Years before Joe Walsh scored solo hits and sawed up hotel rooms with the Eagles, the guitarist was making his mark with the hard rock trio the James Gang. Which is how he came to meet and jam with Jimi Hendrix backstage at a club in 1970 where both acts were billed along with Sly & the Family Stone.
“It was in Youngstown, Ohio,” Walsh said in a 2012 interview with Howard Stern. The James Gang was opening the show and sharing a dressing room with Hendrix.
“We finished, came in, and he’s sitting playing his guitar,” the “Rocky Mountain Way” composer recalls. “And I come in with mine, and we had a jam. I showed him my guitar, and he showed me his.”
Walsh confirms that Hendrix was every bit as sensational as other guitarists have said. When he performed, he notes, the response was “‘what the hell are we doing?’ “That was generally thought by the community."
“Of course I’m intimidated by him. I mean, he had an aura; he had feathers on! It was terrifying.”
While he says Hendrix was a “wonderful” guy, his friendliness did little to diminish the weight of his reputation.
“Of course I’m intimidated by him,” Walsh confesses. “I mean, he had an aura; he had feathers on! It was terrifying.”
Still, Walsh had the presence of mind to take notes, hoping to extract the secrets behind Hendrix’s electric guitar magic during “three or four minutes” that felt like a master class.
“I paid attention to his guitar, like, how heavy or light the strings were, and what the action was, because he was a tough one,” says Walsh, who notes that his own guitar was a Les Paul.
“Because he was left-handed, everything was backward. That’s why he sounded like that. None of us right-handed guitar players could do what he was doing. And that’s why we couldn’t crack the code.”
Walsh leaned further into that theory speaking with Guitar Player last year, noting, “It was like you almost had to be on acid to conceive what he was playing.
It was like you almost had to be on acid to conceive what he was playing.”
— Joe Walsh
“One of the reasons people have such a hard time playing like Jimi is that he used an upside-down right-handed Strat, so he had his tremolo bar on the top, by the low-E string,” he explained. “It’s so hard to play like that when you have a regular Strat with a tremolo bar below the high-E string. It requires a different technique.”
Stevie Ray Vaughan used a left-handed tremolo on his iconic right-handed "Number One" Stratocaster primarily as a tribute to Hendrix, whose music he first heard on an album that had been tossed in the trash. Nevertheless, while SRV may have come closest to capturing Jimi’s sonic soul, no one could top him, as Walsh attests.
