Pete Townshend on Jimi Hendrix (1973)

it was a bit like being thrown back into the days when when i had heroes like chuck berry and jimmy reid and t-bone walker and people like that it was like suddenly being thrust back into that and funnily enough the clubs that that i dragged around to see jimmy in the two weeks that he did in london were all the same clubs that i'd seen all those people at when i was like 16 years old the marquee club blazes and cromwellian he played he played everywhere all the london clubs we were like a couple of school boys you know we used to ring up and find out his date sheet pick one another up and get all excited on the way there and then stand in the front and often if the crowd was a bit down we used to stand and like get all excited and try and whip the the crowd up you know but eric was much closer to jimmy than i was and uh and i felt in a way that perhaps this was because jimmy felt he had the edge on eric uh but that he couldn't quite make me out you know in the stranger position i felt incredibly competitive with jimmy i thought okay he is great he is a genius there is a fantastic aura about the man but if i really let him whip me too much i'll never i'll never really be able to ever play again you know so i must fight back as it were after that i think it was probably good in a way that i wasn't able to pin hole jimmy and maybe that he wasn't able to pinhole the who either because it meant we took slightly different path jimmy said some very very precious things which you know they weren't meant necessarily for the world to hear you know but they've to me they were very important all right they were said when he was drunk and and so on you know but they were said and you know they've always been important and that was he always felt that eric and he and i uh had a sort of you know sort of an empathy and complemented one another in a certain way and although i knew that to be true at heart i could never see myself in the triangle i could never fit in in fact the bit where i fitted in was in in the least glamorous bit was in the plastic bit the stage bit uh i was the very plastic bit of of jimmy's stage show and eric of course was the very soulful bit the musician the you know the the far more romantic thing mine was the blatant the showbiz the the years on the road with little richard you know the act you know the facade the rock and roll leotards and god knows what what happened there was like really important to me and fantastically important to the home and i mean it's just changed the sound of the guitar the electric guitar you know completely turned the whole rock world upside down

Channel: Foggy's Music

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Id: 62iEXsI-am0

Length: 3min 14sec (194 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bartlettdmoore]

One must wonder what they all thought about Jeff Beck at the time who, as Eric Clapton says, is in many ways the very best guitarist surviving the era…

[u/ElliotsRebirth]

Fuck you Pete, you tosser!