“There Were Guitar PlayersWeeping They Had to Mop the Floor Up”
LIKE ALL GREAT overnight SENSATIONS, Jimi Hendrix took years to get off the ground. His was a long road to fame: from the little boy who, in 1958, used his beat-up guitar to imitate sound effects from cartoons, to the guitar-slinger who hired out his talents to Little Richard, the Isley Brothers and others in the early to mid Sixties, to the outlandish psychedelic six-string shaman who flew into London in late 1966. However, within weeks of Hendrix being launched to the Big Smoke’s goggle-eyed media at The Bag O’Nails club in London on November 25, 1966, virtually every major British blues guitarist found himself rethinking his musical direction. Inevitably, the purists would continue to recycle the past, and the unimaginative would slavishly emulate Hendrix — but a handful of inspired innovators would choose to fashion their own unique styles until, out of that seething maelstrom of creativity, a heavy new form of music would be born.
1966
NOVEMBER 25
Having created a buzz with a handful of small-venue appearances, including the now-legendary jam with Cream at Regent Street Polytechnic that had left Eric Clapton gobsmacked at his prowess, Jimi Hendrix was officially launched with a showcase gig in The Bag O’Nails, a tiny but influential music-biz Mecca in London’s Soho. As well as key journalists invited by Hendrix’s manager Chas Chandler, a Bag O’Nails appearance ensured that the fledgeling Jimi Hendrix Experience would be seen by the venue’s regular clientele, which included Paul McCartney, The Who, Eric Burdon and others…
JOHN MAYALL, The Bluesbreakers: When Jimi first came to England, Chas Chandler had put the word out that he’d found this phenomenal guitar player in New York, and he could play the guitar behind his head and with his teeth and everything. The buzz was out before Jimi had even been seen here, so people were anticipating his performance, and he more than lived up to what we were expecting.
TERRY REID, rock vocalist: We were all hanging out at The Bag O’Nails: Keith, Mick Jagger. Brian [Jones] comes skipping through, like, all happy about something. Paul McCartney walks in. Jeff Beck walks in. Jimmy Page. [Editor’s note: Page denies having been there.] I thought, “What’s this? A bloody convention or something?” Here comes Jim, one of his military jackets, hair all over the place, pulls out this left-handed Stratocaster, beat to hell, looks like he’s been chopping wood with it. And he gets up, all soft-spoken. And all of a sudden, “WHOOOR-RRAAAWWRR!” 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 falling out. When he finished, it was silence. Nobody knew what to do. Everybody was dumbstruck, completely in shock.
KEITH ALTHAM, journalist, NME: Jimi was almost too much, to be absolutely honest. He was
