beyond what he achieved with a Fender Stratocaster.

The Living Colour guitarist said he also sees signs of Jimi's emotional expression in "The Wind Cries Mary," which he considers "one of the greatest meditations on the nature of grief and loss ever written.

“The way it spares no one. ‘Somewhere, a Queen is weeping. Somewhere, a King has no, Wife’. The tiny pause between ‘no’ and ‘wife’? That’s where his Mom goes.”

Hendrix's mother, Lucille, was largely absent from his childhood. His parents divorced when he was nine, and the court placed him and his brother, Leon, in the custody of their father, Al. Jimi would reference Lucille in other songs, such as 1971's posthumously released "Angel."

Continuing his Hendrix love-in, Reid has since added that "Red House" proves “that Hendrix was an R&B guitarist, as much as a blues player,” and that “ 'Wait Until Tomorrow’s flawless guitar parts would’ve been equally at home at Stax, Atlantic, or Motown” record labels.

Reid recently teamed up with Reverend Guitars for a brand-new series of signature guitars. The collection comprises three models united by their trio of custom-voiced Railhammer humbucking pickups, Floyd Rose 1000 tremolos and pin-lock tuners, but offering three very distinctive finishes

The collaboration was first teased back in April via Instagram, where Reid said, “It's gonna be a stunner.”

Speaking to Guitar Player in October, Reid explained how a simple error resulted in his greatest guitar find. He says that after a paperwork mix-up led to a price, that “wasn’t too bad” quickly becoming a whole lot better.

Jimi Hendrix was well into his recording career when he sat down for this interview with Guitar Player, which appeared in the magazine’s December 1968 issue. The magazine was just two years old at the time and still finding its way in the new world it had created for the guitar community. No author’s name appears on the article, and the writer makes no effort to place Hendrix’s career in context by mentioning his albums or titles released up to that time.

Still, the interview makes for fascinating retrospective reading. Jimi offers a window into his frustrations with the Experience — bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell — and his difficulties with the Fender Stratocaster, his electric guitar of choice, while he shares insights into his creative process. It's worth remembering that, at this point, few U.S. readers would have known much about Jimi, let alone his approach to guitar playing and songwriting. Decades on, it remains vital reading.

When Jimi Hendrix plays, the house comes down. It doesn't fall in small pieces but in chunks, and the whole place topples on the audience, but it doesn't touch them because he's got them flying up there with him somewhere. That's the way it was at Winterland in San Francisco when we interviewed Jimi Hendrix. That's the way he makes it.

"All my songs happen on the spur of the moment," he says, and he's not handing you a line — you know he's leveling with you. So you ask him if he has to compensate for this spontaneity by using gimmicks.

"On some records you hear all this clash and bang and fanciness, but all we're doing is laying down the guitar tracks and then we echo here and there, but we're not adding false electronic things. We use the same thing anyone else would, but we use it with imagination and common sense. Like ‘House Burning Down’ — we made the guitar sound like it was on fire. It's constantly changing dimensions, and up on top that lead guitar is cutting through everything."

He tells you his most important thing is to communicate with the audience, to communicate with them honestly. His stage presence is usually expected to be sort of obscene, with lots of gesturing, but this is not true most of the time. Jimi's presence is always cool, and he lets his emotions come through strong. At times he has turned his back on the audience — if that's the way he really felt. "When I don't say 'thank you,' or I turn my back to the audience, it's not against them, I'm just doing that to get a certain thing out. I might be uptight about the guitar being out of tune or something. Things have to go through me and I have to show my feelings as soon as they're there."

One problem Jimi has is that his instruments won't hold up. “Like these two guitars I have now, they've been around for a while and they just don't stay in tune. They might slip out of tune a bit right in the middle of the song, and I'll have to start. fighting to get it back in tune. We tune up between every song because it's not a Flash Gordon show — everything all neat and rehearsed — it's not one of those kind of things. It's important for us to get our music across the best way we can. It means we have to do it natural, like tuning up before songs."

He tells you about the trio, about working with Mitch Mitchell the drummer and Noel Redding on bass, and how tough it gets sometimes. "Sometimes they might want to tell me something and I might not be able to understand, and it gets frustrating. Anytime you make a song, you want your own personal thing in it as well as the group. We don't compromise with each other very much, you know. Like one guy thinks one thing and he's going to stick with that one thing, so he does it the way he wants it."

Jimi admits the trio doesn't do much practicing. "Most of our practice is thinking about it. They might hear the same tune I have, so they throw it around in their minds and picture the fingerboard. So then, when we go to the studios and I give them a rough idea, maybe Mitch and I will lay a track down completely by ourselves and then add the rest. As far as jamming out here on a show... we try to listen to each other.

"I just keep my music in my head. It doesn't even come out to the other guys until we go to the studio. Sometimes, if I have a new song, or if the guys want to take a vacation or something like that, maybe I'll go to the studio by myself and have an acid tape made and have a rough idea about the drums, guitar, bass and vocal. Then, other times, I'll just come in banging away on the guitar and be singing and say this is a new song. We try to put our own self into it no matter what song we play."

That's how he feels about Jimi Hendrix, but how does a musician look at other musicians?

"When I see a group I look for feeling, not the jump-around kind of feeling... and then I look for togetherness, a communication between the musicians. Originality comes about fourth or fifth."

The night we talked with Jimi Hendrix it was the second anniversary of the trio. Jimi himself was born in Seattle, Washington, 21 years ago. He left school early to join the Army Airborne. "I've played with millions of groups, played behind cats who are making it now."

Jimi feels that those who influenced him while he was trying to make it were Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Eddie Cochran and B. B. King among others. But Jimi's style is not a mixture of the past, it is something which comes out of himself. "I write songs to release frustration. I like to play lead sometimes so I can express myself. But the way I play lead is a raw type of way. It comes to you naturally."

The way Jimi Hendrix plays may be natural for Jimi Hendrix, but it's the opposite of most other guitarists. He plays a backwards/upside-down guitar, holding the neck in his right hand and playing with the bass strings on the bottom and the high strings on the top of the guitar.

Jimi mostly uses a Stratocaster with Fender light-gauge guitar strings. He also has two Gibsons. "Some of the tracks on our new LP have a Gibson on them." [Jimi would have been referring to Electric Ladyland, which came out in October 1968.] He uses Sunn guitar amps. "It doesn't make any difference what size the amps are as long as I know I have it. I'm not necessarily trying to be loud; I'm just trying to get this impact. I don't like to use mics. To get the right sound it's a combination of both amp and fretting."

He uses light-gauge strings because he doesn't like them to scratch the board too much. Jimi feels it's important not to have a closed mind to new things that are happening. "You can't just get stuck up on guitar; you have to use a little bit of imagination and break away. There's millions of other kinds of instruments. There's horns, guitars, everything. Music is getting better and better, but the idea now is not to get as complicated as you can, but to get as much of yourself into it as you can.

"Music has to go places. We'll squeeze as much as we really feel out of a three-piece group, but things happen naturally. We've got about four tracks that we haven't released yet. One has a very simple rhythm with a funky horn pattern in it, and a tiny bit of echo to make the horn sharper. It happens naturally, like when you hear something you might want to use strings with. But we haven't been able to get these things together because we've been on tour."

You see that there's not much more to ask him, except maybe, that old cliche about what can he say to guys who are still out there trying to make it . . .

"It's pretty hard to give advice, but if these guys have really gotten into it and everyone —mothers and friends — have said 'Wow,' then they should try to get in touch with a major musician or have a representative of a record company come to one of their gigs. But tell them it's best not to sign anything too soon. Tell them to get some lawyers. Managers may not know it all, and a lawyer knows what's right."

"You have to stick with it," he says, "Sometimes you are going to be so frustrated you want to give up the guitar you'll hate the guitar. But all of this is just a part of learning, because if you stick with it you're going to be rewarded."

Experience Hendrix have released a new short documentary (just under 13 minutes long), that captures the story of the time, in 1967, that the Jimi Hendrix Experience opened for the Monkees across the USA.

Although Monkees drummer Micky Dolenz was a fan of Hendrix, who'd caught him live as support to the John Hammand Jr band at the Cafe Wha in New York in 1966, the pairing was not a great one. The Monkees were a teen sensation at the time, and their audience was intolerant of all support acts, let alone one as wild as Hendrix.

Each night, the crowd would chant for the Experience to get off. Eventually, as manager Chas Chandler explains, they concocted a story that a group called the Daughters of the American Revolution had complained about the "erotic" nature of Jimi's performance. In the end, it was great publicity, and a weird footnote in the Hendrix story that had started with a tour with the much more suitable Jefferson Airplane. Unfortunately, suggests Chandler, Airplane couldn't bear being upstaged by Jimi every night.

"Jefferson Airplane were top of the bill," says Chandler, "Jimi was second and Big Brother and the Holding Company were the opening act. We'd done two nights there and Jefferson Airplane cried off because Jimi just crucified them. Murdered them onstage and they pulled out."

US manager Mike Jeffries had an idea. He got them a spot on the Monkees tour. 

Predictably, it ended badly. It was the height of Monkees-Mania and the tastes of the teenage audience did not extend to the high-voltage psychedelic rock of the Jimi Hendrix Experience  – yet. Jimi would play with his teeth, "make love" to his guitar and then set fire to it.

"Jimi was from another world," says Monkees publicist Barbara Hamaker, "and that was pretty obvious pretty quickly."

In August the Experience supported the Mamas and the Papas at the Hollywood Bowl. It was the last time they would be the support act for anyone.

In early October 1968, Guitar Player spoke to Jimi Hendrix on what was just the second anniversary of his trio, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. That night, the band played a historic performance at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco. At the time, the guitarist was riding high – his third and final studio album with the group, Electric Ladyland was just about to hit the stores.

1968 was quite a year. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Apollo 8 became the first manned spacecraft to reach the Moon, and American opinion began to turn firmly against the Vietnam War.

On the music front, 1968 saw the release of Jeff Beck’s Truth, the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money and Cream’s Wheels of Fire. Meanwhile, the Beatles studied Transcendental Meditation in India, where they wrote much of the music that appeared on the ‘White Album’.

Released on 25 October, 1968, Electric Ladyland, a self-produced double-LP reached the number one position in the U.S. charts the following month. Hendrix then appeared on the cover of the December 1968 issue of Guitar Player where he gave this incredible interview...

Jimi Hendrix plays, the house comes down. It doesn’t fall in small pieces, but in chunks. The whole place topples on the audience, but it doesn’t touch them because he has got them flying up there with him somewhere.

That’s the way it was at Winterland in San Francisco when we interviewed Jimi Hendrix. That’s the way he makes it.

“All of my songs happen on the spur of the moment,” he says, and you know he’s leveling with you. So you ask him if he has to compensate for this spontaneity by using gimmicks. 

“On some records, you hear all this clash and bang and fanciness,” he answers. “But all we’re doing is laying down the guitar tracks, and then we echo here and there. We’re not adding false electronic things. We use the same thing anyone else would, but we use it with imagination and common sense.

“Like in ‘House Burning Down’ [Electric Ladyland], we made the guitar sound like it was on fire. It’s constantly changing dimensions, and up on top that lead guitar is cutting through everything.”

He tells you his most important thing is to honestly communicate with the audience. His stage presence is usually expected to be sort of obscene, with lots of gesturing, but this is not true most of the time.

Jimi’s presence is always cool, and he lets his emotions come through strong. At times, he has turned his back on the audience – if that’s the way he really felt.

“When I don’t say ‘thank you,’ or I turn my back to the audience, it’s not against them,” he explains. “I’m just doing that to get a certain thing out. I might be uptight about the guitar being out of tune or something.

“Things have to go through me, and I have to show my feelings as soon as they’re there.”

One problem Jimi has is that his instruments won’t hold up. He explains: “Like these two guitars I have now, they’ve been around for a while and just don’t stay in tune. They might slip out of tune a bit right in the middle of the song, and I’ll have to start fighting to get it back in tune. 

"We tune up between every song because it’s not a Flash Gordon show – everything all neat and rehearsed. It’s not one of those kinds of things. It’s important for us to get our music across the best way we can. It means we have to do it naturally, like tuning up before songs.”

Jimi adds that it sometimes is tough working with the other members of the Experience, drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding.

“Sometimes they might want to tell me something, and I might not be able to understand. It gets frustrating. Any time you make a song, you want your own personal thing in it – as well as the group.

“We don’t compromise with each other very much, you know. Like one guy thinks one thing, and he’s going to stick with that one thing, so he does it the way he wants it.”

Jimi admits the trio doesn’t do much practicing.

“Most of our practice is thinking about it. They might hear the same tune I have, so they throw it around in their minds and picture the fingerboard. So when we go to the studios and I give them a rough idea, maybe Mitch and I will lay a track down completely by ourselves, and then add the rest. 

"As far as jamming out here on a show, we try to listen to each other. I just keep my music in my head. It doesn’t even come out to the other guys until we go to the studio. 

"Sometimes, if I have a new song, or if the guys want to take a vacation, or something like that, maybe I’ll go to the studio by myself and have an acetate made with a rough idea about the drums, guitar, bass and vocal.

“Then, other times, I’ll just come in banging away on the guitar, be singing, and say this is a new song. We try to put our own self into it, no matter what song we play.”

What does Jimi look for in other musicians?

“When I see a group, I look for feeling, but not the jump-around kind of feeling,” he says. “Then I look for togetherness – a communication between the musicians. Originality comes about fourth or fifth.”

The night we talked with Jimi Hendrix was the second anniversary of the trio.

Jimi himself was born in Seattle, 25 years ago. He left school early to join the Army Airborne. “I’ve played with millions of groups, played behind cats who are making it now,” says the guitarist.

Jimi feels that those who influenced him while he was trying to make it were Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Eddie Cochran, and B.B. King, among others. But Jimi’s style is not a mixture of the past. It is something which comes out of himself.

“I write songs to release frustration,” he says. “I like to play lead sometimes so I can express myself. But the way I play lead is a raw type of way. It comes to you naturally.”

The way Jimi Hendrix plays may be natural for Jimi Hendrix, but it’s the opposite of most other guitarists. A left-hander, he usually plays a right-handed Fender Stratocaster that’s flopped upside down and restrung the normal way with Fender light-gauge strings.

He also has two Gibsons.

“Some of the tracks on our new LP have a Gibson on them,” he says. “I also use Sunn amps. It doesn’t make any difference what size the amps are, as long as I know I have it.

“I’m not necessarily trying to be loud. I’m just trying to get this impact. I don’t like to use mics. To get the right sound, it’s a combination of both amp and fretting.”

Jimi feels it’s important not to have a closed mind to new things that are happening.

“You can’t just get stuck up on guitar. You have to use a little bit of imagination and break away. There are millions of other kinds of instruments. There’s horns, drums – everything. 

"Music is getting better and better, but the idea now is not to get as complicated as you can, but to get as much of yourself into it as you can. Music has to go places. We’ll squeeze as much as we really feel out of a three-piece group, but things happen naturally. We’ve got about four tracks that we haven’t released yet. 

"One has a very simple rhythm with a funky horn pattern in it, and a tiny bit of echo to make the horn sharper. It happens naturally – like when you hear something you might want to use strings with. But we haven’t been able to get these things together because we’ve been on tour.”

Jimi’s advice to guys who are still out there trying to make it?

“It’s pretty hard to give advice, but if these guys have really gotten into it and everyone – mothers and friends – have said ‘Wow,’ then they should try to get in touch with a major musician, or have a representative of a record company come to one of their gigs.

“But tell them it’s best not to sign anything too soon. Tell them to get some lawyers. Managers may not know it all, and a lawyer knows what’s right.

“You have to stick with it,” he adds. “Sometimes, you are going to be so frustrated you want to give up the guitar – you’ll hate the guitar. But all of this is just a part of learning, because if you stick with it, you’re going to be rewarded.”

Originally published in Guitar Player, December 1968

It’s virtually impossible to pare decades of rock and roll down to a top-ten list. There are, however, some guitar solos every player needs to know about.

Here are some of the greatest ever committed to record...

10. "Statesboro Blues" by The Allman Brothers Band from 'At Fillmore East' (1971)

Guitarist: Duane Allman

Although the end of "Layla" may be more memorable to most folks, Allman’s Statesboro slide show verifies his title as the undisputed king of bottleneck guitar. 

Slick as oil but with the ability to stop on a dime, Allman not only redefined how slide guitar was played but also created a recycling market for empty Coricidin bottles.

9. "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses from 'Appetite for Destruction' (1987)

Guitarist: Slash

While Axl swayed and sashayed like Steve Wonder around his mic stand, Slash laid back with his Les Paul, patiently waiting for his turn in the spotlight. 

Then, with his blistering ascent up the E harmonic minor scale – which kicks the second solo of this tune into high gear – the top-hatted genius single-handedly breathed new life into wah-pedal sales.

8. "Crossroads" by Cream from 'Wheels of Fire' (1968)

Guitarist: Eric Clapton

Slowhand? Not on this track. Clapton pulls out every blues-rock move in his lick-tionary for this roadhouse romper. 

The true voodoo of this solo lies at the crossroads where major and minor pentatonic tonalities meet, mingle and blast off from E.C.’s fretboard. 

Ol’ Scratch surely smiled when he heard this one.

7. "Crazy Train" by Ozzy Osbourne from 'Blizzard of Ozz' (1980)

Guitarist: Randy Rhoads

You almost wonder if Ozzy named this tune after hearing Rhoads’ white-knuckled rock and roll ride up and down the F# minor scale. 

What more could you want in a metal guitar solo? Tapping, rakes, bends, trills ascending legato runs... 

Rhoads set Eighties guitarists on the rails of neoclassical rock with this one. All aboard!

6. "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin from 'Led Zeppelin IV' (1971)

Guitarist: Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page's "Stairway” solo is nothing short of divine. 

His resolution to the natural F note in the opening minor pentatonic lick of the solo couldn’t have been more perfect if the Almighty himself had chosen the note.

5. "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits from 'Dire Straits' (1978)

Guitarist: Mark Knopfler

Sultan says, “Spend less time making your harem moan and more time making your guitar cry and sing!” 

For those of you who’ve learned the outro solo the lazy way – playing eighth-note triplets for the daunting Dm, Bb and C arpeggios – get your fingers back to the wood shed. 

Those are 16th notes that the “Sultan of Strat” rips off.

4. "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd from 'Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd' (1973) 

Guitarist: Gary Rossington and Allen Collins

To paraphrase Adrian Belew in King Crimson’s "Indiscipline," "I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks…” 

This could go on forever – kinda like the outro solo to "Free Bird," in which guitarists Rossington and Collins double each other for most of this pull-off parade. 

It’s impressive not because of the degree of difficulty of the licks but because of the sheer volume they need to recall – 27, including variations!

3. "Eruption" by Van Halen from 'Van Halen' (1978) 

The Holy Grail for all aspiring rock guitarists. Learn Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" and you’ve earned some serious bragging rights. 

But if you really want props, you’ve got to tame the whole volcano, not just the tremolo picking and tapping sections.

2. "All Along the Watchtower" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience from 'Electric Ladyland' (1968)

Jimi Hendrix offers plenty of reason to get excited in his "Watchtower" solo. 

Besides his masterful manipulation of the C# minor pentatonic scale, Hendrix’s wah-drenched octave climb and the double-stops in the latter half bear out his gift for melodic embellishment. 

It’s enough to make any cat growl.

1. "Little Wing" by Stevie Ray Vaughan from 'The Sky Is Crying' (1991)

With little bits of Jimi, Wes and Mayfield, and a whole lotta soul, SRV exhibits exceptional dynamic prowess throughout, making this reverent Hendrix cover his own. 

A seemingly lost art among modern-day guitarists, Vaughan’s R&B-style chord melody is like priceless art. It should be both admired and studied.

Nels Cline follows two distinct tracks in his guitar playing, alternating the avant-jazz arc he explores solo along with the psychedelic-punk-freakout textures he brings to Wilco.

Here are the five riffs that changed his life, and inspired his own fearless fretting...

1. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds

“I had to listen carefully to see what was going on here,” says Cline. “I learned later in life that I have this great love – as does much of western culture – with the major ninth.

“I think that sound, which has to do with the idiomatic aspects of open strings on a guitar, is what created the term ‘jingle jangle’– not just the timbre of a 12-string, but the sound of ringing, open strings. 

"That sound is irresistible.”

2. “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” by the Yardbirds

“This is one of the most marvelous and exciting and colorful recorded performances of a song.

“If you think about audio engineering at that time – which was a 4-track deck, I’m sure – I don’t even know how they did it.

“There are so many crazy things going on with the guitar. It’s sort of like satellite Sputnik psychedelia. 

"It still gives me a rush.”

3. “Manic Depression” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

“This is the song that convinced me I was going to play guitar. 

"When you hear the intro riff, and all the other stuff he does in the solo, he goes completely mad.

“I was sold. There was no way I was not going to do music for life after that. It was like being jolted with electricity – like flying – and it still feels like that every time I hear it.”

4. “Marquee Moon” by Television

“‘Marquee Moon’ is a veritable feast of memorable and influential guitar riffs.

“Tom Verlaine’s long guitar solo ends in one of the most memorable examples of a mixolydian scale in its most rudimentary form, and it sounds like absolute poetry.

“Then, there’s this beautiful, John Cipollina-influenced thing he plays with his finger, but I do it with the bar.

“That’s where I get my penchant for the ‘wiggle’ – which I use all over songs like Wilco’s ‘Impossible Germany.’”

5. “West Germany” by Minutemen

“The Minutemen had an incredibly diverse, poetic vision. I played on a double bill at McCabe’s Guitar Shop with them in the ’80s with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.

“I found D. Boon’s note choices and phrasing to be almost spooky. His presence, charisma, power, and commitment was galvanizing.”

Written and produced by Jimi Hendrix and recorded by the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1968 for the group’s third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, “1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” has been widely praised by guitar players.

“His studio versions of “The Star Spangled Banner” and “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” are unreal,” Joe Satriani told Guitar Player. “I would listen to that stuff for hours, and it would unlock these desires in me to try and create – with my own music – the experience of being a listener and getting off.”

“I didn’t know he wrote riffs like that,” said Warpaint’s Emily Kokal. “I always thought Hendrix was cool, but when I heard that song it instantly became my favorite.”

Now, Australian rockers Tropical Fuck Storm have honored the high priest of psychedelic rock’s original recording with their own epic version.

Described in the band’s press release as “an acid trip nosedive into another dimension,” TFS’s rendition of “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” is recommended listening for those Hendrix fans with distinctly lysergic leanings.

Tropical Fuck Storm singer/guitarist Gareth Liddiard describes their version of “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” as, “an attempt to right the recent wrongs perpetrated against Hendrix's classic Angel by some idiot from One Direction doing a karaoke-style ‘tribute’ for Jimi's 80th birthday.”

Appearing on the band’s new EP of covers, Submersive Behaviour, this timeless Hendrix track showcases Liddiard on vocals, guitars and drums along with fellow singers Erica Dunn and Fiona Kitschin and drummer Lauren Hammel. The track guest stars Dan Kelly and Aaron Cupples.

Also featuring a cover of the Stooges’ “Ann,” Tropical Fuck Storm’s Submersive Behaviour is available from today via Joyful Noise Recordings.

Order Tropical Fuck Storm’s Submersive Behaviour here.

After its raucous birth in the 1950s and early demise following Buddy Holly’s death, Chuck Berry’s imprisonment, Elvis Presley’s Army enlistment and Little Richard’s spiritual rebirth, rock ‘n’ roll shriveled up.

The epicene years from 1960 to 1964 had been a formative but difficult period in which garage rock bands claimed back a piece of the teen pop charts before the British Invasion groups led the way to a rock ‘n’ roll victory.

Those spirited rebels were anything but monolithic. Many brought together influences of early rock, folk, blues, soul, trad jazz and more.

It’s hardly surprising that the old formulas for songwriting and music production were inadequate to the aims of these young and ambitious performers.

Something had to change, and in 1965, it did, largely due to the work of guitarists.

Fuzz effects, once novelty devices on songs like the Venture’s “The 2000 Pound Bee,” were used in earnest by players like Jeff Beck and Keith Richards for their otherworldly tones, along with already established effects like tremolo and reverb.

It was Beck, too, who introduced the sonorities of Indian music to rock ‘n’ roll with his guitar, soon to be followed by George Harrison and Brian Jones, who did likewise by learning the rudiments of the sitar.

What followed was a radical reconfiguring of teen “beat” music.

In the hallowed halls of recording studios like London’s Abbey Road and Trident, this took place with serious application of orchestras, Mellotrons, electric pianos, harpsichords, organs and early Moog synthesizers.

In the dingy basements and dirty garages of teen bands in the U.S., it was evidenced instead by a deconstruction of norms: screamed vocals and fuzzed-out guitars plied against primitive, pummeling beats.

In either form, this was psychedelic rock.

The shocking new sounds fired off synapses in ways familiar to those who had taken LSD.

The drug had become popular in California’s youth culture, primarily in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead were at the epicenter of Ken Kesey’s acid-fueled happenings, as well as in Los Angeles, where Byrds guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby dropped LSD with the Beatles in the summer of 1965.

Within months, both of those bands would dramatically change their musical direction as acid opened their minds to new approaches to sound.

By late 1966, in London, a newly arrived guitarist christened Jimi Hendrix was conjuring up his own singular brand of psychedelic guitar rock.

He needed nothing more than a Stratocaster and Marshall stack to do so, but with assistance from early effects guru Roger Mayer, Hendrix blew down the walls and signaled the birth of a potent brew of blues-based psychedelia that redefined the electric guitar.

Rock ‘n’ roll was never the same.

On this day in 1996, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus film finally saw its commercial release.

Initially intended as a means of promoting the Rolling Stones' 1968 album Beggars Banquet on British television, this unmissable concert movie was put together in December that year and features a host of talent including Jethro Tull, the Who, Taj Mahal and Marianne Faithful.

The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus is infamous for a number of reasons. Sadly, it was the last time founder Brian Jones would appear with the band due to his untimely death the following July.

Riddled with controversy, the production was withheld from being aired on the BBC by the Stones as they deemed their performance unsatisfactory.

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg revisited the abandoned project in 1992 but aborted his mission when it was discovered that key footage was missing.

Miraculously, further material was unearthed the following year in the Who’s private archive by producers Michael Gochanour and Robin Klein who finalized the cut that was eventually released on this day in 1996.

A particular highlight of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus is the performance of the Beatles’ “Yer Blues” (from their eponymous 1968 LP known as the White Album) by John Lennon’s supergroup the Dirty Mac.

Comprising Lennon on vocals and rhythm guitar, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums, this short-lived dream team delivers a truly unforgettable rendition.

Lennon’s searing vocals and Clapton’s masterful lead work using his 1964 Gibson ES-335 semi-hollow render the performance extraordinary.

Bolstered by a stellar rhythm section, this one-off show by the Dirty Mac is the stuff of rock and roll legend.

Order The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus here.

With the pandemic having forced many artists off the road and into the studio we have seen a steady stream of inspired ‘lockdown albums’ in recent months.

And the Tedeschi Trucks Band are no exception. Far from it. Their recent announcement of a substantial quadruple album release titled I Am the Moon currently has fans on the edge of their seats.

Comprising 24 songs spread over four albums, the band’s latest studio project is their most ambitious to date, with Susan Tedeschi reaching for new musical heights alongside slide phenom Derek Trucks.

Arranged into four parts, the first instalment of I Am the Moon will appear as I Am The Moon: I. Crescent on June 3. 

The remaining parts are scheduled to land every four weeks thereafter, as follows: I Am The Moon: II. Ascension on July 1; I Am The Moon: III. The Fall on July 29; and I Am The Moon: IV. Farewell on August 26.

Check out the cool artwork below...

With over two hours of music in the can the idea for a series of four distinct releases arose when, "We started thinking of records we love," recalled Trucks. 

Citing Jimi Hendrix’s groundbreaking 1967 album Axis: Bold as Love as a major source of inspiration the guitarist points out that, “It’s 36 minutes long,” adding, “That’s the way to digest a record.”

In order to allow fans the opportunity to soak up and reflect on I Am the Moon together, a series of companion films directed by Alix Lambert will be unveiled a few days prior to each album release.

You can keep a lookout for those on the Tedeschi Trucks Band YouTube channel.            

Following a suggestion by vocalist Mike Mattison some two year ago, the Tedeschi Trucks Band were inspired to create a fresh interpretation of Nizami Ganjavi’s poem, Layla & Majnun – the same work that inspired the title of Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

Last year, the Tedeschi Trucks band released a live performace of Clapton's album titled Layla Revisited (Live at Lockn'). Nevertheless, "You always want to do something bigger and thematic,” reflected Trucks. “This is the first time it happened naturally."

Pre-order I Am The Moon: I. Crescent here.

A limited-edition 180g black vinyl Deluxe Box Set featuring all four albums will be available September 9.

It’s fitting that an artist as innovative as Jimi Hendrix would land upon a secret weapon to take his sound into another dimension, and that’s exactly what the Octavia accomplished.

Effects designer Roger Mayer had made fuzz boxes and treble boosters for Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Ritchie Blackmore, Big Jim Sullivan and others prior to meeting Hendrix in January 1967 and creating his most infamous electric guitar effect.

A month later, Hendrix used the Octavia to usher in a new era of tone via a unique, ringing octave-doubled fuzz sound on the explosive Are You Experienced tracks “Purple Haze” and “Fire.”

The Octavia remained a signature sound for him for the rest of his short career and was heard on songs such as “One Rainy Wish,” “Little Miss Lover,” “Little Wing” and “Machine Gun,” among others.

Last year, the Roger Mayer Purple Haze Octavia was released in a limited run of 100 numbered and hand-signed pedals. Boasting a ferrite transformer, these models are the closest thing available to those units Mayer custom built for Hendrix back in the day.

Mayer says the unit Hendrix used on Are You Experienced had germanium transistors and a ferrite transformer.

Due to its limited drive capabilities, it was paired with another custom driver in a separate enclosure, which was placed in front of what Mayer refers to as Octavia “Evo1,” to give enough drive and extra EQ to produce the sounds Hendrix wanted on his recordings.

Mayer says he threw away the first Octavia, but he and Hendrix worked together at a pace that produced at least 15 variations of the device in under a year.

Mayer adds that, by the time they began recording sessions for the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s second album, Axis: Bold As Love, later in 1967, the effect’s clarity and detail were much more defined.

Mayer was simultaneously updating and customizing distortion units to complement the latest Octavia revision.

“At the end of 1967, I designed the wedge-shaped enclosure, which was manufactured by my father’s electronics company,” Mayer says.

“The Octavia was housed in the new wedge enclosures and still used germanium transistors and ferrite transformers. They were primarily designed for studio work and not suited for touring.

“I went on tour to the U.S. with Jimi from January 30, 1968, until April 19, 1968, and the wedge-shaped Octavia was used on a few special gigs.

“We didn’t use it every day, owing to the fact they were custom made and couldn’t be easily replaced. Having gear stolen from the stage was a real problem, but we never lost an Octavia because Jimi and I kept them with us at all times.”

The brilliance of Hendrix and the electronics design acumen of Mayer – arguably the first boutique pedal maker – led to the creation of an effect that still carries a certain mystical quality in how it shape-shifts to the individual player’s touch and tone.

The product of a unique alliance, the Octavia lives on in myriad forms as produced by Chicago Iron, Fulltone, MXR, Voodoo Lab and others, including the originator himself.

The authentic Roger Mayer Purple Haze Octavia is currently available to order here.

On this day, in 1969, the original Jimi Hendrix Experience line-up featuring bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell performed for the final time on British soil at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

This historic concert was captured on film and a screening of the enhanced footage was exhibited at the Royal Albert Hall itself in October 2019, some 50 years after the show took place.

Titled The Jimi Hendrix Experience: The Royal Albert Hall this infamous concert recording has “long been considered the holy grail of ‘lost’ films,” according to the official Jimi Hendrix website.

“It has never before been released on any format nor commercially screened anywhere in the world,” reads the event’s promotional literature. “It has remained unseen and been the subject of death, litigation and intrigue since its creation fifty years ago.”

Featuring a remastered soundtrack mixed by Hendrix’s recording engineer Eddie Kramer, the color-corrected film captures this historic performance by the Jimi Hendrix Experience as well as backstage footage and scenes shot in the aftermath of the riotous London show.

Later in ‘69, Redding parted ways with the band amid personal tensions, while Mitchell continued performing with Hendrix, including the guitarist’s unforgettable Woodstock appearance. He was replaced the following year by drummer Buddy Miles who featured alongside bassist Billy Cox on Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys 1970 live album.

Bootlegs and unofficial low-quality YouTube snippets aside, there is little to see of this revamped Hendrix flick aside from a frustratingly enticing one-minute-fourteen-seconds-long trailer.

Meanwhile, fans are screaming out for an official release (read the YouTube comments section for a measure of their current level of frustration!) 

For now, we can only hope a digital release is in the pipeline…

The estates of all three original members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience have – in recent weeks – become embroiled in a complex legal battle that's taking place on multiple continents.

Essentially, the fight revolves around copyright, and the distribution of royalties from streaming and digital media. We'll unpack the multiple lawsuits in play, and the reasoning behind them, below.

The battle was first set in motion in December, when Sony Music received a letter from British attorney Lawrence Abramson, claiming that Sony owed the estates of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell (who died in 2003 and 2008, respectively) performance royalties for around 3 billion streams of the Experience’s songs.

Ignoring the claim, Abramson wrote in the letter, "may lead our clients to commence proceedings against you and may increase your liability for costs.”

The letter prompted Hendrix's estate to file a preemptive lawsuit against the estates of Redding and Mitchell in January in Manhattan federal court. The lawsuit stated that Redding and Mitchell had no grounds on which to claim royalties, citing documents the bassist and drummer had signed in the '70s, in which they reportedly waived their right to sue the Hendrix estate, and released it from future legal claims.

The Hendrix estate's lawsuit – which was also filed on behalf of Sony Music – is a declaratory judgment action, meaning that at this time the Hendrix family and Sony aren't seeking damages.

In response, Redding and Mitchell's estates made good on their threats, filing a lawsuit of their own in London’s High Court last week. 

Among other points of contention, Redding and Mitchell's estates make the case that the contracts they signed decades ago do not extend to streaming rights or digital media revenue, which – they say – “none of the parties would have been able to foresee or contemplate” at the time they were signed.

The filing against Hendrix and Sony in the London court seeks a ruling on three counts – whether or not Redding and Mitchell have a copyright stake in the Jimi Hendrix Experience's music; whether those rights have been infringed; and an assessment of monetary damages, if the judge rules in their favor on the first two counts.

It's unclear at the moment where and how the dispute will eventually be litigated, given that the dueling claims and suits were filed in two different countries. According to Billboard, Hendrix's original estate proceedings – including the signing of the release documents by Redding and Mitchell at the center of the battle – took place in New York courts.

Legal messes like this tend to take quite awhile to sort themselves out, but we'll update you with new information on the proceedings as soon as we get ahold of it.