Marshall has unveiled a special commemorative collection to celebrate Jimi Hendrix plugging into its guitar amps and changing the course of music history – and the fortunes of the brand itself.

The Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection comprises a hand-wired 1969 JMH Super Lead-style tube amp head, partnered with a matching hand-wired 4x12, featuring a commemorative badge and a black-and-purple cosmic swirl finish, to which you can put a matching limited run Dunlop Fuzz Face fuzz pedal in front of and have at it.

The collection also includes a special cosmic purple swirl Hendrix signature edition Acton III Bluetooth speaker.

“We built the amps, Hendrix made them scream,” says Marshall. “From the moment Hendrix plugged into a Marshall guitar amplifier in ’66, they became an unstoppable creative force.”

Look at any archive footage of Hendrix – at Woodstock, Maui, Monterey, Atlanta – and behind him would be a this black tower, the Marshall Super Lead head sitting on a pair of 4x12 speaker cabinets.

It is an indelible image, and it helped put Marshall on the map.

“Jimi was a formidable musician, a real force of nature,” says Terry Marshall, co-founder, Marshall Amplification. “He took everything to a new level and carried everybody with him. When he played, it was an emotional time for everybody because everyone was thinking, if he can do it, I could maybe do it.”

Seeing Hendrix inspired new players to pick up the electric guitar. Seeing Hendrix with banks of Marshall stacks behind him, well, that made players want a Marshall, and Terry Marshall believes there can be no questioning how important Hendrix was to the Marshall story.

“It was a really special time for us all and there’s no doubt that we grew with him and his fame, it was a natural tie-up,” he says. “The rest is history as they say.”

The tones (and the volume) coming out of the 1959 JMH and its matching speaker will be familiar. It is built in the same spirit as the original Super Leads that Hendrix et al played back in the day. But it looks very different.

The black-and-purple swirl on the control panel and matching grill cloth speak to Hendrix’s psychedelic sound (and his love of psychedelics). The LED even illuminates purple.

“From his fashion to his lyrics and of course, his music, there are so many different stories we could tell when it comes to Hendrix,” says Emma Rydahl, senior industrial designer, Marshall Group. “We started with materials and pattern exploration, looking at different fabrics and running test prints with a psychedelic track in mind. We spent a lot of time adjusting the final design to get it just right across the whole collection.”

The Acton III speaker, which is officially available to order from 14 May, priced $299, even has a plush crushed velvet covering – it's like they made it out of an old jacket from Jimi Hendrix's wardrobe.

The rest of the Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection is available to now, with the half-stack and Fuzz Face bundle priced $4,999. See Marshall for more details.

Picture the scene. You are playing a sold-out show at Seattle’s legendary Paramount Theatre, playing in Jason Isbell’s backing band, the 400 Unit, and to close out the set Isbell has an idea. Why not invite Mike McCready onstage to jam on a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing?

Sadler Vaden has been there, four years ago now, but the 400 Unit guitarist can still picture it in his mind’s eye – it’s an experience he is not likely to forget any time soon. For a start, covering Little Wing is no gimme. You’ve got to do the song justice. But then you’ve got the guitarist from Pearl Jam up there with his Fender Stratocaster, too.

“It’s like the question of, it’s not my decision, but do you even do something like this!? It’s Jimi Hendrix, right?” laughs Vaden, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. “I think it was Jason’s idea. But we were in Seattle, it’s Mike McCready, why not? You know what I mean! And I think that we have license to do that because we’re careful with it.

“I remember just being really excited, thinking like, ‘We’re doing Little Wing’ with Mike McCready in Seattle, it’s sold out. I just felt like I’m where I’m supposed to be. I never thought I would be here but clearly I’m where I’m supposed to be!’”

Vaden and Isbell had already played a cover earlier in the set, performing R.E.M.’s mid ‘80s classic Driver 8, which had just been recorded and released on Isbell’s 2021 studio album, Georgia blue. But this is a Hendrix in Hendrix's hometown Seattle, playing a track with so much history. Stevie Ray Vaughan's version is also a lodestar for generations of blues guitar players. No pressure. “Yeah, absolutely, and that’s untouchable,” says Vaden. “Everything he did!”

Both Isbell and McCready were on Strats. Vaden, who is here to ostensibly talk about his new signature Gibson SG Standard, was playing a Les Paul. Vaden says he only met McCready earlier in the day.

“I was a kid [when they broke through] but Pearl Jam is of those bands that they’ve sort of transcended all eras, and, I mean, they’re Pearl Jam!” he says. “But that was my first time meeting McCready that night. [He’s] just the nicest guy, musician, just wanted to know about your gear and all that kind of stuff, and those are the things I remember.”

The list of classic electric guitar classics that have been informally banned in guitar stores worldwide probably began with Stairway To Heaven but has most definitely expanded over the years to include Enter Sandman, Wonderwall, Seven Nation Army and you could probably through John Mayer’s Slow Dancing In A Burning Room in there too. Little Wing is surely in there, too. Everyone plays it.

So how did Vaden and Isbell approach it as not to receive a blanket ban from the Guitar Center network across the continental US? Sadler admits that covering the standards is not easy. There is an art to it.

“Yeah, for me, any time I’ve ever done something like that, it’s hard,” he says. “I’m not Jimi Hendrix, but I also want to honour it a little bit, so I try to find that happy medium of just expressing myself, and putting my own soul into it, but also having little – I call them checkpoints. Any time I do a solo, there’s a lot of improvisation, but I have little checkpoints that I like to hit.”

There don’t need to be that many checkpoints. The key was trusting the audience to fill in the blanks, and throwing in some note-for-note Hendrix licks when the time was right. So long as Vader remembers where they go, he’s all right.

“After I make that checkpoint, I can take some off-roads, I can go off the GPS or take some different routes,” he explains. “But then find my way back! With something like Little Wing, for me it was important to express myself, to put myself into it, but then hit a melody line or something, just to bring people into it, and have their ear grab a hold of it.”

McCready was no slouch either. He’s been around the block. He knows just what to do.

“Oh, he was great,” says Vaden. “Yeah, he’s amazing! Right when he started soloing, he went back and turned every knob up on the amp that he was playing through, just all the way up. [Laughs] It was great.”

In a three-guitar jam, the most important thing to do is to listen to what everyone else is doing. And to be ready.

“When we got onstage and started going, it’s kind of like I’m thinking, ‘I don’t have the ball. Mike McCready has the ball.’ So I’m gonna find my way in wherever I can get in,” says Vaden. “If and when someone looks over and says, ‘Go!’ I’ll be ready. And also hearing, ‘Who’s gonna do the rotary tone?’ Kind of waiting [to hear] who’s gonna do certain licks. I don’t want to step on those when they come around.’”

Vaden is lucky enough to have a few of these all-star jams under his belt. The McCready jam has to be up there with the best but is it the best jam he’s had with someone who is in the pantheon, someone who is—

“—A rock star!?”

Vaden’s not sure. A few special nights are coming back to him here.

“Umm, let me think. We did play with Chuck Leavell in Memphis,” he says. “We did In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed – we’ve had Warren Haynes play In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed with us as well, so having Chuck Leavell up there was amazing, and Warren too.

“One of the best best jams I’ve had was I was doing my own thing on a music cruise, and Jason got up and, once again, we did In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed by the Allman Brothers, and Jerry Douglas got up, he brought his Dobro, and that was one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever been a part of! Me and Jason just stopped soloing when Jerry Douglas was here. But we’ve had a lot of great moments like that.”

Vaden laughs. This is to hard to call. But then one performance in 2018 with David Crosby springs to mind, playing the song Neil Young wrote about the Kent State Shootings in 1970.

“David Crosby! Probably playing with David Crosby, doing Ohio with David Crosby, multiple times,” he says “But at Newport Folk Fest one year, I would say that probably is the high. That probably was the best.”

The Sadler Vaden SG Standard is available now, priced $1,999. See Gibson for more details.

Whenever people talk about the greatest guitar solos ever recorded, Guns N’ Roses star Slash is always in the conversation for what he played on classic songs such as Sweet Child O’ Mine, Welcome To The Jungle, Civil War and November Rain.

But what would the man himself name as the best guitar track of them all?

In an interview with Q magazine in the early 2000s, Slash revealed his favourite – Machine Gun by Jimi Hendrix, from the 1970 live album Band Of Gypsys.

The track was recorded on 1 January 1970 at the Fillmore East venue in New York City. In this performance, Hendrix was accompanied by bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles.

Slash told Q: “There are so many guitarists and so many tracks that have had such a huge impact and influence on what I do – people like Albert King and Jeff Beck. But nothing beats Machine Gun by Jimi Hendrix – the live version he recorded with the Band Of Gypsys at the Fillmore East.

“That performance by Jimi, it speaks. The solo is his interpretation of war, all this screaming… It’s such a brilliant piece of artistry, such a pure form of expression.

“I first heard it when I was about 13. I was in my bedroom, sitting on my bed – the bottom bunk below my brother’s if you really want to know! It was on the radio and it just killed me.

“I found the Band Of Gypsys album in my mom’s record collection – she had all the really cool stuff from the ‘60s. I must have played Machine Gun five hundred times, but I never tried to learn how to play it. I’ve never been like those other guitar players that have to tear a piece of music apart and put it back together again. With a lot of my favourite stuff, I just like to listen to it.

“When you’re 13, 14, it’s all about discovering your own music. I was getting into Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Sabbath… AC/DC was a big one. But eventually I went back to all those great records that my parents listened to.

“I wasn’t into the psychedelic thing, all that meandering, self-indulgent shit I couldn’t relate to. But Jimi was just hands down the best guitarist I’d ever heard. And what he’s playing on Machine Gun is not even complicated in a technical sense.

“It’s a very particular language that Jimi is speaking. It’s just pure, soul-wrenching emotion.”

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.

ZZ Top have recorded some great blues songs over the years – none of them better than the one on which Billy Gibbons played a Stratocaster gifted to him by the most revered guitarist of them all.

It was in 1968, in the days before ZZ Top, that Gibbons befriended Jimi Hendrix.

Gibbons was then a member of psychedelic rock group The Moving Sidewalks, who opened for The Jimi Hendrix Experience on a US tour.

Eleven years later, when ZZ Top recorded their sixth album Degüello, Gibbons pulled out the Strat that Hendrix had given to him. He played it on the track that many fans consider to be ZZ Top’s finest blues number – A Fool For Your Stockings.

In a 2018 interview with Classic Rock, Gibbons recalled: “Many of ZZ Top’s songs started out from picking up a catchphrase, just something off the cuff, and that was certainly true of A Fool For Your Stockings.

“I remember overhearing one of our buddies recollecting why he fell for a certain girl. When he uttered the phrase, ‘Man, I was a fool for her stockings’, it was so honest and so unexpected. I wrote it down immediately, and it served us well.

“Interestingly, when we recorded that song, I was playing the Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix gave me when we were travelling together, and 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 particular track.”

Touring with Hendrix was a legendary period in Gibbons' life. Not only were the Moving Sidewalks opening for Hendrix, they were covering his songs to fill out their set. Hendrix just had to admire the cheek of it.

For Gibbons, it was an education, particularly about the unadvertised capabilities of Leo Fender's most successful electric guitar design. Hendrix could not only play it like no one else, he had modded it, too, anticipating the five-way pickup switch we see on today's models.

“Jimi took the three-way toggle switch into five-way,” said Gibbons, speaking to Total Guitar. “He’s the one that discovered the in-between positions, and in order for that not to pop out of place, he showed me how to take off the back scratch plate and remove the spring within the toggle switch, so it would more or less stay in place! And that sound had this extra chimeyness to it.

“This is the first five-way toggle switch that I ever saw. He took the springs off the standard switch so that it just hung there. When he wanted to move it out-of-phase, Jimi’d shake the guitar until the switch moved, smooth as can be, into the position.”

Gibbons argued that Hendrix never quite got the credit he deserved for that. But he won't forget it. As for the pink Strat, it is still in his rotation.

“It's in safekeeping, and it still gets a good whoopin' in the studio every once in a while," he said, speaking to Premiere Collectibles in 2020.

There are many other classic blues songs in the ZZ Top catalogue – most notably Sure Got Cold After The Rain Fell from the album Rio Grande Mud (1972), Jesus Just Left Chicago from Tres Hombres (1973), Blue Jean Blues from Fandango! (1974), I Need You Tonight from Eliminator (1983) and 2000 Blues from Recycler (1990).

Gibbons told Classic Rock how his love for blues guitar originated.

“I grew up in a house where music was a constant,” he said. “My dad, a rather interesting all-round entertainer, provided a tremendous sonic background to my childhood.

“We also had a housekeeper and she loved listening to the rhythm-and-blues radio stations.

“And one day, when I was about seven years old, my dad took me to ACA Studios in Houston, where he had some business to do.

“There was a recording session in progress and my dad put me in there, sat me on a chair, and said, ‘I’ll come back for you in a little while.’ It turned out that the session was by none other than B.B. King. And what B.B. was doing with the guitar, I remember thinking, this is for me…”

He described this as a defining point in his life.

“It sure was. Also, my younger sister and I got to tag along with my mom to go to see an Elvis Presley concert. And those two events, to this day, loom large in the mind.

“Those two events were doubly responsible for taking my life into a certain direction. Between Elvis and B.B. King, I was done.”

Gibbons named two other blues artists who had a profound influence on him.

“I think it’s fair to say that when Muddy Waters left the acoustic guitar by the wayside and finally decided to plug in and power up, that was a rather significant turning point,” he said. “From that moment – the electrification of the blues – there was no turning back for me.

“And I would also add Jimmy Reed into the mix. Even to this day I find myself returning to his old recordings, and it’s somewhat remarkable that after hearing these things over and over again, there’s always something that pops up that I may not have caught before. It’s kind of amazing to me that I can still get such a charge out of Jimmy Reed’s stuff.”

On his 2018 solo album the Big Bad Blues, Gibbons recorded two Muddy Waters songs – Standing Around Crying and Rollin’ And Tumblin’.

“I like to extol the virtues of the originators,” he said. "We’re challenged to be successful as interpreters.

“In those silent moments when you’re all alone in a studio and you imagine what it might have been like during those rather captivating moments when many of these great songs were recorded, it’s inspirational.

He added: “It requires some measure of imagination, of course, but I think that’s part of the mystery of the magnetic appeal of this rather simplistic art form. I use that word ‘simplistic,’ but it really is rather complex.”

Buddy Guy may have retired from touring last year but the 88-year-old blues veteran is now apparently making a comeback of sorts – he’s been added to the final show of this year’s ‘Experience Hendrix’ tour.

You can now see Guy at the last date of the tour, at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre on April 12, where he’ll join an array of modern-day guitar heroes on stage, including Zakk Wylde, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Eric Johnson, Samantha Fish, Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram, and Marcus King.

Of course, Guy stands above all of those names, not least for the simple fact that he’s actually played with Hendrix - indeed Jimi cited Guy as an influence back in the day. “Thank you to the Hendrix Tour family for bringing me back to perform at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta on April 12,” he said in a statement. “I’ll never forget meeting Jimi at that club in New York in 1968, and I’m so grateful we had the chance to become friends. It’s an honour to help keep his legacy alive.”

A few years back footage emerged of the pair jamming together on a version of Stormy Monday from 1968. As you can see above, it may be muddy quality, but you can clearly see Hendrix with a left-handed Strat play one of his inimitable solos.

Janie Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix's stepsister, also commented on Guy's inclusion in the Atlanta lineup. “Having Buddy come out of retirement to play with us in the Atlanta show is an amazing finale,” she said. “It’s a true act of friendship and mutual admiration. I can’t think of a better way to close out such an epic event.”

In other news, Guy has also collaborated with the band Switchfoot on a new track. Last Man Standing features the guitarist sharing vocals with Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman, as well as laying down his trademark licks.

“Buddy Guy was the blues legend that taught me how to play the guitar,” Foreman said in a statement.

“I remember watching him live as a teenager and being completely transformed. I wanted this song to be something worthy of the man who helped shape my musical journey. Buddy, thanks for joining our band for a tune. Bigger than that - thanks for teaching me how to play.”

We’ve all been there, turning up to a gig only to find out that all the guitarists will be playing through the same backline, cue the onrushing panic as we try to get a decent tone out of an unfamiliar guitar amp. It is some comfort to learn that the greats are no different – even Brian May has a war story to share.

In a recent interview with Guitarist, the Queen guitarist recalls an evening in the early days in which he had to play through a Marshall tube amp and the experience was so bad he sounded like “an angry wasp” and struggled to play a lick.

To make matters worse, Jimi Hendrix was the headliner that night at the Olympia, in London, and we all know how the Marshall stack and Hendrix’s unearthly style made for an era-defining electric guitar tone.

“We played one show at Olympia. Top of the bill was Jimi Hendrix and everybody essentially played through the same gear,” said May. “So I plugged into a Marshall stack with my guitar and treble booster. Turned it all the way up – and it sounded so awful. I could hardly play.

“I didn’t know what to do. It sounded like an angry wasp. It didn’t have any depth or articulation, I couldn’t play chords. It was a really hard experience for me.”

This was a familiar story for Queen back in the day – and it wasn’t just May who suffered. When recording their eponymous debut album at Trident Studios, Roger Taylor had to make do the studio’s drum kit and it killed his game.

Speaking in October last year at the launch of Queen’s rebuilt and restored debut, retitled Queen I, May said he could see Taylor struggling.

“I remember Roger getting angry because he was in such an unfamiliar situation,” said May. “He has been drumming for years, and he’s pretty good as a drummer, he can do a thing or two! Instead of playing in a room with his kit, which he knows inside out, suddenly he is in a tiny little room with a foreign drum kit, which was tiny and transparent as I remember.

“It was plastic, all covered in tape, literally covered in all this tape. They’d taken most of the skin off the bass drum and it’s got a cushion inside. He’s trying to play this thing and he hates it!”

“Yeah, there was no resonance or anything,” replied Taylor. “Not what you want.”

In 1971, Taylor had used his own drum set to record the demos for the album at De Lane Lea Studios, and though nothing fancy – his kit was cheap, too – they sounded much better. The drums sounded like Taylor. And that sound matters. Just as May was thrown by the Marshall, Taylor couldn’t play with his usual freedom.

“We were told: ‘This is the Trident sound’. But we didn't want the Trident sound. We wanted our sound,” said Taylor. “I really had a bad time playing that kit, which is why, actually, if you listen to the demos – which I played on my relatively cheap kit in De Lane Lea – it's a higher standard of drumming. It’s quite busy, but it makes sense. And it’s just better to listen to.”

Queen ultimately swapped out every single one of Taylor’s drum beats for the Queen I reissue. And May, well, he too made his choice, finding his sound with the Vox AC30 combo. With that, his treble booster, and his home-made Red Special, he had his tone. And Hendrix sure had his.

For the avoidance of doubt, May assures Guitarist that Hendrix and the Marshall did not disappoint.

“After we’d played, I stayed behind backstage and I looked through between the amps as Jimi came on stage, plugged into that same amp – and it sounded like a cataclysm,” said May.

You can read the full interview with May in the latest issue of Guitarist, available now via Magazines Direct.

Joe Satriani was recently asked about his the records that changed his life and the way he looked at the electric guitar, and it was no surprise that he cited Jimi Hendrix.

But what he had to say about Hendrix was perhaps a lesson for us all, because Satch cautioned that today’s players were being failed by a society that isn’t giving them “the space to express themselves”.

Speaking to Guitar Player, Satriani spoke of his awe upon hearing Hendrix for the first time. “It altered the DNA in my body,” he said. “Even before I could express it properly, I just always felt like there was something unique about Jimi Hendrix that I didn’t really hear from anybody else.”

Satriani made the comparison with today’s cohort of up-and-coming virtuosos, and argued that social media and prevailing pop-culture at large was not creating an environment conducive to developing the next Hendrix.

What made Hendrix great, argues Satriani, was that you could not hear the practice hours in his playing. There was no sense that you were listening to a player who had spent days on an alternate picking drill.

“He never played anything that sounded like an exercise,” said Satriani. “He never seemed to be demonstrating anything, unlike today. There are so many fantastic guitar players all over the world who are demonstrating – but it’s not their fault. It’s the fault of society that doesn’t really give them space to express themselves.”

Some would argue it was ever thus. After all who, since Hendrix, has electrified the instrument to the same degree? Jimmy Page? Eddie Van Halen? Such talents will always be rare. Satriani, however, seems to be getting at a deeper issue. Social media incentivises technical excellence; it also incentivises creative behaviours that are a million miles away from what Hendrix was doing with his instrument.

Social media requires attention to be captured at scale. This insatiable demand for more content places more pressure on players who want to maintain their online presence; they have to keep producing those 30-second clips Satriani is talking about, and all the effort expended to create this makes for less time to develop a deeper musical purpose.

Satriani said Electric Ladyland didn’t just bare Hendrix’s soul, it required his soul to sound as it did.

“He just sounded like music, like everything was just expression,” said Satriani. “I thought, Wow… that’s it. It’s all about expression.”

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2015, Satriani admitted Hendrix’s compositions and performances hit him so hard that he struggled to get through them in one sitting.

“I remember almost struggling to get through Third Stone From The Sun because it was so cathartic,” he said. “He used his guitar to represent the sounds of not only the world around him, but some sort of inner yearning, confusion and a whole range of emotions.

“Some days I had to take it first half and then the second half later in the day! He was the first guitarist to totally blow my mind and he continues to do so.”

In other Satriani news, the G3: 25th Anniversary Reunion Tour album is out today via earMUSIC, and captures sets from Satch, Steve Vai and Eric Johnson, and all three jamming together in the encore, during which, yes, they play some Hendrix, reinterpreting Spanish Castle Magic for three guitars.

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your boat this year.

Back in 1990, Guitarist magazine caught up with The Who guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend, who was characteristically frank and revealing. Here, we look back at this classic interview.

Best of 2024: What originally influenced you to become a player and a writer?

"My father had played the guitar when he was young and my uncle Jack had worked for Kalamazoo, before the war, developing guitar pickups. So there was a kind of family thing about the guitar, although it was considered something of an anomaly then.

"My father was in a dance band and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good. Then I hit eleven and decided I did want to try the guitar, so my grandmother bought me one.

"Then I started to examine what was happening, listening to Elvis Presley like all my friends. But to be honest I never really liked him, and also I think Scotty Moore was an aberration - it's not my idea of great playing.

"I think he was someone from another era who'd been drafted into rock and roll; he was competent but not brilliant. I know that's sacrilege to many people and I wouldn't want to slight him as an individual or as a player, because he's cited as a seminal influence by so many people, but for me it was more the sound of Nancy Whiskey."

Do you mean Freight Train?

"Yes, the sound of strumming guitars; such a glorious sound. And I like flamenco music and used to listen to a lot of that, and that's really where my style was born.

"I got my guitar for Christmas but I didn't learn it. Instead I bought myself a banjo, because in my class at school we had quite a good trad band, we even had a tuba player - and [The Who's bassist] John Entwistle was on trumpet. We were all very left-wing, or they were – I didn't know what politics was about. And they were always disappearing into sleeping bags with girls.

"So I picked up the banjo. And the players I looked at were the guys who played with Acker Bilk, Ken Colyer and Kenny Ball. English banjo players really were a law unto themselves – you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.

"But Acker Bilk's banjo had this very vital, bright sound. He used a G banjo with along scale and played it with lots of flourishes, and I copied that, until I went back to playing guitar a couple of years later.

"I didn't start to collect records and listen to guitar players properly until I went to art school, when I'd already been playing for five years. So my style was already formed and that's why I think it's so unique. I did start copying Chet Atkins when I was eighteen and I can do quite a good impersonation – not quite as good as Mark Knopfler, but I could give him a run for his money on Lambeth Walk, for example.

"But they're not in my blood, they're things that I learned but rapidly got tired of, and I became interested in the intuitive style that seemed to be R&B - like Jimmy Reed, who just played two shapes, but it was the depth in those two shapes that created the poetry."

Was your songwriting developing at the same time as all that?

"Yes, listening to R&B and to other players, and the creative process, were all part of the same thing. Prior to that I'd just been playing for amusement, not really accepting any challenges.

"In a way I regret not having had a formal beginning, because there are walls that I come up against, particularly in these days of players who are so brilliantly expressive and can play so fast. I can play much faster now than I used to, but I'm always ahead of my fingers, my vocabulary is limited and I can't read very well. So I wish I'd taken a more formal route."

Wouldn't that have changed the way you evolved as a musician?

"No. I think it might have structured my songwriting a bit better; I look back and see wasted songs because I was working so intuitively. There were lots of really lucky songs, like Won't Get Fooled Again or Behind Blue Eyes, which came out perfectly, but not through any understanding of song structure.

"Computers have since helped me a lot there - it's a bit like having always suffered from hay fever and then finding that your computer will analyse the pollen count. Analysis is a lost art, and to replace it with intuition is asking too much of intuition. Intuitive players and composers should have all their armoury before they start relying on intuition. That's when they'll make quantum jumps.

"Look at somebody like Prince. He has that armoury, he can write an orchestral score, sit at a piano and read a part, knock out a fairly good version of the Moonlight Sonata or study Gershwin if he likes. Then you've got this impetuous, imp-like character grafting all this intuitive waif-like feel - and you come up with that kind of magical quality."

So where does blues, rock 'n' roll and country fit into that?

"I think people are now looking at blues, rock and roll, country and folk music as a separate strain. But it's not, it's just that those four categories are the most disciplined forms of music that exist, with rock 'n' roll probably the most disciplined of the lot."

Because you're bound by certain limits?

"Yes, and they're very strict. A lot of them have now become rules which you break at your peril - people who broke the rock 'n' roll rules in the seventies are still smarting from the response."

But didn't bands like The Who push those boundaries and merge the feel of rock 'n' roll with true pop?

"The interesting thing is that rock 'n' roll was denied to The Who in a way. The Who were more a pop band than a rock band. Some people get confused when they read the history of The Who, or hear me talking about 'rock'.

"When I talk about rock I'm talking about the ideology that lay behind the emergence of new pop in the sixties - British pop. And I include in that people like The Beatles. That unleashed something which I'm very proud of, because it happened here and it came from us! I talk with Paul McCartney about when it all started, and it's fascinating to feel that you were the beginning of a movement that has outlasted Cubism!

"A lot of people will find that statement unbelievably pretentious, but the fact is that rock 'n' roll itself lasted as long as the pundits said it would - a couple of years. I mean, Elvis only made one rock 'n' roll album!

"Then there were a couple of albums from Bill Haley and one from Eddie Cochran. Buddy Holly isn't really rock 'n' roll at all, but you'd concede one album. And Jerry Lee Lewis said it - they were buried by the emergence of bands like The Beatles, who actually took the song form back to its romantic and sentimental post-war origins."

You mean the set middle eight and everything like that?

"That's right, much more melody involved, lyrics about love and sentimentality rather than about sex. And very few code words for sex, which rock 'n' roll was full of. We really didn't understand then – I don't think The Beatles understood better than anybody else what was really going on.

"We were quite naive and I think it produced a very innocent and refreshing form of music. And where the guitar fits into all this is as the symbol, the anchor, the only continuous line through that period and probably out to the present day.

"People occasionally try to revive the saxophone: the saxophone is the symbol of the eighties - bullshit! Even today, people hold saxophones like guitars! I'm not claiming superiority for the guitar, I'm just talking about what's been imposed."

The feedback and other noises that you extracted from your guitar, were these conscious efforts to do something new, or did you happen to turn your amp up too loudly one day and create it entirely by accident?

"No, I'm afraid I was an arty little sod and I was actually experimenting. I was at art school, surrounded by real intellectuals, people that were experimenting all the time. I was greatly impressed by all this and wanted to please these people.

"A lot of it was posing, trying to drag something out of the band that it was resisting - this is pre-Keith Moon. And as I got louder, John got louder by inventing the 4 x 12 speaker cabinet, which he did with somebody up at Marshall. Then I got a 4 x 12 cabinet and put it on a chair, so then he invented the 8 x 12 cabinet, to get louder than me, and then I invented the stack by getting two 4 x 12s and stacking them up.

"Marshall were outraged, and one day somebody from Marshall came and they were nagging me about the fact that the top cabinet was shifting and was going to fall off and get damaged, and I just said, 'So what?' and knocked it over! There was a tremendous kind of arrogance.

"I haven't actually shown up at any of Jim Marshall's anniversaries or anything because firstly I feel a bit guilty about the way we treated their products, but also because I never see anywhere that what they actually did was rip off the circuit of a Fender Bassman amplifier. I remember them doing it. I remember the amplifier in the shop, on the counter, This is the one we're copying. But of course, there was a revolution in the way that they built the stuff and the actual sound that it produced.

"Our experimentations were all to do with our irritation with the audience, who heckled if you played a rhythm and blues song that they didn't know. You'd get blokes in the back with their pints of beer shouting, 'What's all this rubbish? Play some Shane Fenton!' And we just got louder as a result. Then the squeaks and farts did start to occur in the feedback, but by that time I was already well along the path.

"When I broke my first guitar, I'd actually watched a guy called Malcolm Cecil, at Ealing Tech, where I was at High School, beat me to the punch. He went on to co-produce Innervisions for Stevie Wonder and he was bass player with the Johnny Scott Quintet.

"A girl in my class went out with the flautist and she invited Malcolm Cecil to come and give a talk. Halfway through the talk he started to get carried away, saying,' There are lots of different ways you can play the bass; you can play it like this, or like that'.

"And then he started to bang it. Somebody had been doing something on the stage with a saw, and it was still there, and he picked it up and said, You can even saw at the bass, and he started to saw through his strings and we all stood up and cheered! It made a fantastic noise, and the fact that he was sacrificing his strings! And he just carried on sawing, right through the strings and through the belly of the bass!

"The whole college was full of it, so that wall had been broken and it seemed perfect, natural for me, a couple of months later, to find myself doing the same thing. I saw myself as an R&B/ jazz musician, and also as an artist.

"I thought The Who would last about a year and I'd end up back in experimental music pursuing a career very much like Brian Eno, who, believe it or not, I was a primal influence on, from a lecture I did at Winchester when he was in the audience.

"It shows that radical experimentation really is worth pursuing. Because even though it might feel stupid and pretentious, if you do discover something new, it's your property and you're identified with it for ever.

"Other people stumbled on feedback at the same time as me. Jeff Beck was using it when Roger [Daltrey] went to see The Tridents rehearsing. He said, 'There's a shit-hot guitar player down the road and he's making sounds like you'. Then later, when we supported The Kinks, Dave Davies was adamant: 'I invented it, it wasn't John Lennon and it wasn't you!'

"I worshipped The Kinks and never let a bad word about them pass my lips, so I conceded. But I believe it was something people were discovering all over London. These big amps that Marshall were turning out – you couldn't stop the guitars feeding back!"

But you did try to turn it into something musical, didn't you?

"Oh yeah, you can hear it on the records. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, the solo, on the note A I would flick a harmonic, get it feeding back and then go 'dit-dit-dit-dar-dar' with the switch. And by standing at certain angles I could get incredible sounds out of it, some of which were just characteristics of the Rickenbacker body, which I stuffed with paper.

"You could control it and it could be very musical - certainly that sort of thing where you hit an open A chord and then take your fingers off the strings... the A string is still banging away but you're hearing the finger-off harmonics in the feedback.

"Then the vibrating A starts to stimulate harmonics in other strings and it's just an extraordinary sound, like an enormous plane. It's a wonderful, optimistic sound and that was something that happened because I was posing - I'd put my arms out, let go of the chord then find that the resulting noise was better."

Is it correct that The Kinks' single You Really Got Me influenced you to write Can't Explain to attract the attention of the Kinks' Producer?

"That's right. I had two songs, one called Talking Generation, which became My Generation, and Can't Explain. We picked Can't Explain as the first song to play him and I re-did the original demo with staccato chords. Listening to it, it's a craftsman-like pop record of the time and a lot of people's favourite Who record. Shel Talmy was producing a particular kind of sound in the studio, a particular kind of arrangement."

So you were into home demos even then?

"Yes, I actually started with tape recorders before I started with guitars. As well as the trad band, John Entwistle and I were also in a rock band. One of the guys had a tape recorder and we used to have such fun with it doing spoof radio shows and stuff like that, and I set my heart on getting one.

"My mum and dad had a junk shop, in which I worked, and inevitably a tape recorder came in – it was a Grundig or something. I couldn't dub on it, but I rapidly realised that all I needed was another tape machine and I'd be able to.

"It was Kit Lambert who set me up with a studio of my own. He was The Who's manager and he pushed me all the way. I had a flat above my folks' and I set a studio up in one of the rooms. He bought me two machines and although those demos are a little brittle-sounding they were the first things I ever did and they sound really good."

Did you regret you weren't The Who's singer?

"No, not really. There were actually periods when Roger left the group for several weeks and I was The Who's singer. Robert Plant talks about the fact that when he first saw us I was the singer. He came to see us three nights in a row and offered himself for the job, as did Steve Gibbons when he came to see us and Roger wasn't there. Obviously none of them thought I was any good!"

If asked what songs Pete Townshend writes, many people would say, aggressive songs. But some of them are really gentle...

"Well, everybody has different shades, some of which don't get seen by the public. But anybody who cares to go further can find that stuff. I find myself whining about how record companies put everybody into boxes, but we put ourselves into a box.

"If you've got something to say I think it's best to specialise, but when you are the product, you end up lumbered with the specialisation. It's not like running a factory and saying, We'll start by concentrating on the garden gates and then move on to the rest of the furniture. You say, I'm a garden gate.

"But then, when you've successfully sold yourself as that and you say, 'Oh, by the way, I'm not just a garden gate', people say, 'Oh shut up'. They don't want to know. There's only room for one garden gate and that's The Who."

When everybody else was after guitar hero status, you turned around and played a one-note solo on I Can See For Miles. Was that Townshend the anti-hero?

"Well, maybe. I'm sure it was a kind of defence mechanism. You have to remember that I knew Jimmy Page – Led Zeppelin weren't formed then but I'd seen him in various bands and if anything his playing slowed down as he got older! He was an extraordinary player, arrogant, flash...

"And Eric [Clapton], with the Yardbirds, used to play absolutely beautifully and he'd only been playing a year! And Jeff Beck, who always had that guitar quality of making the guitar sound like a voice. That was the kind of marketplace I was in, and although I hadn't been belted round the chops by Jimi Hendrix yet, I definitely didn't want to be competing with those players."

You say you were belted round the chops by Jimi Hendrix.

"It's very difficult now, just listening to records, to understand what all the fuss was about. He was such a visual performer There was something else, other than music, going on. Hendrix was a great player, but he wasn't really creative. He was dealing in other people's ideas, old blues things and tricks that were either borrowed from Eric – that Marshall kind of style – or the pyrotechnic things that he had caught off watching me.

"He used to follow the band around, watching, and then he suddenly appeared on stage doing all this stuff. But it was something else that made it extraordinary; he was just an extraordinary man. Talk to the women who came in contract with him - he literally enchanted them. And he was a pretty unremarkable kind of gnarled-looking guy, but he was a real enchanter.

"The thing that really stunned Eric and me was the way he took what we did and made it better. And I really started to try to play. I thought I'd never, ever be as great as he is but there's certainly no reason now why I shouldn't try. In fact I remember saying to Eric, I'm going to play him off the stage one day. But what Eric did was even more peculiar, he said, Well, I'm going to pretend that I am Jimi Hendrix!"

What statements were you making by smashing your guitars?

"The guitar smashing was basically marketing. I knew it was going to work, but I had to use real guitars and that was because I am primarily a musician and I wanted it to be real. I'm also an artist, and I'm not afraid to claim that what I do is art.

"But it couldn't be phoney, there had to be a kind of act of vengeance against the consumer society that was telling people like you and me that we had to have a Fender with those funny little Phillips screws on, otherwise we weren't real people. And I did the paper round for three years to buy my first real guitar!

"I lent it to John Entwistle one day and it was pinched and his mother gave me three quid! I think I swore then that I would never get attached to another instrument as long as I lived.

"When Rickenbacker made me a Signature model, a couple of guys in the factory weren't too happy about it – they felt it was a kind of jibe. But I don't have romantic misconceptions about musical instruments – they're just wood, probably far more useful as pulp than anything else.

"There are actually a couple of instruments that I would miss, and in fact a weird thing happened to the J-200 that I've had for a long time. Half way through Iron Man [Townshend's musical] it got wet here in the studio and exploded, and it was almost like the guitar getting back at me – the only guitar I really cared about dying on me!

"In The Witches of Eastwick, Jack Nicholson smashes up a Mercedes 600 saloon. I saved up for about five years for one of those once, and I thought, smashing it up in a movie! It could have been any car and it would have been just as effective."

Have you ever smashed a guitar off stage, in anger?

"Oh yes, quite a lot - once the principle is there..."

The greatest guitar player of them all was born on this day (27 November) in 1942.

Jimi Hendrix was an innovator and visionary whose pure artistry was expressed with fearless experimentation.

His genius has been an inspiration to countless guitarists across the years - and that’s certainly the case for Memphis-born blues player Eric Gales.

Like Jimi, Eric draws on all kinds of genres and styles to create a unique musical identity. And he even play right-handed Strat-style guitars upside down, just as Jimi did in his brilliant but all-too-brief career.

In a 2023 interview with Total Guitar, Eric explained why Jimi will never be topped in the annals of guitar greats...

“It’s all about innovation,” Eric said. “Jimi Hendrix was able to find new sounds by just sitting down and experimenting on his own.

“He found all these different techniques that seemed to work for him, things like using his thumb for bass notes over the neck. He had big hands so he was able to use his own physicality to help him accomplish whatever he was hearing in his head. And it feels like he never gave up… that guy would do whatever it took to make it happen!

“It’s almost impossible to comprehend just how innovative he was and how he ended up influencing me. I’d actually say there’s nothing he did that didn’t influence me – from his legendary tone to the way he used chords to writing and everything else. I could sit here all day long trying to explain his contributions to the world in terms of guitar playing, songwriting and even lyrics. He could express himself beautifully.

“Even all these years later, I’m still blown away by the sheer magnitude of how Hendrix was able to communicate and talk about things that were happening in his era, in his time. He was telling us about the world around him, and it was in a terrible state. He would channel all of that frustration and anger into his guitar.

“He was trying to emulate things that were going on during his time. It was an expression of mayhem, chaos and turmoil and what an awesome translation it was.

“When you read up on his life, you get an understanding of his backstory and it becomes clear he was trying to recreate the destruction and the uneasy state of the world at the time. It’s still going on all these decades later, we got a whole lot of chaos going on right now.

“Hendrix was translating the human experience through his guitar, from the eyes of all these different people across the world. But let’s not forget the beauty he saw in the world around him too – which you can hear on tracks like Little Wing and Angel.

“He was able to channel a delicate side that focused on his love for the people in his life and everything that inspired the beautiful sounds and colours in his mind. From his mind to his instrument to the studio speakers and finally the ears of the listener, it was pure poetry and not a task for the faint of heart. He was brave, beautiful and powerful.”

Eric cited Little Wing and Castles Made Of Sand as great examples of how Jimi was able to play rhythm and lead at the same time, playing licks within the chords.

“In my opinion that kind of stuff came from his Curtis Mayfield influence and what he took from the soul and RnB genres,” he explained. “Jimi would take some of those more gospel-style lines and experiment, twisting them in his own way. It led him down the road of finding songs like Little Wing and Castles Made Of Sand.

“That’s why he was such a big part of the guitar’s evolution. He was doing things that had never been done. And we’re supposed to try and evolve this thing – anyone that’s influenced by me will automatically end up taking on the players that inspired me and turn it all into something new.

“I don’t think Jimi was aware of his skills and the impact he’d end up leaving on this world. He was doing things that hadn’t been done prior to him, but of course he was also taking his own influences and moulding all of them into his own unique character.

“Inspiration is very, very powerful and can lead you into a room with the door closed for days. You will be sat there trying to emulate all these magical noises made by the people you are influenced by and it will take you in a new direction, quite often by randomly trying stuff and making a few mistakes along the way.

“That’s how it worked for me. So I’d listen to songs like Bold As Love, Remember and If Six Was Nine, trying my best to jam along to them. I also loved a lot of the lesser-known tracks like Peace In Mississippi.

“It’s easy to forget that this guy was experimenting with serious drop-tuning way back then. A lot of these new kids think drop-tuning is this new thing that just came out and it’s like, ‘No way, Jimi Hendrix was doing that stuff a long time ago!’

“All these different approaches and techniques were the sound of him getting the noises out of his head and onto the fretboard and ultimately through his amp cabinet. He’d intentionally bust his speakers to create distorted sounds. He had no boundaries when it came to trying things.

“I’ve often questioned myself about my own reckless abandon and a lot of that comes from Jimi. Basically, you’ll never know if you don’t try. That’s one of the most important lessons I learned from him. And who would have the guts to try all this stuff during a live show, not knowing what might happen next?

“I try to be like that myself. If I hear it, I’ll try to strike while the iron is as hot as it can be. You’ll never know what might happen until you try. I have a habit of executing things like that on the fly just like Hendrix did.

“He was always off-the-cuff. Every night was different. No solo was the same. That’s another thing I really learned from - make every night stand out and feel like that night!

“There was no stone left unturned when it came to unlocking the ideas in Jimi’s head. And he made you pay attention. He was the one to say, ‘Alright, I’m playing this guitar and you will all know who I am!’

“It’s like he came from this whole other planet. He was so ahead of his time, even now you listen to his recordings and they sound like something new and exciting.”

Eric talked about the personal connection he felt to Jimi as a left-handed player using right-handed Strat-style guitars upside down: “During Hendrix’s time, there weren’t a whole load of examples to go from. His technique and style was pure trial and error. He figured it all out on his own. There were no how-to books, YouTube videos, tablatures or anything like that. It was all nose-to-the-grind sitting down and conjuring up whatever he could. And boy, did he come up with some stuff!

“So there are similarities to me, in that sense. I didn’t grow up with a whole lot of examples, either. All the people I was influenced by were right-handed players. I wasn’t even paying attention to what way they were playing. I just knew I liked what I heard and I refused to quit until I figured it out.”

He discussed the influence of Jimi in his own music: “I can say there are plenty of conscious and non-conscious things I do directly out of the Hendrix book. I’d be the first to admit it and I’m not embarrassed to say it!

“I don’t care who you are, no matter what style you play, Hendrix will have influenced you somehow. There are some chordal things I do in the song Stand Up from my most recent record that you can link to his work on the Axis: Bold As Love, especially songs like Castles Made Of Sand.

“There’s also a heavier kind of influence on my song Survivor which has a If Six Was Nine sort of style to it. I’m sure there are a handful of songs on every record I’ve done that will have come from Hendrix’s world.”

In conclusion, Eric described Jimi as not only the greatest of all time - but also an enigma.

“He was hearing all these things in his head and would do whatever it took to make it come out of his fingers. There were no limitations – that’s what led to a lot of innovative things that still has the world with a huge question mark hanging over our heads, asking ourselves how and where the hell did this all come from?

“Until the end of time, we’re going to be wondering how this guy came up with this stuff. Why did he play like that? What was he thinking? I don’t have the answers... I just know I enjoy listening to his genius.”

When Lenny Kravitz first became a star in 1990 with his debut album Let Love Rule, he revealed how Jimi Hendrix’s former drummer Buddy Miles had promised to give him the famous guitar that Hendrix had played at Woodstock.

It was an offer that seemed too good to be true - and sadly for Lenny, that’s how it turned out.

As Lenny recalled, Miles had seen him perform the Hendrix classic If 6 Was 9 in concert, and was so impressed that he said that Lenny could have what was arguably Jimi’s most iconic guitar - the white 1968 Fender Stratocaster that he played at the Woodstock Festival on 18 August 1969.

In an interview with Sounds in May 1990, Lenny said: “He [Miles] offered me the guitar in front of 30 people, my band, crew, the bus driver. He said, ‘I'd really love you to have this.’ He came to my gig in Chicago, got on stage and held my arm up — that was like his approval of me.

"He was saying how I was the best thing since Jimi or whatever. We were hanging out and having a great time and he had no reason to try to impress anybody.

“He said, ‘It's in storage, I'm gonna get it.’ And the motherf**ker disappeared! It's kinda f**ked up. He didn't have to say it, nobody asked him for it, he didn't have to boast.

“You just don't tell a young kid like me who idolises Jimi Hendrix that you're gonna give him his guitar and then don't give it.

“I haven't lost anything but it's a big tease, man. It really bothered me."

Lenny reckoned he would have had no fears about playing that guitar. “Hell, no!” he said. “I'd play the shit out of it! I wouldn't be like, ‘Oh my God, I can't touch it.’ I'd play that f**ker!”

He also revealed how he had wanted Jimmy Page to play a solo on the song Fields Of Joy - but ended up having Slash play it.

“Slash approached me after one of my shows and we talked,” he recalled. “We went to high school together actually, but we really didn't know each other, we just passed each other. He was, like, ‘I really want to play on your record.’ And I was like, ‘I'll take your number and call you.’ And he was like, ‘Call me, don't bullsh*t me.’

“It was a solo which, before I met him, I wanted Jimmy Page to play. And I couldn't get him, so I thought Slash would be the next best cat. And he played his ass off on it. Unbelievable! It's the best I've ever heard him play.”

On 19 October, multi-million selling rock band Foreigner will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. The band was formed by guitarist Mick Jones in 1976, but he’d already had a taste of the big time 10 years earlier as backing musician for Johnny Hallyday, the singer known as ‘The French Elvis’. And that was how Mick got to see Jimi Hendrix on stage and got to know the man offstage.

In an interview with Outlaw magazine in 2019, Mick recalled: “Johnny Hallyday was doing a tour and we needed musicians to back him up, so we were out one night at a club in London, The Cromwellian, where [British jazz/rock star] Brian Auger was playing. Jimi got up to jam with him and he just tore the place apart.

"He was extraordinary. He had this charisma about him before he even picked up his guitar. And when he played a blues, it was unbelievable. I’d never heard or seen anything like it and nor had anybody else. So that evening, they did the deal in the club to take The Jimi Hendrix Experience to France for a month’s tour, opening for Johnny.”

As Mick remembered it, Johnny Hallyday’s fans were completely bemused by Hendrix’s performances.

"Those people didn’t know what hit them!” he laughed. “They were sitting there aghast. I’d watch Jimi every night from the side of the stage, and I was amazed. You had Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and all these great guitar players, but Jimi blew everybody’s socks off!”

Mick also recalled how different Hendrix was offstage. “He was beautiful,” Mick said. “Kind of shy offstage, very mellow and warm. He was on his own little planet, but we had a lot of fun together.”

An amazing haul of previously unreleased Jimi Hendrix recordings will be put up for auction on 15 November. And the jewel in the crown is a demo tape from 1968 featuring alternative versions of classic tracks Up From the Skies, Ain’t No Telling, Little Miss Lover and Stone Free.

This item alone is expected to reach a sale price of £200,000. And Mark Hochman, music consultant for the auctioneer, Propstore, explains what that kind of money will buy: “The kudos of having your own Jimi Hendrix songs which only you can listen to.”

The auction will be live-streamed from London, and will include various items of Hendrix memorabilia including a gold suit worn by the guitarist and the first professional contract for The Jimi Hendrix Experience. But the high value items are the 50 tapes of previously unreleased recordings, some of which are in boxes bearing song titles in Jimi’s handwriting.

The collection is being sold by Patricia “Trixie” Sullivan, who worked as the personal assistant to Hendrix’s manager Mike Jeffery between 1966 and 1973.

Mark Hochman says of the tracks on the 1968 demo tape: “These versions have never been heard before, circulated or broadcast and are very different in sound and length to the more common examples.

“They’re a lot tighter and smoother. You can hear more guitar, which is obviously what Hendrix was famous for. The experts who have visited and heard the recordings all agree that these are far superior to all the other versions of these tracks.”

For now, Jimi’s fans can only imagine what these versions sound like. Whether any of these recordings will ever be made available to the wider world is a matter for the winning bidder to negotiate with the Hendrix estate.

Epiphone has unveiled the latest top-of-the-range electric guitar from its collaboration with the Gibson Custom Shop and it is the Jimi Hendrix Love Drops Flying V, a stunning Ebony finished model with psychedelic floral graphics, and some serious firepower in the pickup department.

We’ll get to the pickups in a moment. First, the provenance of this instrument, a signature guitar that seemingly came out of nowhere and comes with the blessing of the Hendrix family, who took a hands-on role in its development.

As with the Inspired By Gibson Custom edition of Kirk Hammett’s Greeny 1959 Les Paul Standard, this is a high-end Epiphone guitar that could stand side-by-side with their US-made Gibson counterparts. 

It even has a pair of Custombuckers in the neck and bridge positions – one of the finest Gibson USA electric guitar pickups on the market – and under the hood you've got Mallory caps, CTS pots, and Switchcraft jacks and switches, all of which you might notice once you've stopped admiring the finish.

Like the original late ‘60s Flying V that Hendrix played between 1967 and ’69, its aesthetic is wholly in tune with the flower power zeitgeist of Woodstock, Monterey and the Isle of Wight festivals where Hendrix redefined popular culture with his incendiary playing.

Hendrix’s Gibson was originally a sunburst model, refinished in ebony, and ultimately decorated with his own artwork, reproduced here. This Epiphone version nails the look – especially with that ’67-style double-sided three-ply white pickguard, the black ‘Witch Hat’ style control knobs with silver reflector inserts. 

It even has a Maestro short vibrola and a LockTone Tune-O-Matic bridge with nylon saddles. And, appropriately, Epiphone is offering this model for left-handed players, too.

Okay, the fingerboard is laurel, not rosewood, but we’ll let that slide. Everything else is as you might expect; solid mahogany body, a chunky C profile neck, carved from a single piece of mahogany and glued to the body with a long heel. Jimi Hendrix’s signature is applied to the back of the headstock in gold. Dimensions are very much on brand with a 12” fingerboard radius and a 24.75” scale.

There is a set of Epiphone Deluxe tuners with ‘double ring’ Keystone buttons, a 43mm Graph Teq nut, and three strap buttons just in case any southpaws – or righthanders – fancy playing this guitar upside down as Hendrix did originally before getting his hands on a left-hander – the most iconic being his Isle Of Wight Flying V with gold hardware, that Billy Gibbons recently played on Jimmy Kimmel in 2022.

In 2020, Gibson released a super-limited run of Murphy Lab replicas of the Jimi Hendrix Isle Of Wight Flying V at a cool $9,999 apiece.

The good news is that the Jimi Hendrix Love Drops Flying V is a lot cheaper than that, and a lot easier to get your hands on. Priced £1,499, it is available now, and it ships in a hardshell guitar case, with a custom Hendrix guitar strap. For more details, head over to Epiphone.

Legendary recording engineer and producer Eddie Kramer is one of the few people who had an inside perspective on the remarkable talents and creative processes of Jimi Hendrix, and he helped him create the musical legacy we enjoy today. A new documentary on Electric Lady Studios will now explore this and more and we have an exclusive clip from it detailing the first song Kramer really dug into from inception with Hendrix at the studio.  

Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision details the New York studio's creation that was rooted in the guitar maverick's desire for a permanent recording base. In the exclusive clip above, Kramer details working on the ambitious Night Bird Flying at the New York studio during sessions in 1970.

"This is actually the first song that Jimi and I work on from scratch at Electric Lady," says Kramer in the clip above. "We've gone from England 1967 four-track to Record Plant 1968 12-track – a big jump, we skipped eight-track – so we come to Electric Lady and everything is 16 and I'll tell you what, there are so many tracks that you need to consider. Ideas that he put down and each one of them was great but what is the right one?

"You sometimes get into trouble because there are just too many choices and you have to figure out, right,  that really does not work over there, we've got to be selective."

Kramer then isolates some of the "many layers of guitars" in the track that showcase just how rapidly Hendrix's creative vision for the instrument was growing in scope, with overdubs that Hendrix went back to track in July and August after the initial Electric Lady session on 16 June 1970 with drummer and co-producer Mitch Mitchell alongside bassist Billy Cox.

The footage is a fascinating insight into how Hendrix was building parts on Night Bird Flying. "I mean the man's mind was just on so many different levels – it's amazing," marvels Kramer.

Check out the clip above to hear it in all its glory. Night Bird Flying was one of the few songs Hendrix would live to complete for his planned fourth album and has since appeared on a number of posthumous compilations, including the 1971 record Cry Of Love. 

The documentary Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision will be released on 13 September with Hendrix L.L.C., in partnership with Legacy Recordings and a deluxe box set will be available offering 29 tracks (38 of which are previously unreleased) that were recorded by the Jimi Hendrix Experience featuring Cox and Mitchell at Electric Lady Studios between June and August 1970. 

For more info and to preorder visit jimihendrix.com 

• Production legend Eddie Kramer on 11 career-defining records

Jimi Hendrix fans are in for a treat on 13 September with the launch of a deluxe Blu-ray and CD/vinyl box set that features 38 unreleased tracks and a film documenting the creation of Electric Lady Studios.

Released by Experience Hendrix/Legacy Recordings, Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision takes us back to the summer of 1970, when Hendrix was ensconced in the New York studio with his new backing band of Billy Cox on bass guitar and the returning Mitch Mitchell on drums (after a brief interregnum when Buddy Miles sat in for Band Of Gypsys). 

It collects all the tracks intended for Hendrix’s fourth studio album, posthumously released in 1997 as First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, plus bonus tracks Valleys Of Neptune, Pali Gap, and Lover Man. All have been given a new 5.1 surround sound mix. 

Inside the box, the give LPs or three CDs are accompanied by extensive liner notes and Hendrix’s own handwritten song drafts. The tracks features here were all recorded in the last four months before Hendrix’s death, on 18 September 1970. These tracks capture Hendrix’s work-in-progress, such as “Take 7” of Angel, which was captured on 23 July 23 1970, and has been shared to promote the box set.

Take 7 of Angel is more spare, more room for Hendrix's electric guitar to occupy. It was some time after Hendrix’s death that Mitchell added extra percussion to finish the song. Some of these tracks were completed in the company of Hendrix’s go-to producer and engineer.

Others are a little more rudimentary, such as the demo versions of Valleys Of Neptune and Heaven Has No Sorrow, which were captured on a four-track. You will also find alternate arrangements of Come Down Hard On Me and Belly Button Window that show which direction Hendrix’s musical curiosity was taking him.

The centrepiece of the box set, however, is the film itself. It will premiere on 9 August at the Quad, NYC, before receiving a limited release theatrically (see Electric Lady Studios for showtimes). It traces Electric Lady Studios back to the beginning, when it was just a derelict nightclub in Greenwich, NYC. Under the auspices of Kramer and architect/acoustician John Storyk. 

The goal was to have a resident studio that Hendrix could use any time. Steve Winwood, who was interviewed in the film, was there the first night it was open. 

Sadly, after leaving to play the Isle Of Wight Festival, Hendrix would never return. But many others did. As Janie Hendrix notes, the studio and those who tracked in it is part of her brother’s musical legacy, too. 

“My brother had a musical vision,” Janie Hendrix reflects. “With this project, it felt appropriate to shed light not only on his own music, but also on his lasting contribution of Electric Lady Studios. He was driven internally to build a home base where he could record everything he felt. While his life was cut short, so many other talented artists continue to express themselves within those magical walls on 52 West 8th Street.”

John Lennon, the Clash, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and U2 are just some of the artists who have checked in there over the years. In the picture above, Stevie Wonder is tracking Talking Book.

Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision was directed and produced by John McDermott, with Janie Hendrix and George Scott both sharing production credits.

The city of New York is getting in on the celebrations, too. On 8 August, they’ll be renaming West 8th Street between 6th Street and MacDougal Street, where Electric Lady Studios stands to this day, as “Jimi Hendrix Way”. Maybe it should be permanent. 

Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision is available to preorder now via Experience Hendrix/Legacy Recordings.

It’s been confirmed that there’s a new documentary on the way about Electric Lady in New York, the iconic studio that was originally set up by Jimi Hendrix.

Directed by John McDermott, who also made the Music, Money, Madness – Jimi Hendrix in Maui doc, Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision is set to have its premiere in New York next month, followed by a global release.

The film traces the origins of the project – from Hendrix’s initial purchase of a derelict Manhattan nightclub to its status as one of the world’s best-known studios. It will also include exclusive footage of Hendrix himself and interviews with Steve Winwood, who was there on its opening night, Experience bassist Billy Cox and producer Eddie Kramer, who was Director Of Engineering at the studio from its inception to 1974.

Electric Lady was born from Hendrix’s desire for a space where he could unwind and record on an 8-track. The original idea was for a club. As the doc reveals, he had been inspired by Cerebrum, a Greenwich Village club whose patrons wore flowing robes and were inundated by flashing lights, spectral images and swirling sound. Hendrix and his manager Michael Jeffery envisaged something similar, ‘an electric studio of participation’.

In the end, as Kramer recalls, this idea was shelved: “I knew at once that a club would be disastrous. I remember saying something like “You guys must be out your f***ing minds! Do you have any idea of what Jimi spends in studio time in a year? Let’s build the best studio in the world for him so when he walks in, he can relax and record whenever he wants.”

The studio was completed in June 1970 and Hendrix recorded much of the Cry Of Love album there before he left to play his final live shows in Europe that September. After his death, Electric Lady went on to be used by some of music’s biggest names: John Lennon, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Chic, AC/DC and The Clash have all recorded there.

Hendrix’s surviving sibling, Janie, is the co-producer and has said of the film: “[It] brings to light just how forward-thinking and inventive Jimi was in every aspect of his music, including production and recording.

“It was at Electric Lady Studios where he pushed beyond the musical limits of what was known, and he then opened the door to other musicians, allowing them the space to realise their own artistic hopes and dreams. My brother conceived something so amazing and so big that it has lived on for decades since its inception, serving as a passageway for hundreds of artists to bring their creativity to a waiting world audience.”

Jimi Hendrix was an unknown 22-year-old guitarist when he was part of Little Richard's backing band at Boston's Back Bay Theatre – then known as the Donnelly Theatre – on 12 May, 1965. Now a recently discovered recording of that night is up for bidding by RR Auction in Boston with an estimate value of $40,000+.

Hendrix was briefly part of Little Richard's backing band, The Upsetters, and the recording was engineered by Boston radio personality Little Walter DeVenne on a Scotch 190 reel-to-reel tape at 7.5 IPS. And it remained in DeVenne's personal archives ever since until its recent discovery.

"Hearing Jimi Hendrix attack the opening chords of I Saw Her Standing There makes your hair stand up," says Bobby Livingston, Executive Vice President at RR Auction. "Finding a live recording with both Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix is akin to discovering a musical holy grail."

The set features a mix of rock n' roll standards including Richards' take on Lucille and Shake A Hand, as well as hits from the Beatles. 

There are few known live recordings of the pre-fame Hendrix. At the time of the recording, he had only recently joined Little Richard's band after leaving the Isley Brothers band. His tenure ended up short-lived due to reported disagreements over Hendrix's spotlight-stealing stage antics and pay. 

As well as a 'psychedelic' sketch by Hendrix, RR Auction's lots also include a rare abstract painting of animals and musical notes by Bob Dylan from around 1968, when he lived in Woodstock, New York following his infamous motorcycle accident and The Basement Tapes recordings with The Band.

"Significantly, the painting includes a red outline of a man wearing a brimmed hat, echoing Dylan's self-stylization during the era, reminiscent of his appearance on the Nashville Skyline album cover," notes RR Auction. "The palette is alive with bright yellows, corals, and oranges, contrasted against a backdrop of earthy greens and browns. This piece is signed discreetly on the reverse 'Bob Dylan', confirming its authenticity."

At the time of writing, bids for the painting had reached $129,690. See more here, and follow the Hendrix bids here. 

The auction, set to end on 23 May, also features autographs by The Beatles and stage-used memorabilia from Prince's final tour.

More info at www.rrauction.com. 

As you’re learning guitar, you’ll hopefully hear other musicians talking about triads – it means they're privy to a key of chord knowledge that unlocks a world of creativity in your playing. And today you can learn it too.  

Triads are great ways to change up what you do with chords and add a new level of interest to your guitar playing, and in this lesson with chord boxes and video we’re going to dig into what they are and look at three great ways you can start using them today. 

What are triads and how can we get them from chords? 

A triad is a chord that has been distilled down to three notes. The bare essentials of that particular chord. 

In this lesson we’re going to be using an A major and A minor barre chord and extracting triads from these chords:

Even though these are chords that sit across all 6 strings of the guitar, there are only 3 different notes inside of each chord. These notes are referred to by their interval number in music theory, which is 1 3 5 for the major chord and 1 b3 5 for the minor chord. 

The triads we’re going to be looking at are made up of those three intervals. We are going to be removing all the duplicate notes from the chord.

You can find the first major triad that we’ll be using on the D, G and B strings:

To turn this into a minor triad you just flatten the 3rd which in this position is the note on the G string. This turns the triad into a minor triad:

There are also triads in this lesson that sit on the G, B and E strings. In the first triad, the lowest note of each triad is the root of the chord, but in these triads, the lowest note is the 3rd. These are known as inversions. This is when you have the same three notes of a chord but they are stacked in a different order.

All these triads are derived from the 6 string major and minor chords. There are triads all over the guitar, but when you’re new to triads, this is the easiest place to start. Start with triads that come from familiar chord shapes and then as you develop your knowledge, you can expand your triad use all around the fretboard.

1. Using triads to frame existing chord progressions

If you’re writing your own songs, or you play in a two-guitar band, triads are a great way to add some additional layers to your chord progressions.

In the video above you will see a simple chord progression made up of A, D and E chords. This idea applies to any progression regardless of complexity, but when you start integrating triads into your writing process it’s best to start simple to get a handle on the concept.

Using the triads, you can strum the chord progression with triads to add a layer in a higher register, or you can arpeggiate the triads to add some melodic movement over the top of the progression.

2. Using triads for funk 

Triads are perfect for playing funk!

When you start to play funk, each instrument occupies a specific frequency range in the sonic spectrum, while leaving room for the other instruments. The low end in a funk mix is typically occupied by the bass, and the lower mids can be occupied by the brass and horns.

The guitar does not take the lead role in funk, it becomes more of a rhythmic instrument with the occasional single-note line. Most funk guitar players will keep the rhythm tight and choppy without overplaying.

So when playing funk, you want to avoid doing full chords so you don’t creep into the frequency space of the other instruments.

This is what makes using triads an essential part of this style. Start playing funk rhythms with the higher triads on the G, B and E strings and leave the low end for other instruments in the mix. With these triads, you can do a few cool things to spice up your funk rhythms. 

The first is to do a semitone slide into the triad. Wherever the triad you’re playing is, start one fret lower and slide into your target chord on the start of your rhythmic phrase.

You can also experiment with chord extensions by using a free finger to add other notes in and out of the chord as you rhythmically play. There are theoretical ways to work out the correct notes, but in the early stages of using triads just experiment with the idea and let your ears tell you what sounds good.

3. Using triads for Hendrix/Mayer/Frusciante-style rhythm guitar

If you’re a fan of Jimi Hendrix, John Mayer or John Frusciante, you will no doubt have witnessed their approach to rhythm guitar. This method uses triads but with the addition of the thumb playing the root note on the low E string.

This is a great way to add the additional low-end reinforcement of a full chord while still removing some notes to free up some sonic space. The other major advantage to this, similar to the funk approach, is having a finger free to add some melodic lines and extensions over the top.

The triads look like this:

Once you’ve got your hands comfortable with these shapes, you can then use your little finger to start adding notes around the chords from the major or minor pentatonic scales based on the chord. 

This works across entire chord progressions. There is an example piece in the attached video using A, F#m, D and E all played with triad shapes and added lead notes over the top.

• Learn the ultimate Jimi Hendrix rhythm guitar chord lesson

It's no secret that actor Jason Momoa plays bass and guitar, has acquired some dream instruments and even got to jam with some of his heroes. But he's never been in a band or played a gig before. That all changed last night with the debut performance by his new trio called Oof Tatata (Momoa applied to trademark the name on 9 April). We say new, but the three musicians involved go way back. 

"I've known Kenny Dale and Mike Hayes for about 20 years and these guys taught me how to play music," said the Game Of Thrones alumni introducing the trio's set at the New Zealand wrap party at the end of filming for the long-awaited Minecraft film. "But I never wanted to play in a band, but now times have changed so this is the first show."

He picked a great occasion for the debut gig because fellow Minecraft castmates Danielle Brookes, and Jack Black (alongside Rita Ora) were on hand to help out – the latter two duetting on a celebratory take on Stevie Nicks' classic Edge OF Seventeen with Momoa on Fender Precision Bass, Hayes on Buddy Guy Strat and Dale on drums. 

Hayes was the lead singer for much of the set that included versions of The Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog, Led Zeppelin's In My Time Of Dying and Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child.

Black returned for a thunderous take on Black Sabbath's The Wizard before Brookes delighted the guests on a duet with Hayes of the Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove-penned country classic Tennessee Whiskey – most recently made famous by Chris Stapleton.   

Momoa swapped to a wonderfully worn-looking Jazz Bass for a take on Metallica's Whom The Bell Tolls fronted by Black and his mighty bellow. 

From the clip above, this trio has chops as well as star power and Momoa promises "more to come". We look forward to hearing it! 

• Minecraft: The Movie is due for release in 2025.

Whenever we talk about Jimi Hendrix, we always talk about his blazing lead guitar licks and wild on-stage antics, but underneath the wild guitar heroics lives a rhythm style that is unique and inimitable. 

Here are four chords that Hendrix used on a regular basis to craft his ferocious rhythmic style.

E7#9

This chord is known as The Hendrix Chord. It’s a dominant 7 chord with an added #9. The #9 is a note we typically view as a minor note, it’s also the note known as the b3, but played an octave higher.

This can most famously be heard in Purple Haze and is often paired with the open Low E string. 

C#/A

If we look at this chord based on the notes present, it’s just an A Major Chord with the major 3rd, C#, placed into the bass. However, the sound of this inversion is something Hendrix uses to great effect. Check out the intro for All Along the Watchtower to hear this in action.

Sus2 Triads

These sus2 triad shapes can be moved around easily. They’re rooted off the D string but the G is left muted. Sus2 chords are useful for creating tension inside a chord progression, but Hendrix would also use a series of these chords to create melody inside chord lines, as he does in Little Wing.

Barre Chords as Triads

Ok, so this one is two chords for the price of one. Hendrix would always play major and minor chords as a triad with his thumb playing the root note. This frees up the little finger to add extensions and embellishments. Many Hendrix songs have these chord shapes present, including Bold As Love.

• Learn the ultimate Jimi Hendrix rhythm guitar chord lesson

Though posthumous Jimi Hendrix releases have been fairly regular in recent years, even though the 'Acoustic Ladyland' recordings still haven't officially surfaced for release, the impression is that there isn't much left in the vault. But a new report by Mojo suggests that could be about to change; there's an 'untouched archive'.

It's part of the estate of Mike Jeffery – the late manager of The Animals and co-manager of Hendrix attached to more than his fair share of controversy. His office at 39 Gerrard Street in London’s West End was said to be crammed with memorabilia and recordings but when bailiffs visited they weren't interested in their potential value and it was all left on the floor before being discovered by Jeffery's former assistant and their current custodian Trixie Sullivan.

'Among the archive’s wealth of tapes, all in perfect condition, most are contemporaneous copies of recordings that Hendrix engineer Eddie Kramer suspects Experience Hendrix have in their library (“Jimi would have a copy, [producer] Chas [Chandler,co-manager and producer] would have one, and maybe one for Mike,” he says),' writes Mojo.

'One, a 7-inch box labelled in red biro in Hendrix’s own hand, contains early versions – possibly from Mayfair Studios in New York – of songs destined for Axis: Bold As Love, including thrillingly raw versions of Up From The Skies and Ain’t No Telling.'

The music magazine reports that representatives from Experience Hendrix (the company that manages the late guitar legend's estate) have been amongst potential buyers who were booked to view the collection of recordings, letters, telegrams, photos and even a  July 1970 Hawaii postcard from Hendrix to Sullivan.

“He was a good guy,” Sullivan remembers of Hendrix. “Very shy. Gentle. They all thought I was having an affair with him but I wasn’t. I wasn’t interested in any of the bands. They were cocky little sods most of them. I was like the big sister clipping them round the ears. Jimi – he was different. He had no idea how good he was.”

Read more at Mojo. 

A 1972 Fender Telecaster Custom that was played onstage by Keith Richards is going up for auction, alongside a guitar strap and assorted Rolling Stones tour ephemera.

The auction, which is being hosted by Gotta Have Rock and Roll, will also see a Vox wah pedal that was once used in anger by Jimi Hendrix go under the hammer.Starting bids for Hendrix’s wah are set at a cool $15,000, while Keef’s black Tele Custom – one of a number that have been at his disposal over the years – starts at $20,000.

The ’72 Telecaster Custom is instantly recognisable as a Keef guitar. It comes from the collection of Jim Callaghan, who was a veteran of the Rolling Stones security team. The story goes that Richards gifted Callaghan the Telecaster in 1990, when the band were clocking up the road miles on the Urban Jungle Tour in support of Steel Wheels, which was fresh in record stores across the world.

Sadly, there is no guitar capo included with the lot, but then if the budget stretches to a stage-played Keith Richards Telecaster then you can always pick one up at your local music store. Unlike the black Telecaster Custom on Richards’ regular rotation, this one has all six strings, so you might have to remove the lower E string and tune it to open G yourself for maximum Stones effect.

There is, however, plenty of case candy here to sweeten the deal. There is a Fender guitar strap, reportedly the one used by Richards himself, a crew jacket, a pair of crew T-shirts, tour itinerary and a number of passes. A certificate of authenticity and letter of provenance is also included. 

The guitar itself is early ‘70s Fender, complete with the F-stamped neck plate. The knobs are black skirted Strat style, with the dual volume, dual tone controls serving a Wide Range humbucker at the neck and a single-coil pickup at the bridge. 

This electric guitar is not too dissimilar to the American Vintage II 1977 Telecaster Custom, which would make a more than acceptable alternative. It is estimated to fetch between $50,000 and $100,000 but these things tend to get a little out of hand once the action heats up.

As for the Hendrix Vox wah, this is an Italian made, Clyde McCoy holy grail wah pedal, serial number 02683. The listing says it was used on the stage and studio, and judging by the pictures it has seen a lot of action. 

The pedal was owned by The Ghetto Fighers, aka Arthur and Albert Allen, the twins who performed backing vocals on tracks such as Dolly Dagger and Izabella, and has previously been auctioned via Julien’s Auctions in 2008 and 2011. 

Both lots will be auctioned on 12 April. For more details, head on over to Gotta Have Rock and Roll.

Eddie Kramer has been discussing his recent remixing and restoration work on the lost tapes and recordings of Jimi Hendrix, and has hinted that there may be more to come – and if that means using digital tools, such as AI, to retrieve the late electric guitar icon’s vocals out of a mix then he will do it.

Appearing on The Vinyl Guide Podcast, the legendary producer/engineer was asked by host Nate Goyer about his caseload, and whether the AI technologies that made recent headlines thanks to the Beatles’ Now And Then could be applied to Hendrix recordings. Kramer said why not? 

Though he was circumspect about using the word ‘AI’ with regards sound separation tools, he said that digital technology was presenting him will all kinds of possibilities, and that there was no shortage of tapes in the archive – or perhaps in the wild – that he would be itching to get to work on for Experience Hendrix. “There are tapes that I would love to get my hands on with John [McDermott] and Janie [Hendrix] and say, ‘Hey, maybe we can do X, or Y!’” he said. 

Doing X or Y might involve some kind of separation, as Kramer explained how many of those original analogue recordings were tracked to tracked to a four-track recorded, then mixed onto a second four-track, and back again. Separating this information will be key to to restoring it.

“When one uses the phrase ‘AI’ it is really advanced digital manipulation, and now the technology has become so evolved that here is a cassette tape of John [Lennon], playing piano, and now they are able to isolate the voice,” he said. “We have always had something similar – maybe not as good – but now as the technology has expanded we are really able to become quite clever about the quality that remains thereafter, and if it requires some king of AI manipulation, okay, that’s fine.

“But it’s a digital piece of information and now we can go, ‘Wow! John’s voice.’ Same thing with Hendrix. I mean, I’m sure if we found another tape where Jimi’s voice is buried, I know I could use something similar – which I have used before but now it’s going to be on a much higher-level.”

Goyer said that Kramer’s tone gave him hope that there was something “around the corner” but Kramer said it might be some time yet before we hear news of any forthcoming release. 

“I would hesitate to use ‘around the corner’ because that corner could be quite lengthy,” he said. “Hopefully, yes.”

Kramer’s latest work with Experience Hendrix brought us the the previously unheard and Hollywood Bowl set of 18 August 1967. That was one that he immediately knew he could work with. There could be more out there, including a rumoured recording from a New York club featuring Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. 

“That’s possible,” said Kramer. “Was it the nightclub that eventually became Electric Lady Studios? Originally it was called the Village Barn and then it became The Generation nightclub, that Jimi used to go down and jam a lot in, then it became the Electric Lady. But who knows!? Somebody has got a cassette somewhere! Tell them to contact me and we’ll fix it.”

By Kramer’s reckoning, there is more chance of tapes out there in the wild of Hendrix’s live recordings. Hendrix’s front-of-house engineer, Abe Jacob, would often record the set. Some of the tapes Kramer has got ahold of were in excellent condition, and just needed some TLC to convert from analogue to digital to apply a spit and shine on the mix.

“This was the case with Hollywood Bowl,” he said. “Some guy had a tape machine and was running it off the console and whoever was doing the front-of-house put it together and the stereo out of the board fed into the machine.”

You can hear the full conversation on The Vinyl Guide podcast and follow the show on Patreon. Kramer also has a wicked story about the legendary Bob Ludwig ‘Hot Mix’ of Led Zeppelin II, and shares some wonderful memories of Hendrix.

It would have been Jimi Hendrix's birthday today so to celebrate we're bringing you this archive piece - let's go back to the source...

1 October 1966. Cream are playing at the Central London Polytechnic in Regent Street. Eric Clapton had left John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in July, and since teaming up with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, Cream seemed invincible.

That three already well-established musicians should form a band was without precedent in British rock history. And, for Clapton, the powerhouse rhythm section of Bruce and Baker was the dream team. It allowed him the freedom to stretch out on long extended jams, an innovative format owing more to jazz than rock or blues - and the band had been taking audiences by storm.

Killing floor

An outsider jamming with Cream was unheard of, but, on this night, when manager Chas Chandler asked if new American guitarist Jimi Hendrix could sit in for a number, Clapton readily agreed.

Hendrix had only flown in from New York a week before, but thanks to Chandler’s clever PR, a huge buzz was already going around the London clubs.

Clapton couldn’t have anticipated what was about to unfold. “He was very, very flash - even in the dressing room. He stood in front of the mirror combing his hair and asked if he could jam. He played Killing Floor, a Howlin’ Wolf number I’d always wanted to play but which I’d never had the complete technique to do.”

The effect on Clapton was undoubtedly cataclysmic, shattering any preconceptions about blues guitar - and his confidence. Writer Keith Altham was present. “Hendrix blew into Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor at breakneck speed, just like that - stopped you in your tracks.”

Chas Chandler went backstage to find Clapton puffing nervously on a cigarette. “You never told me he was that fucking good,” Clapton is reported as saying. Chandler later recalled, “When we first met in New York, Jimi knew all about the guitarists in Britain and asked if he’d get to meet Eric Clapton. I told him that once he got over, he’d show Clapton how it was done, which of course he did.”

A night to remember 

The Blues Band and The Manfreds guitarist Tom McGuinness first met Clapton at an audition at The Station Hotel in Richmond in 1963 and hit it off immediately via a mutual love of the blues.

“We sort of chatted and said names to each other like Elmore James and Lowell Fulson… the fact that you could meet someone who knew these people was a real treat.”

McGuinness and Clapton formed a band, The Roosters, and it was during that time that Clapton first heard Freddie King.

“It was fine with the white rock ’n’ rollers until I heard Freddie King, then I was over the moon,” Clapton told Guitarist, speaking of his own musical development. “I knew that was where I belonged, finally. That was serious, proper guitar playing and I haven’t changed my mind ever since.”

Shortly afterwards, The Roosters disbanded, Clapton joined The Yardbirds and McGuinness went on to play with Manfred Mann.

“I didn’t see Eric play in between then and the Mayall album, because I was working every night,” says Tom.

“I was at a college gig in Manchester in 1966 and before the gig they were playing records while we were setting up and I heard this record and I thought, ‘Wow! Who is that amazing guitar player?’ and it was John Mayall’s new album [Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton] and I thought, ‘I didn’t know he was that good!’”

Flying with The Yardbirds 

To those who knew him, Eric Clapton’s eventual evolution to godlike guitar playing status must have seemed a divine right. The genesis of his fame began with The Yardbirds, a band of neatly suited mods from south London. In the wake of The Rolling Stones, the band’s gigs at Richmond’s Star Hotel and Crawdaddy Club had fast become the stuff of legend.

Fronted by singer and harmonica player Keith Relf, The Yardbirds excelled at hammering out frenetic takes of R&B anthems by heroes such as Chuck Berry and Slim Harpo, culminating their shows with the guitarists speeding up the neck in a manic tour de force.

Replacing guitarist Top Topham, 18-year-old Eric Clapton had joined the band in October 1963, bringing about an immediate quantum leap in both The Yardbirds’ sound and fortunes. Shortly after, German promoter Horst Lippmann arranged for the hard drinking, maverick blues harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson to work with the band.

A larger than life character, more used to the rigours of juke joints in his native Helena, Arkansas, Sonny Boy Williamson accompanied Lippmann to catch a Yardbirds show at Richmond’s Crawdaddy Club. After briefly jamming, he was enthusiastic at Lippmann’s suggestion that they should record.

On 8 December, Yardbirds manager Giorgio Gomelsky and engineer Keith Grant duly lugged gear into the club’s cramped kitchen for two nights of recording. As Clapton later admitted, backing the blues legend was a daunting prospect.

“He put us through some bloody hard paces. For a start, he expected us to know his tunes. He’d say, ‘We’re gonna do Fattening Frogs For Snakes, then kick it off, and, of course, some of the band had never heard those songs.

“I’d already decided before I met him [Sonny Boy], that he wasn’t one of the great blues artists; I think he sensed my arrogance and deliberately gave me a hard time. He put me on the spot at any possible occasion. It was just a nightmare and I asked for it.”

Listening to the album today, the band’s rhythms sound stilted, and Clapton’s solos on his Fiesta Red Telecaster, played through a Vox AC30, lack any fire.

Clapton lets loose

In March ’65, The Yardbirds’ single For Your Love was racing up the charts and, in a display of extraordinary idealism, Clapton left the band. “I got brainwashed with this commercial R&B. The whole thing got so businesslike with finances and promotion, we became machines instead of human beings,” he later said.

Over the next five years, fleeing fame and expectation would become an obvious character trait of Clapton’s, but little enticement was needed for him to join John Mayall & The Blues Breakers; Mayall was a blues purist, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the music and a record collection to match.

With Jimmy Page producing, Mayall’s first move was to record two songs for Andrew Oldham’s Immediate label, I’m Your Witchdoctor and the smouldering slow paced Telephone Blues. With Page’s sympathetic ear at the mixing desk, Clapton was given free rein to reproduce his live sound, the sustained, disembodied wail of his Gibson Les Paul howling over Mayall’s droning Hammond organ.

Page’s white-coated engineer, more used to working with big bands and orchestras, at first switched off his machine, stating that the guitar was unrecordable. He was unable to believe Clapton was producing his sound on purpose!

Soft Machine guitarist John Etheridge remembers seeing Clapton play on many occasions during the mid-1960s.

“When [The Kinks’] You Really Got Me came out, Dave Davies’ solo was considered to be the pinnacle of what people were doing at the time. It was kind of Chuck Berry on amphetamines - lots of notes and double-stopping, early 60s bending. I’d heard Five Live Yardbirds and I thought, ‘This guy’s okay…’ but I didn’t think about it much.”

To the Manor born

But in October 1965, on the recommendation of a friend, Etheridge went to see the Blues Breakers at the Manor House in Finsbury Park.

“I walked in and there was this guy standing there and he began playing and the whole of my life went 'kryyykkk', really. The reason why it was so great was that this was the first time I had heard anyone actually singing on the guitar.

“The whole emphasis, the whole vocalisation of it, the self-conscious intelligence and musicality of it was in another league, really. The sounds of it - and the vibrato. I’d heard Buddy Guy and BB King, but they had the implication of vibrato and Clapton completely refined it. The Les Paul into the Marshall was just incredible. The whole room was transfixed; everybody was completely blown away.”

When John Mayall & The Blues Breakers went into Decca’s West Hampstead studio, their small budget landed them in the undersized No 2 studio. To compound matters, producer Mike Vernon and engineer Gus Dudgeon were both comparative rookies and, as Vernon later recalled, unprepared for the difficulties they would encounter:

“John didn’t know what the hell was going on as far as technical problems were concerned; he was just interested in making music. And Eric would insist on playing loud, which we hadn’t had to contend with before.”

Clapton, in fact, resolutely refused to turn down his Marshall JTM45 combo. “He had a terrible time with the engineer,” drummer Hughie Flint recalled.

“He wanted his amp right up, which meant it was distorting and Gus was tearing his hair out. But Eric said, ‘No, I can’t play unless I play like I play on stage.’”

Proximity mics

In an interview with Guitarist in 1994, Clapton elaborated: “When I was doing that album with John Mayall, it was obvious that if you mic’d the amp too close it would sound awful, so you had to put the mic a long way away and get the room sound of that amp breaking up.”

Fortunately, Clapton’s obstinacy on the recording of what has become known as ‘The Beano Album’ (due to Eric reading the comic in the cover shot) produced what is undoubtedly one of the most influential albums in rock history: one that’s inspired not only blues players, but just about every rock guitarist of note, from Eddie Van Halen to Steve Hackett.

However, some people who had seen The Blues Breakers play live had a few mixed feelings. “We were disappointed with that record,” Etheridge continues. “It wasn’t nearly as good as the live show. People used to be in tears, because it was so beautiful and good; friends of mine would just be sobbing. That’s where ‘Clapton Is God’ came from. It wasn’t promo bullshit; he was!”

Clapton would leave the Blues Breakers two months later to form Cream. But with ‘Clapton Is God’ graffiti appearing on bus stops and walls around London, for John Mayall losing his star player was a bombshell.

He must have taken small satisfaction from the fact that Clapton helped create an album that ironically achieved higher chart success than Cream’s first record when it was released later that year.

But Clapton’s position as the greatest British blues guitarist seemed unassailable. “I was so deadly serious about what I was doing - I thought everyone else was either in it just to be on Top Of The Pops or Ready Steady Go! or to score girls or for some dodgy reason. I was in it to save the fucking world! I wanted to tell the world about blues or just get it right,” Eric said.

“I saw myself as being Buddy Guy, playing with a trio, but I was out of my depth with Jack and Ginger,” he later admitted privately. But whatever insecurities Clapton had about Cream - and he had some - they were soon compounded.

Hendrix has arrived

On Friday 25 November, the hurricane that was Jimi Hendrix finally hit. Manager Chas Chandler arranged a showcase gig at The Bag O’ Nails, a trendy Soho watering hole frequented by pop aristocracy such as Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones.

A huge buzz was already starting about this American guitarist; nothing like him had been seen or heard before. Despite Clapton’s undoubted guitar playing skill, he was hardly a showman. He stood stock still studying his fretboard with academic intensity.

Hendrix, on the other hand, used every trick in the book. Not only was his playing sensational, he was a consummate showman, picking his Fender Strat with his teeth, behind his back and humping it between his legs.

Hendrix was more than just a great musician, he was an American archetype, the latest in a lineage of hard-living, hard-rocking ramblers that included artists as musically diverse as Charlie Parker, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis: a lineage that stretched back to 1920s bluesman Charlie Patton. 

Singer Terry Reid set the scene: “We were all hanging out at The Bag O’ Nails, Keith [Richards], Mick [Jagger], Brian [Jones] come skipping through, all happy about something. Paul McCartney walks in, Jeff Beck. I thought, ‘What’s this? A bloody convention or something?’

“Here comes Jimi, wearing one of his military jackets, hair all over the place, pulls out his left-handed Stratocaster, beats it to hell, looks like he’s been chopping wood with it. He gets up all soft spoken and, all of a sudden, Whooor-raaawwrr! and he breaks into Wild Thing… and it was all over.

“There were guitar players weeping, they had to mop the floor up. He was piling it on, solo after solo. I could see everyone’s fillings dropping out. When he finished there was silence. Nobody knew what to do, everyone was dumbstruck, completely in shock.”

Jeff Beck was similarly devastated. “It wasn’t just his amazing blues playing I noticed, but his physical assault on the guitar; it was an explosive package. He hit me like an earthquake. I had to think long and hard about what I should do next.”

The aftermath

The late Guitarist writer Julian Piper was also a witness to Jimi’s UK landing: “I’d also seen the cataclysmic effect of a Jimi Hendrix performance,” he recalled.

These were the glory days of pop journalism, and Melody Maker’s Chris Welch penned the ‘Raver’s Column’, a goldmine of trivia about who was jamming with whom, who’d been spotted creeping into a recording studio in downtown Penge, and who was about to throw in the towel in a famous band - that sort of thing. Welch was the man on the spot.

“Sent to London for a week in 1966, I excitedly scanned ‘The Raver’. An entry read: ‘Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney and Brian Jones all hung out at Mayfair’s new 7 ½ Club to catch sensational newly arrived American guitarist, Jimi Hendrix. Catch him next week on Wednesday or Thursday, he’s going to be big!’

“That Wednesday night,” Julian continues, “with a friend in tow, I stumbled downstairs to sit on a long bench at the edge of the dance floor. The cellar couldn’t have held more than 40 people, and occupying almost all of the floor were two Marshall stacks and a drum kit. More people drifted in and then - wearing one of his military jackets, his face dwarfed by a huge bush of hair - a smiling Hendrix walked on carrying a white Fender Strat.

“I was transfixed; I can’t recall even noticing the arrival of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell. After briefly fiddling with his tuners, Jimi kicked into Rock Me Baby, the sound knocking you back in disbelief - a shattering wall of glorious controlled noise, mixing feedback and Eastern tonalities, all built around that familiar, hoary old blues riff. As we later found out, at this point Jimi was struggling for enough suitable material, and the band barely rehearsed.”

Noel Redding provided an intriguing insight into that time: “We learned to play as we went along. Right at the beginning, it was very short, intense gigs at small clubs in London with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones watching, which really freaked me out.

“There were never any setlists and we didn’t do soundchecks or hardly any rehearsing. That’s why there were some tunes we never played live, because, if we did, they’d just peter out or collapse.

“We’d just tune up on stage, say good evening to the audience and probably kick off with Killing Floor. It was all very spontaneous, and when we went on stage we had no idea what we were going to do.”

Dare to be different

Julian Piper picked up the story: “Although the record was not yet out, Hendrix played Hey Joe and Stone Free, but the highlight was his take on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone; somehow he managed to sing it and play all those wonderful doublestop licks from the original recording.

“At one point, he walked in our direction, leering - the guitar neck pointing suggestively at the face of the beautiful blonde girl sitting beside me, a person I realised was Marianne Faithfull. Beside her sat an expressionless Mick Jagger.

“After Jimi finished with his volcanic take on Killing Floor, he flung the Strat to the ground, creating a cacophony of feedback. Chas Chandler, who’d been sitting behind us, vaulted over to switch the amps off, leaving a stunned silence. An encore would have seemed redundant.”

Roger Mayer, who had been building effects pedals for Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck for several years (his Octavia pedal famously became a favourite of Jimi’s), also recalls the shocked aftermath:

“A few of them said they wanted to give up playing the guitar. They realised they’d seen someone so good that what they’d been doing was just a pale imitation of the real deal. That night exposed, in no uncertain terms, the weaknesses of their own guitar playing. It’s true of seeing any genius perform, and it showed the English guitar playing fraternity what could be done.

“In 1964, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page had started rolling forward the guitar sound, but it wasn’t until Jimi that we really went to town. Up until then it had all been very simple - a white man’s version of the blues, which was all very good, but didn’t shift the goal posts.”

Looking forward

“Jimi was used to playing behind Wilson Pickett, where he’d get an eight-bar break in a song if he was lucky,” continues Mayer.

“He came from the tight confines of the R&B bands with the shiny suits and the headliners out front. They didn’t want anyone in the back line to outshine them, and Jimi told me that was one of the reasons he got fired - he was always doing tricks, stealing the show.

“You should always dare to be different,” Mayer asserts. “Copying and looking over your shoulder is no good. You should be looking forward, not backwards. A lot of white man’s blues today is just boring!

“Blues, by definition, cannot be learned; you can feel it, but there’s no way a white person can feel it in the same way as a black person who grew up with it in their neighbourhood.”

Kathy's song

Probably no-one got to know Jimi Hendrix better than Kathy Etchingham, who met Jimi Hendrix soon after his arrival and was his girlfriend for three years. She remembers a man who wasn’t as supremely confident as his music might suggest:

“He had an enormous amount of confidence in his music, but, as an American in London, he was like a fish out of water. Chas Chandler thought, ‘Ah, we’ve got to get Jimi introduced onto the social scene,’ and that’s what he did. But in those early days we didn’t have any money, so we used to sit around a lot in the places we lived, planning out the future.

“We’d play games - card games, Monopoly, Scrabble - and, as time went on, we had more money and went out more often. Jimi certainly knew about English music before he came over, knew about Eric Clapton, admired John Mayall’s Blues Breakers and Cream.

“Jeff Beck’s name would come up often; in my mind, I’m sure he preferred Jeff’s playing to Eric’s. There was real rivalry between Jimi and Eric. When they did talk, people might’ve thought it was all very friendly, but it was a stilted, difficult conversation where they tried to be nice.

“To be fair, it was difficult for Eric; he was the leader of the gang then this character comes in from nowhere. When Jimi played at the London Polytechnic with Cream, Eric strolled confidently off, then Jimi started playing Killing Floor and you could see the look on their faces. Jimi walked offstage with this smirk; he knew exactly what he was doing.

“When Jimi went back to the States to play at Monterey,” Etchingham concludes, “it was a big deal for him. Perhaps he didn’t have the confidence to realise how important he’d become in Britain. But, at the same time, I think he knew he’d worked his way up quietly, and knew in his heart of hearts he could blow them all away.”

A blues legacy

From those first appearances in the UK, Jimi took the world by storm, and in 1967 his first album, Are You Experienced, would stand alongside The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and Cream’s Disraeli Gears as the great psychedelic masterpieces of the era.

In 1968, Cream disbanded, Eric Clapton later confessing: “My overall feeling is that it was a glorious mistake, and although it ended up being a wonderful thing, it was nothing like it was meant to be.

“But with Jimi, part of me wanted to run away and say, ‘Oh no - this is what I want to be,’ and part of me fell in love. But I just had to surrender and say, ‘This is fantastic.’”

The new live album, 'Jimi Hendrix Experience Los Angeles Forum: April 26, 1969' is out now on 2LP vinyl, CD and all digital platforms via Legacy Recordings (streaming links are here: https://hendrix.lnk.to/ForumPR). The new book, JIMI by Janie Hendrix and John McDermott is out 24th November.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience has a new live album coming out, bringing us previously unheard audio from the band’s 1967 set at the Hollywood Bowl, when they rocked up to support the Mamas & The Papas and sent 17,000 into a state of shock – and the latest track from the set, a helter-skelter cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, has been shared ahead of its release on 10 November.

They had never seen anything like it, Hendrix, throttling a Fender Stratocaster, backed by the dynamic rhythm section of Noel Redding on the bass guitar, Mitch Mitchell on the drums. They had never heard anything like it. And those of us who were not in attendance that warm, late summer’s day, on 18 August, have never had a chance to hear it because until now it had never been released, never bootlegged, making The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Hollywood Bowl August 18, 1967 essential listening for any Hendrix fan.

It is one of the last recordings of Hendrix before he broke the States. It is the sound of a band coming back of the canvas at a time when success had proved hard to come by. 

Their previous two singles flopped. Purple Haze never made the Top 50. Hey Joe didn’t even chart, which is remarkable to think on it now that given that it is so engrained in popular culture that it could be almost be considered naturally occurring ambience in guitar stores the world over.

But Hendrix represented a seismic change for electric guitar. Brian Ray, Paul McCartney’s long-time guitarist, was in attendance with his sister at the Hollywood Bowl. He says Hendrix’s physicality with the instrument changed everything..

“Here comes this guy and there's only three of them on stage and they have these afros and these wild, ornate, very theatrical clothes,” he said. “Jimi proceeds to shred, and it’s loud but it’s musical, and then it becomes so physical.

“He starts playing the guitar under his leg, and now it's behind his back, and now he’s playing it with his mouth, and now he’s on the ground on his knees and he's like humping it, and it, to me was mind blowing. It was sort of every human characteristic; it was beauty, grace, it was sexual, violent, gentle, it was just everything all at once in one band coming out of this one guy.”

Ray dug it. Not everyone could say the same thing. At least, not then. It would be interesting to hear how these Mamas & The Papas’ fans now look back on Hendrix.

Hendrix’s cover of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band is the second track to be shared from the album, with Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor released last month. 

Hendrix’s producer Eddie Kramer restored the audio for the album, with Bernie Grundman mastering it. The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Hollywood Bowl August 18, 1967 is available to preorder via Experience Hendrix, L.L.C. in partnership with Legacy Recordings.

At 8.30am on Monday 18 August 1969, a sleep-deprived Jimi Hendrix took to the stage in front of the audience of the Woodstock Festival carrying his now-legendary white Stratocaster. Despite his dislike of large audiences, breaking a string during Red House and his intense fatigue, the 26-year-old played an energetic set of cover versions, established classics and new pieces that would become staples of his emerging Band Of Gypsys project.

After his 12th tune – a rendition of Voodoo Chile segueing into Stepping Stone – Jimi paused and then, with sparse accompaniment, delivered his version of the American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. America’s involvement in Vietnam had dragged on for 14 years with dwindling support from the American public and Jimi’s rendition – replete with screaming feedback; whammy bar dips that mimicked bombs, explosions and artillery fire; and a few notes from The Last Post – spoke of the stark reality of war and echoed the growing resentment of the nation. 

With this performance, Jimi – himself a discharged US paratrooper – created an iconic moment for both the '60s generation and the electric guitar. As may be expected, the performance was not without criticism; dissent against the war was considered unpatriotic and anything other than a reverent rendition of the anthem was tantamount to flag burning.

Despite the deep-felt attachment many Americans have to The Star-Spangled Banner, it isn’t an American tune. It was, in fact, written in the 1760s by the British organist and composer John Stafford Smith (1750-1836) when he was just a teenager. Smith, an avid musicologist and score collector, wrote the tune for the ‘Anacreontic Society’ a London-based gentleman’s club of amateur musicians.

Named after the 6th century BC Greek poet Anacreon, the club shared a love of drinking and music, and hosted concerts with such master musicians as Joseph Haydn. Smith’s melody was given lyrics by Ralph Tomlinson – the club’s president – to form the Anacreontic Song, the official tune of the society. It became a popular drinking song, despite the melody being tricky to sing, even when sober.

Once imported to the US, it was popular and set to various lyrics – including, ironically, Francis Scott Key’s 1814 poem The Defence Of Fort McHenry, a rousing account of the US fort’s valiant defence against the bombardment of the British Army in the War of 1812. This mix of the British composer’s music and the US lawyer’s lyrics became known as The Star-Spangled Banner and was adopted officially by the US Navy in 1889, the President in 1916 and as America’s national anthem in 1931.

Although reinterpretations and stylistic renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner are now perfectly acceptable, even expected, when the public feels a line is crossed in performance, players can expect controversy. Hendrix was not the first nor the last to be criticised for ‘desecrating’ the piece: Jose Feliciano’s slow, guitar-strummed bluesy version performed for the 1968 World Series was met with deep criticism, for instance. To this day, any rendition that’s played with a sense of irony or comedy to it can still cause widespread offence. 

Even well-intentioned renditions are not without controversy when lyrics are forgotten or notes missed; Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 1985 slide guitar performance at a Houston Astros baseball game was fraught with memory slips and met with jeers from the audience.

In fact, performance errors are common; the tune is hard to sing, as a host of celebrities, athletes and other non-professional singers have found out to their horror while millions listened. The melody spans a wide octave-and-a-half range and includes a note from outside of the key (our arrangement is in G major, so the non-diatonic note is a C#). However, it is this heroically wide melodic range, the majestic leading tones and its rousing lyrics that, when played correctly, create such a powerful impression for the listener.

Despite the controversy surrounding Jimi’s version, electric guitar Star-Spangled Banner renditions are now common and widely accepted, even when delivered with extreme rock guitar tones and tricks. Ted Nugent colours the melody with Texan-style double-stops interspersed with wah-filtered trills, tremolo picking and bluesy runs. Slash takes a more stately, almost careful, approach with slow bends, wah-wah and long, sustained feedback.

Joe Satriani delivers the melody quite simply with his characteristic vocal-like tone. Eric Johnson, on the other hand, takes liberties with the tune, re-harmonising sections and elaborating the melody with his trademark exquisite pentatonic runs and wide interval patterns. 

Steve Vai performs the song with typical technical accuracy, but interjects virtuosic legato runs, harmonics, wild divebombs and abstract chord voicings. 

Dave Mustaine opts for a respectful, simple approach. Of course, Yngwie Malmsteen simply can’t resist embellishing the melody with wide vibrato, neo-classical trills and sweep-picked arpeggios.

• The ultimate Jimi Hendrix lead guitar lesson

New previously unreleased and never-before bootlegged concert footage from the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s 1967 performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles has been unearthed, is being released, and you can hear a track from it right now.

Jimi Hendrix Experience: Hollywood Bowl August 18, 1967 is that rare thing, a unicorn find for Hendrix obsessives, and the first track – an incendiary cover of Howlin’ Wolf classic Killing Floor – has been shared ahead of the album’s release on 10 November. 

This performance captures Hendrix on the cusp of greatness as his mastery of his Fender Stratocaster was cresting, and his sound would resonate with a wider audience and help define the pop-cultural zeitgeist of the decade. Here was the Jimi Hendrix Experience at one of the greatest venues on the US tour circuit, supporting the Mamas and the Papas. 

This was not his crowd, not yet. He had made a name for himself in the UK but that was yet to translate into anything tangible back home in the States. Nights like this were crucial, and soon to be rare. 

It would be one of the last opportunities Hendrix would have to introduce himself to an audience, 17,000-strong, and as such maybe there is a little more fire in the belly. 

There is certainly an edge to the way the Howlin’ Wolf blues standard is reinterpreted as a new era for electric guitar was being ushered in by players such as Hendrix, and he must have been bruised by his early failures in the States.

Backed by Mitch Mitchell on drums, Noel Redding on the bass guitar, the trio had recently inked a US record deal, turned in a live show for the ages at Monterey Pop, only to see new single Hey Joe fail to chart, with Purple Haze languishing outside the Top 50. A string of dates supporting the Monkees only served to disillusion Hendrix – that was a mismatch.

But the Jimi Hendrix Experience had their fans Stateside. Some of whom were very influential – not least, “Papa” John Phillips, leader of the Mamas and the Papas, who had helped put on Monterey, and at whose invitation the Jimi Hendrix Experience would perform on that sunny evening in Hollywood. 

Brian Ray, Paul McCartney’s long-time guitarist, was in the audience that night and recalls the crowd being bewildered by what they had saw. They had never seen anything like it.

“They haven't heard of Jimi Hendrix.  I'd never heard of Jimi Hendrix, and he couldn't be more opposite of The Mamas & The Papas as an act, culturally, physically, in every possible way he was the opposite,” says Ray. “Here comes this guy and there's only three of them on stage and they have these afros and these wild, ornate, very theatrical clothes. Jimi proceeds to shred, and it’s loud but it’s musical, and then it becomes so physical. 

“He starts playing the guitar under his leg, and now it’s behind his back, and now he’s playing it with his mouth, and now he’s on the ground on his knees and he's like humping it, and it, to me was mind blowing.”

Not everyone was of the same opinion. Polite applause greeted Hendrix and Co. But the dye had been cast. Those, such as Ray and his sister – who “were going bananas” – were paying attention to this new sound. And there would be more like them, and soon.

Jimi Hendrix Experience: Hollywood Bowl August 18, 1967 is being released by Experience Hendrix LLC in partnership with Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony. The set-list features performances of the then-unreleased Foxey Lady and Fire, with Hendrix leaning into his repertoire and covering Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone and Wild Thing, by the Troggs. 

When Ray recalls Hendrix “humping” the electric guitar, you can imagine it is to the prehistorical I-IV-V progression of Wild Thing.

Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas had been “mortified” by Hendrix’s performance at Monterey. She wasn’t quite ready to see an artist setting fire to his instrument with lighter fluid. “I really was shocked. I had no experience with this kind of rock and roll theatre,” she said Phillips. “And that was the first time I had ever seen it.” 

When she saw it again at the Hollywood Bowl, it all made sense. “I absolutely loved him,” she said. “He was a gentleman, he was lovely, he was funny.” 

There is also a new YouTube documentary charting Hendrix’s run from Monterey Pop to the Hollwood Bowl that you can check out above. Jimi Hendrix Experience: Hollywood Bowl August 18, 1967 is available to preorder now.

Master of the ‘80s medley Martin Miller has leaned upon his convening powers once more to recruit fusion legato master and fellow Ibanez signature artist Tom Quayle to perform Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, arranged for guitar.

The performance, posted to Miller’s YouTube channel, features two guitars and nothing else. Miller is on his Ibanez MMN1 signature guitar. Quayle is on his 21st-century T-style Ibanez TQMS1 in Celeste Blue. 

With just a little bit of grit when needed, their tones are on point, both players sending their electric guitar signal through Fractal amp modellers. Miller is using an FC-12 MkII foot controller – presumably with an Axe-Fx III – while Quayle is playing through an FM-9 amp modeller and multi-effects pedal. It sounds exquisite.

Miller and Quayle are regular collaborators, notably teaming up for a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing at Guitar Summit 2022. In 2018, they put on an epic run of Ibanez guitar clinics, playing 45 shows in 15 different countries. That’s a lot of time spent playing together, and their playing styles are ideally suited to adapting material like this.

Miller might insist that he is more rock than fusion yet he is nonetheless preternaturally disposed to blurring the boundaries between jazz, funk, soul and rock as he does here. 

The duet is a change of pace from the Martin Miller Session Band treatment that stitches together the biggest hits of Toto, A-Ha, Tears For Fears and more into 25-minute epic jams, though the approach is similar. 

Speaking to MusicRadar in March, Miller said that digging into material like that and adapting it for a full band is an education, and it has changed the way he approaches his own writing.

“Performing this kind of music is the greatest research and the greatest study,” said Miller. “When you immerse yourself in this music? When I put a medley together, I first of all spend a lot of time listening to an artist’s catalogue, then I listen to various versions of that same set of tunes, then I learn it on my instrument, and then play it with my band, and at the end of all of that I mix it, so I listen to all the different parts in isolation.

“That is just fantastic study material, and that informs my own music to such a large degree. I can’t imagine what my compositional skill would without that. I took so much away from that. Now, putting this stuff together, for an individual medley it is all about the pacing. How do you hold the attention for 25 minutes?”

On Billie Jean, both Quayle and Miller take turns to solo, and to handle the melody, with Miller adapting the vocal melody first, and then transitioning this into the first solo just after three minutes in. Quayle takes over a minute and a half later.

It speaks to how much musical information is carried in the original arrangement – and Jackson’s vocal – that Miller and Quayle can build out from that to this, expanding it without it ever not sounding like Billie Jean. 

If you are brave enough to try this at home, and your chops are up to it, Miller has made the tablature available for this arrangement for five bucks.

If there’s one thing to heed to when executing it is to pay attention to your intonation. Miller’s is unimpeachable, and he advises us all that this can make the difference in performance and we don’t focus on it enough.

“I think us guitar players need to talk about this a lot more because never – either in my conservatory or my college years – has the topic of intonation been brought up,” said Miller. “Whenever I, for example, told my professor, ‘My intonation is a little off here.’ ‘What do you mean, the bending?’ No, no, no, the pressure of your hand and the position of your hand affects the intonation. 

“The better the form of your left hand, the better your intonation will be. And you can tell. It doesn’t matter what instrument you give them, if someone is not a professional player, or is a player who is early on their discovery of the instrument, you can tell. They constantly sound out of tune. Then you hand that same instrument to a pro, and suddenly everything is in tune, and not just with the bends and the vibrato.”

Subscribe to Martin Miller on YouTube here. Miller’s solo album, Maze Of My Mind, is out now.

Jimi Hendrix might have changed the lives of generations of guitar players – a peerless talent the likes of which we might never see again – but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Back when he was playing sideman and picking up gigs in backing bands, Hendrix’s preternatural abilities with an electric guitar could on occasion get him into hot water. 

Speaking to The Times, Graham Nash recalled an in incident back in 1965 when they were all young colts. He was touring with The Hollies, taking Merseybeat Stateside and hoping to capitalise on the recent success of the Beatles post-Ed Sullivan. 

The Hollies were playing with the livewire rock ’n’ roll godfather Little Richard at the Brooklyn Paramount and after watching a typically kinetic, high-energy headlining set from Little Richard he witnessed the sight of what happens to the backing band when they pull focus away from the star. Hendrix’s showmanship ran away with him and Little Richard was not impressed.

“I remember watching the end of Little Richard’s show,” said Nash, “and he came off screaming, ‘Don’t you ever play your fucking guitar behind your head again, don’t you upstage me, I’m fucking Little Richard.’” 

Hendrix’s career was gathering a little steam by then. He was doing his time in the chitlin’ circuit. He played back-up to the Isley Brothers. He still lived by the seat of his pants and was penniless when he landed the Little Richard gig, two gigs a night. 

But the times were a-changing as the ‘60s aesthetic matured, peace, love and all that jazz. Little Richard did not have the temperament for all that. Hendrix playing the guitar behind his head was always going to be an explosive provocation – what would he have done if he had set the guitar on fire? 

As things were, Hendrix recalled Little Richard as a hard task master. In Steven Roby’s Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews And Encounters With Jimi Hendrix, the man himself discussed the tensions when taking the Little Richard gig, and what was required of the backing band. The ‘hippy gear’ was verboten. 

“Little Richard didn’t want anyone to look better than him,” said Hendrix. “I was best of friends with Glen Willings, another guy in the band, and we used to buy the same kind of stuff, and wear it onstage.

“After the show one night, Little Richard said, ‘Brothers, we’ve got to have a meeting. I am Little Richard and I am the king of rock and rhythm and I am the one who’s going to look pretty onstage. Glen and Jimi, will you please turn in those shirts or else you will have to suffer the consequences of a fine.’”

Hendrix might have avoided a fine for inappropriate stage wear but when he told Little Richard he wasn’t cutting his hair for anyone, it was a five-dollar fine. Hendrix said, “Everyone on that tour was brainwashed.”

Looking back on that era, Nash told The Times that he doesn’t think Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young will be remembered by future generations. Neil Young might be remembered, but few others.

“I think in 50 years when people look back at what happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s they will remember the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and they’ll remember Joni [Mitchell],” he said. “I don’t think they’ll ever remember CSNY at all, Neil [Young], maybe.”

They might even remember Hendrix for wearing loud shirts and playing his Fender Stratocaster behind his head. Little Richard was right. It was quite the show. If you want to know what Little Richard thought about Hendrix looking back, check out the video below – “He used to make my big toe shoot up in my boot! He did it so good."

Graham Nash's new album, Now, is out now via BMG.

The US tends to make the weather when it comes to popular culture but there have been a few exceptions in music history, one such notable incidence occuring in 1967 when it found itself behind the curve on the electric guitar magic of Jimi Hendrix. 

The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s revolutionary debut album, Are You Experienced, was released in May 1967 in the UK, peaking at number two in the charts before receiving a wider release in the States in August, and in the interim it became the kind of record that only those in the know had familiarised themselves with. 

Billy Gibbons, then of the Moving Sidewalks, was one. He had an English girlfriend who turned him onto Hendrix, and would even have the chutzpah – and the talent – to put some covers from Are You Experienced in the set when he toured in support of Hendrix. Game recognises game; Hendrix approved. 

But consider this: even the family hadn’t heard the record, and when they did, not all recognised him right way. As Jimi’s younger sister and president and CEO of Experience Hendrix, Janie Hendrix, revealed to Nate Goyer on The Vinyl Guide podcast, the family’s first experience of Are You Experienced was when they heard it coming through the walls at their Seattle home. And they had the hippies to thank for the introduction.

• 5 songs guitarists need to hear by… Jimi Hendrix

“Right, so we lived in a triplex, and there were the hippy girls – that’s what my parents called them – two girls who lived next door,” she recalled. “It’s like a house that is divided by three. The walls were thin, and we hear music. I remember dad saying, ‘That’s Jimi playing. I don’t know who’s singing, but that’s Jimi playing.’ Because in my dad’s mind, he didn’t think Jimi could sing. [Laughs] 

“My mom goes next door, she knocks on the door and says, ‘Can we ask you what record you’re playing?’ And she shows here, and it was the Are You Experienced record, and that’s how we acquired our first Are You Experienced album, because our mom said, ‘That’s our son!’ And the hippy girl said, ‘Oh my god! Here! Take it! We’ll go buy another one.’ I think he relied on his management to send us records but they never did.”

Goyer and Hendrix’s conversation covered a wide range of topics, from the archive process, and how Experience Hendrix acquires audio materials to be restored, ephemera to be preserved, to Jimi’s evolution as an artist, working with Eddie Kramer, and the pivotal moments in his career.

Tantalisingly, she hinted that there will be more archive materials to be shared, and that more unheard recordings that are ripe for restoration.

“Jimi worked really hard,” she said. “My dad had a really great work ethic, which he passed on to Jimi and myself. [Jimi] was constantly working on his music, whether it was in his apartment on a four-track, or if he was in the studio, or just if he was on the road in a hotel room. 

“Also, there were a lot of shows, a lot of live shows, and not all were recorded but we have put the word out, ‘If you were at this concert, even if you recorded it from your hand-held tape recorder or whatever, we would like to have that.’”

Such are the advances in technology, even beat-up old recordings might yield some gold, and Experience Hendrix has Hendrix’s engineer, Eddie Kramer, on hand to help fix them up.

“Eddie [Kramer] is a master in the studio as far as cleaning things up,” she said. “I think technology has finally caught up with Jimi, so cleaning up tape has become much better than it was decades ago. Whatever we can get our hands on. 

“There is a lot out there still that we don’t have that we would love to have in our collection and be able to clean it up and present it to the fans the way it should be heard and enjoyed.”

But might we see knew deluxe reissues of currently released albums? Janie Hendrix did not elaborate, but when conversation turned to her brother’s friendship with Frank Zappa, she mentioned that work on converting Hendrix material to Dolby Atmos.

Most recently, Experience Hendrix celebrated Jimi Hendrix at 80 with the release of  Jimi Hendrix Experience – Los Angeles Forum April 26, 1969, through Legacy Recordings, and Jimi, a special edition illustrated hardcover authored by Janie Hendrix and John McDermott.

You can check out the full conversation above and subscribe to The Vinyl Guide here.

JIMI AT 80: It would have been Jimi Hendrix's 80th birthday this week and, to celebrate, over the next few days MusicRadar will be running stories about this legendary musician and his impact on the world of guitar playing. Let's go back to the source...

Considering he departed this plane at just 27, Jimi Hendrix’s catalogue is thankfully vast, probably due to him playing live or recording seemingly every day of his life. 

Consequently, there is a surfeit of lesser-heard Hendrix out there and a treasure trove of insane guitar pyrotechnics on obscure live recordings (see the official Dagger Music label). 

Also, thanks to the ceaseless trawl through his archive of studio material that’s now entering its sixth decade, you can now hear Hendrix in all manner of musical contexts. 

Should you wish to doggedly sift through music its creators never intended for public consumption, you can spend hours and hours piecing together a detailed mosaic of his musicianship from intimate home recordings, such as Suddenly November Morning from the mythical Black Gold tapes, on West Coast Seattle Boy, to endless jams, demos and unfinished recording experiments such as Valleys Of Neptune, People, Hell And Angels, Both Sides Of The Sky and many, many more. 

So out of this avalanche of music, can any of his tracks be classed as underrated and overlooked?

• The ultimate Jimi Hendrix lead guitar lesson

As ever, it depends which aspect of his genius you feel like prioritising. If a guitarist is only as good as their riffs, then Hendrix is surely never given enough kudos for the endless supply of premium-grade specimens in his catalogue. 

Does Hendrix the blues-rocker ever get the songwriting praise he deserves for the sinuous reimagining of RnB chord progressions in Little Wing, Angel or Long Hot Summer Night? Is Hendrix the firework-detonating, in-your-face guitar slinger ever fully appreciated for the dynamic solo-acoustic Delta stylings of his 12-string version of Hear My Train A Comin’? 

For that matter, Jimi the recording-studio polymath is underacknowledged for his constant willingness to explore newly emerging technologies and techniques to deliver avant-garde soundscapes. 

Listen to the backwards guitars of Are You Experienced?, the atmospherics of Moon, Turn The Tides… Gently Gently Away and the mad harmonies of Night Bird Flying for just three varied examples.

Nor, perhaps, is the supposedly apolitical ex-paratrooper turned psychedelicist fully credited for the overt conscientious objection of Machine Gun, dedicated “to the soldiers fighting in Chicago, Milwaukee, New York… and Vietnam”.

• How Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton changed guitar forever

In Starting At Zero: His Own Story, a 2014 book of his collected quotes and wisdom, the 27-year-old Hendrix riffed on the idea of his own funeral as a jam session featuring the likes of Miles Davis. 

“It’s funny the way people love the dead. You have to die before they think you are worth anything. Once you are dead, you are made for life,” he mused, ending the thought with a simple plea. “When I die, just keep on playing the records.” 

Well, guitarists surely will keep coming back to hear them – even the underrated ones, even when everyone else has forgotten.

1. One Rainy Wish, from Axis: Bold As Love (1967)

Hiding in plain sight behind a distractingly poetic lyric and a time-signature change from 3/4 in the verse to 4/4 in the chorus – this was one of the songs containing elements that came to its creator in a dream – we have not just one, but at least two of the many relatively overlooked guitar parts from the Hendrix canon. 

The rhythm part that makes up the foundation of the song’s verse is a fine example of how Hendrix could embellish chords so creatively. The extra hammer-ons, pull-offs, legato notes and sliding doublestops he adds to familiar shapes come courtesy of the signature fluid rhythm style he based in part on what he learned while touring with Curtis Mayfield. 

Providing the higher-pitched melodic flourishes is an extraordinary effect-washed Octavia part which metamorphoses throughout, its volume swelling while its EQ phases and swirls. 

One Rainy Wish was recorded on the same day as our next selection… during the same Axis: Bold As Love session, the ultra-prolific Hendrix Experience also worked on recordings of EXP and Up From The Skies, as well as the title track for the album.

2. Castles Made Of Sand, from Axis: Bold As Love (1967)

The stark, exposed blending of rhythm and lead guitar in the song’s main part would be enough on its own to assure this of classic Hendrix status. 

That’s before you even consider the beautifully understated delivery of the enigmatic autobiographical lyrics, the sensational backwards guitar – a mind-bendingly musical technique in Jimi’s hands that’s showcased more directly in this song than anywhere else in his catalogue – and finally, the sliding sus2 chord figure ascending to the heavens that ends the song in a ghostly shimmer of reverb. 

All things considered, it seems a shame this understated masterpiece doesn’t enjoy quite the same universal reverence as fellow Hendrix ballads Angel and Little Wing. There’s an instrumental take on West Coast Seattle Boy with a slightly more urgent rhythm part and no reverse guitar stuff that’s worth a listen to compare and contrast. 

3. Crosstown Traffic, from Electric Ladyland (1968)

Hendrix hated his own voice and always wanted it lower in the mix; producer Chas Chandler recognised the incredible musicality of its phrasing and, after arguing the toss, put it up front and centre anyway… a good job he did, when it comes to tracks like this. 

Listen to the attention to detail in the overlapping rhythms in this song, the push and pull, the simultaneous landing of the instruments, the rhythmic conversation between the disparate parts – this is the indefinable magic that separates the great from the merely good. It’s drawing from the same well you hear on its earlier prototype, Spanish Castle Magic. 

Recorded at London’s Olympic Studios, Jimi was in experimental mood, famously improvising with a cellophane and comb instrument to create the kazoo-like effect on the main riff and also playing the driving piano bassline for good measure. Unified layers of guitars build up the excitement, tension and release, but until you hear them in isolation, you can barely pick out their individual details – even though they’re made up of chord stabs, unison bends, doublestops, dual-string builds, the repertoire of accompanist’s tricks Hendrix learned from his time as an RnB sideman. 

4. Peace In Mississippi, from The Jimi Hendrix Experience (purple box set, 2013)

Hendrix is often proclaimed as a godfather of hard rock and metal, with connecting lines drawn automatically between him and Zeppelin, Sabbath and Purple. The notion of a direct lineage is an oversimplification, yet it’s on sledgehammer jams such as Peace In Mississippi where the idea finds most credibility. 

Recorded in October 1968 in TTG Studios in California with the original Experience line-up and released in various edits, there’s an infamous version on 1975’s Crash Landing which saw Alan Douglas wipe Noel and Mitch altogether in favour of overdubs from four different musicians. 

The official, original seven-minute version, though, is a greasy bucket of fuzz and cascading feedback, alternating chunky low-slung riffs with redlining distorted bluesey lead breaks, before ending in a proto-Van Halen whammy-bar freakout. It’s that winning formula heard on countless Jimi jams, including Voodoo Child (Slight Return), Machine Gun and others – just angrier, less considered, more anarchic. 

Sometimes, you just have to make some noise, and Hendrix shows here just how inventive he could be while employing route one tactics. 

Odd trivia: Crash Landing was the first album bought by The Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne. He told Uncut: “I bought this as nobody I knew owned it. So I was filled with glee, but that soon faded after putting it on. There’s one great, crazy, distorted song, Peace In Mississippi, but I’m not sure if Hendrix is even playing on it!” 

He is.

5. 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be), from Electric Ladyland (1968)

Hendrix devoured science-fiction novels, both as a child and when he came to London with Chas Chandler in 1966. Songs such as Third Stone From The Sun and Up From The Skies contextualised his futuristic-sounding guitar experiments, and sci-fi was a subtle source of inspiration elsewhere in his early catalogue: the term ‘purple haze’ came from a 1966 Philip José Farmer novel called Night Of Light, for example. Jimi called these sonic experiments of his “science-fiction rock and roll”. 

Fortunately for us, when he came to record Electric Ladyland at New York’s state of the art Record Plant Studio in 1968, with its 12-track recording technology and trusted engineer Eddie Kramer along for the ride, he finally had the time and technology at his disposal to begin bringing the magic of his interior soundscapes properly to life. 

Understandably, 1983… is often noted for its spectacular lyric – a poetic apocalyptic vision of a couple escaping a war-ravaged dystopia and beginning a new life under the sea. Yet perhaps because the song is so freeform and mutates through so many different moods and musical phases across its 13:39 runtime, the details of what Kramer described as a “huge sonic painting” are usually lost in an appreciation of the whole. 

Yet even if you leave aside the pioneering atmospheric sound effects, created in the studio through various techniques including tape-speed changes, backwards instruments, VFOs, tape-delayed vocals and feedback, there are still innovations galore.

There are several astonishing guitar solos and riffs (cocked-wah at 4:00, gentle underwater legato Strat sounds at 5:54, Killing Floor-esque riffing at 10:43, all-out-fuzz war at 12:20, funky rapid wah at 13:16, among many, many more) which show the tremendous diversity of his style but are rarely acknowledged. 

So that’s our final selection for underrated Jimi songs… Hendrix’s evergreen sci-fi symphony, the clearest, most-fully realised glimpse we have into the mind of a true sonic innovator.

• Watch Christone "Kingfish" Ingram play Jimi's Red House... on the roof of Hendrix's last-known house

The new live album, 'Jimi Hendrix Experience Los Angeles Forum: April 26, 1969' is out now on 2LP vinyl, CD and all digital platforms via Legacy Recordings (streaming links are here: https://hendrix.lnk.to/ForumPR). The new book, JIMI by Janie Hendrix and John McDermott is out 24th November.

Billy Gibbons will honour Jimi Hendrix this Thursday, 17 November, when he takes to the stage on Jimmy Kimmel Live to perform classic Hendrix tracks on the late guitar icon’s Gibson Flying V.

This rare public occasion of one of the world's greatest players playing one of the world's most storied electric guitars is part of the Hendrix at 80 celebrations, which will also see the release of a the Legacy Recordings live album Jimi Hendrix Experience – Los Angeles Forum April 26, 1969, on CD and LP, on 18 November. 

There is no word on what tracks Gibbons and Kimmel’s band are likely to cover, but way back in the day when the Jimi Hendrix Experience took Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top band, the Moving Sidewalks on tour, there would be occasions when Gibbons and co would have to add a few Hendrix tunes to their opening set. 

Perhaps that might offer some clue as to what Gibbons has lined up for Thursday. His I Was There essay, included with the liner notes for the new Los Angeles Forum live album, compiles his memories of that gig in 1969, when Hendrix acknowledged him from the stage.

“In those days VIP seating was yet to be, so we angled over to side-stage,” writes Gibbons, as per Jimi Hendrix. “I stood standing with arms folded and I remember Jimi looked over and gave me a nod, the same nod that he gave me the first night that we played together when the Moving Sidewalks had to flesh out their opening set with Purple Haze and Foxey Lady.”

Gibbons has covered both tracks on many occasions over the years, including at Experience Hendrix events, at Gibson's NAMM jam, and alongside players such as Joe Bonamassa and Jeff beck.

The Hendrix V he will be playing on Kimmel was in rotation for Hendrix's 1970 tour, the highlight of which came at the Isle of Wight festival, on 31 August, where he played in front of the largest audience of his career.

Some 600,000 people were reported to be in attendance at Afton Down, Freshwater, and they witnessed a legendary set, with Hendrix opening with two quintessentially British standards – God Save The Queen and Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band – before barreling into Spanish Castle Magic.

For many Hendrix fans, Isle of Wight was legendary for his rendition of Machine Gun – another reminder that Hendrix was approaching the instrument from another dimension. 

• The ultimate Jimi Hendrix lead guitar lesson

The Flying V, finished in Ebony with gold hardware, was a 1969 model that Hendrix had ordered direct from Gibson. It featured a Maestro short vibrola, black Witch Hat control knobs with gold inserts and silver pointers, and an ebony fingerboard with Split Diamond MOP inlays.

The guitar itself is digging its passport out for Gibbons’ performance, making its way from London, where it has been stored at Hard Rock International under the care of of Chase McCue, Hard Rock’s director of memorabilia. 

In 2020, Gibson released a super-limited run of Murphy Lab replicas, 25 left-handed, 125 right-handed, yours for $9,999. Who could possibly put a value on the Isle of Wight model? 

Hendrix would have turned 80 on 27 November. Earlier this week, JIMI, a deluxe hardcover book authored by Janie Hendrix, president and CEO of Experience Hendrix and Authentic Hendrix, and John McDermott, who is served as catalogue director of Experience Hendrix for nigh-on 30 years.

Finally, on 4 December, there will be an all-star concert held in Hendrix’s memory at the Moody Theater ACL Live, in Austin, Texas. Billy Cox, bass player in Band of Gypsys, will be playing alongside the likes of Dweezil Zappa, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Doyle Bramhall II, Zakk Wylde, Eric Johnson and more. See Jimi Hendrix for more details. See Ticketmaster  for tickets.

Gibbons will also be signing his liner notes at a post-Kimmel reception at LA’s Mr Musichead Gallery. You can get tickets for the reception here. Jimi Hendrix Experience – Los Angeles Forum April 26, 1969, is out on 18 November through Legacy Recordings.

Positive Grid has unveiled the Authentic Hendrix collection, promising high-quality digital emulations of Jimi Hendrix’s various rigs that is compatible with BIAS FX 2 plugin and Spark digital guitar amp platforms.

The amp modelling and guitar software giant’s officially licensed collection includes the guitar amps, and effects pedals behind the great man’s sound, plus a number of very cool features that sit nicely within Positive Grid’s intuitive, player-friendly format.

You can learn about Hendrix’s career and the evolution of his rig through the years on interactive timeline, accessing editable presets from each rig to match his recordings or to use as a launchpad for creating your own sounds.

Should you choose the Authentic Hendrix collection for Spark, you can also use the Auto Tone feature, which is accessed via the Spark app and allows you to jam along with classic Hendrix tracks while the app automatically selects the presets for each section – and, of course, calls out the chords so you are not caught out with the changes. No Hendrix track is easy to play so any help is gratefully received.

On the BIAS FX 2 Authentic Hendrix pack, you can use the Guitar Match feature to turn your digitally transform your guitar into one of Jimi’s, with electric guitars such as the Monterey Fender Stratocaster , which is on hand to give your cover of Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) a little more authenticity.

The amps and cabs offer a comprehensive picture of Hendrix's backline over the years, with a variety of vintage high-wattage options offering Marshall, Sunn amps and Fender flavours. 

It goes without saying that having a digital model of a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead is a lot more user-friendly than having the original hardware and the wall-levelling volume that goes with it. Though do try to resist the urge to set your guitar on fire and rub it against your MacBook Pro.

Saucing the pot further, you’ve got a cornucopia of pedals to add to the signal chain, with emulations of classic fuzz pedals such as Roger Mayer’s Axis Fuzz, the Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face, Tone Benders, octave fuzz, a Uni-Vibe, wah pedals and more. 

Although full details are yet to be released, it is interesting to see how these signal chains are presented onscreen, with GUI offering a clear understanding of what is going on with your signal, deepening our appreciation of how Hendrix constructed such a sound, and allowing you to make informed edits that complement your gear.

The Authentic Hendrix collection will be launched on 14 October. You can sign up for alerts and get more information over at Positive Grid. And check out how it sounds in Sophie Burrell’s demo of the BIAS FX2 plugin, who is one of the artists involved in Positive Grid's Ignite Sessions, celebrating the company's 10th anniversary with some inspirational instructional videos to make you play better.

A 1962 Fender Jazzmaster, played by Jimi Hendrix during his early days as a session player, and a Marshall Super Lead 100 guitar amplifier he played at Woodstock in 1969 has gone up for sale on Reverb. 

While we might associate Hendrix with the Fender Stratocaster, if you caught him during one of his sets with the Isley Brothers or Little Richard circa-1964, you may well have seen him playing this 3-Color Sunburst offset. 

The Jazzmaster made its debut in 1958, but like all of Leo Fender's creations it would be subtly refined in the years that followed. Early prototypes featured Telecaster-style metal control knobs, and by '62 the gold anodized aluminum pickguard had been swapped out for a 3-layer tortoiseshell celluloid 'guard, and Strat-style control knobs were used.

1962 was a transitional year for the model, with the thicker slab-style fingerboards giving way for a thinner veneer. The clay dot inlays as found on Hendrix's model would soon be replaced by pearl dots in '64, with block inlays coming two years later.

Some reports say Hendrix never used a case for his Jazzmaster, and this could certainly be borne out by the amount of wear on this Jazzer. But given that this was at the hands of Hendrix, it can be filed under appreciable wear and tear.

The guitar comes with a COA from "two very prominent and extremely respected members from the musical/guitar world". The Reverb seller, Neil's Gear Bazaar, Los Angeles, is open to offers but lists the Jazzmaster at a cool $750,000 / £564,765.62 plus shipping.

The Marshall, meanwhile, has to go down as the Holy Grail of Hendrix amplifiers. You might say this non-master volume model – a veritable system of public address as much as it is a guitar amplifier – is wholly unsuitable for the 21st century, but that is part of its charm. 

This was the amp from which Hendrix summoned the magic, its ear-ablating volume controlled by Hendrix rolling back and forth on his guitar's volume controls. 

The listing has been certified by Marshall's archivist and technical specialist, Phil Wells. Bearing the serial number Sl/100XX, it was built in March 1969, with Hendrix using it from around April 1969 and through a summer festival schedule etched into music history.

That means the amp was part of the backline for Hendrix's sets at Rainbow Bridge Vibratory Color Sound Experiment, Woodstock, Isle Of Wight and Hendrix's final show on 6 September 1970 at the Open Air Love & Peace Festival, Fehmarn, Germany. Hendrix also used the Super Lead 100 in rehearsals with Band Of Gypsys.

"J.H. EXP" and "HANDLE WITH CARE" is stencilled on the black Tolex covering, and you'll definitely want to observe the last instruction. The price for a Hendrix-owned Super Lead 100 in 2021? £263,557 / $350,000. Again, this is being sold via Reverb by Neil's Gear Bazaar. Included are no less than three certificates of authenticity.

See Reverb for the listing.

Sony Music Entertainment and Experience Hendrix (the holding company of the Hendrix estate) have unveiled a Jimi Hendrix app for the iPad and iPhone that they hope will allow fans to interact (and presumably pay for) his music in brand new ways.

According to the press release, 'Jimi Hendrix: The Complete Experience', to give the app its full title, combines text, photos and videos to create "interactive chapters of Jimi's legacy".

What that means for the user is that they get a lot of information for free, including (non-critical) guides to his full discography, an interactive map of significant Hendrix locations and walk-throughs of significant gigs.

The discography section of the app features the full collection of official Hendrix releases and allows the user to stream iTunes previews of tracks they don't own and the full versions of those they have previously purchased. And, of course, iTunes integration means that users should be able to easily buy tracks through the app.

All cynicism aside though, TG reckons it's good to see music companies offering their customers a bit more than the usual 'go here, buy this', especially when it comes to Hendrix.

What do you think: innovation or in a rush to cash-in? Let us know through Facebook and Twitter.

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