JIMI HENDRIX’S GREATEST GUITAR MOMENTS RANKED
Jimi Hendrix is a guitar player of such iconic status that even the most non-musical cite him as a reference point for six-string greatness. What’s more, for someone whose time in the spotlight effectively spanned just four years and three studio albums, there is thankfully a colossal amount of Hendrix material to consider.
His sudden passing led to a decades-long archaeological dig that disinterred every hotel-room recording, every studio take and every lost concert, almost all of which has been packaged in varying states of undress and paraded in the public domain. It’s a testament to his unearthly talent that so much of it is sensational music in its own right – Jimi’s lost-and-found archive is a deep well of inspiration for obsessed guitarists.
So when it comes to narrowing down that huge portfolio of material to his greatest 20 moments, where do you start, and how do you define greatness?
We haven’t included many obscurities in this list, for fear of displacing better-known classics. Instead, we’ve attempted to pick out 20 special moments from a tragically short career that illustrate the extraordinary variety of Hendrix’s playing, and that will reward you every time you return to them.
20 RED HOUSE
It may be difficult to believe but there was once a time when you could doodle your way through a 20-minute cosmic blues jam, look up, and still see an audience. At his live shows, Hendrix would often switch from his omnipresent Strat to a Gibson (usually a Flying V or an SG) and promptly vanish into this welcome break from the pyrotechnic thrills expected of him to pay tribute to the elemental influences at the heart of his playing.
Virtually every surviving recording of Red House is a string- and mind-bending odyssey through the blues lexicon, unfurling like a fresh glimpse into Hendrix’s unconscious brain. The 3:50 version on the UK print of Are You Experienced, one of the first songs the Experience ever recorded, is just the tip of the iceberg.
PLAYING HOUSE
Noel Redding played the ‘bass’ part on a “terrible, awful” borrowed hollowbody guitar on the original recording and would occasionally
