From contemporaries such as Neil Young and Eric Clapton to the likes of Kurt Cobain and Prince, Jimi Hendrix has inspired more legends than most. It’s a testament to his musical prowess that in such a tragically short life and career, he managed to change guitar music so much.
Famously, it was even his arrival in London – when he caught the 1960s’ established acts off guard – that he forced them to up their game. They realised that they could not rest on their laurels any longer, as there was a new act in town, who had discreetly blown across the Atlantic and taken Europe by storm.
While greats in their immediate orbit such as Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney have spoken extensively about watching The Jimi Hendrix Experience play their early shows and immediately feel that a new era for guitar music had arrived, other acolytes from across the world have also detailed how their minds were opened to a world of possibilities when first hearing him.
One of these is one of his most famous fans, AC/DC lead guitarist Angus Young, whose electrifying, muscular riffs are deeply inspired by the late ‘Voodoo Child legend. “The thing is a lot of what goes in those albums, when we were younger, that’s where a lot of it all goes back to, at that point — like when I was an early teenager, 13 or 14,” Young once told Tiny TV. “Music excited me, still at that age.”
Young then recalled that as a teenager he had to wait up all night for the music he liked to be played at around two AM by an unnamed American disc jockey on the radio. The future rock star would sit there in bed, next to his little radio, and wait for the DJ to play the latest rock classics. It was on these transformative nights that he first heard Cream, Led Zeppelin, and of course, Jimi Hendrix.
For the latter, it was the 1967 hit ‘Purple Haze’ that introduced him to the American, and unsurprisingly, it changed his life. “I heard [Jimi] Hendrix on there, I heard Cream — people like this. And later on, you started to get your [Led] Zeppelins and bands like this. And especially when Jimi Hendrix, when I heard ‘Purple Haze’, boy, that was it. I was so excited,” Young reminisced.
Of course, Young knew he needed more of Hendrix. As soon as he could, he looked everywhere to find a photograph of the rock god, and eventually stumbled across a magazine from England which featured a picture of Hendrix with his guitar. His immediate thought was: “‘Wow! I wanna look that cool.’”
