Sobering level of other famous top musician reaction snippets from link that is hard core Classic Rock history of that era. In 1968 as someone quietly in the Counterculture scene during my Viet Nam War military years, I had both Jimi Hendrix Experience albums Are You Experienced and the insanely heavy psychedelic Electric Ladyland a double album. Interestingly the Jimi Hendrix Experience with Redding and Mitchell were one of the few groups along with The Doors and Cream I never saw in concert even though they were touring locally at times in SF.
However I did see Hendrix with drummer Buddy Miles. Also had Cream's album Disraeli Gears and highly psychedelic jamming double album Wheels of Fire. So yeah I was pretty hardcore AOR rock music enthusiast, that is also when I became a freestyle dancer, and am still a hard core rocker decades later.
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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.
...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.”
