March 25, 1969, is a date that John McLaughlin will never forget. It was the day that Mitch Mitchell would introduce him to Buddy Miles, it was the day he met Jimi Hendrix for the first time – and he got to jam with him.
Hendrix’s revolutionary command of the electric guitar didn’t disappoint. Meeting Jimi Hendrix did not disappoint. In a recent interview with Ultimate Guitar, McLaughlin said Hendrix couldn’t be nicer. “He was a sweet guy,” says McLaughlin. “And I met him again, subsequently, where we had a chance to talk. And he was just totally unpretentious.”
McLaughlin says there was a lot of guitar players in the room. There was a lot of people. This was a period in which Hendrix was putting together his Band of Gypsys lineup, with Miles on drums, Billy Cox on bass guitar.
On that day in ’69, McLaughlin said New York City’s Record Plant was jumping. It was a “party”, with Hendrix undertaking “a one-man revolution on the electric guitar”.
McLaughlin was invited to sit in but, expanding on what did disappoint him that day, he didn’t have the tools to give his best in the jam. It is a subject of disappointment for many Hendrix (and McLaughlin fans) that this jam – which you can listen to on YouTube – never received an official release. Perhaps this is why; simply, his guitar let him down.
“The problem is, the only guitar I had was a Gibson Hummingbird,” says McLaughlin. “I’d run out of money when I was in the UK and Europe. I’d moved to Europe by that time. And I had to sell my really nice Gibson guitar because I didn’t have any money. And so it was pretty cheap, and I had a DeArmond pickup over it.”
Anyone who has tried to play an acoustic with a magnetic pickup on it in the presence of a dimed tube amp will know what happened next. Hendrix was on home turf, on electric. McLaughlin’s acoustic guitar? It never stood a chance.
“In that volume, I plugged my guitar in, and it was just like instant feedback,” he says. “It was really hard to play. It was unfortunate, because I needed a solid body guitar on that session.”
But things were going well for McLaughlin. The ‘60s were good to him. He was playing with Miles Davis. He was playing with Davis’ alumni Tony Williams, the virtuoso drummer from Davis’ ‘Second Great Quintet’, and one of Mitch Mitchell’s heroes.
“Every time we were in New York and playing a slog – four one-hour sets a night – there was Mitch,” recalled McLaughlin, speaking to MusicRadar in 2015. McLaughlin touched on some of his memories of that night then, too, calling the jam a “fiasco” but also giving us an idea of just how much volume was in the room.
Remember, there was no master volume on Marshall amps in those days and Hendrix had his on full blast. McLaughlin was overwhelmed.
“I walked into this studio and the volume! I was, like, hallucinating with the volume!” he said. “I tried to play, but I couldn’t play because by guitar was feeding back. Every time I put the volume up it was feeding back. I should have had a solid body!”
It never soured his relationship with Hendrix. They would meet again.
“I got to meet Jimi a couple of times,” said McLaughlin. “He was very gracious, very unassuming, no pretensions – he didn’t need it. He had nothing to prove to anybody.”
Nor has McLaughlin. Maybe that jam should be released once and for all. You can check it out above.
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