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The musician Jimi Hendrix stole his entire look from: “I think I’ll try it this way”

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Artists are rarely truly original. The Beatles took key aspects from their combined influences, such as Little Richard’s shouting. Led Zeppelin never hid from the effect of others on their work, even when shamelessly pilfering from them. This applies to today’s collection of postmodern pioneers, too. They base a lot of their music on the chopping and sewing together of samples—other people’s work. We might not like it, but cross-pollination is inherent to music moving forward. Even Jimi Hendrix wasn’t entirely authentic.

There’s no doubt that the Seattle native changed guitar playing and rock music for the better. Taking his blues, R&B and rock ‘n’ roll influences and putting a thunderous spin on them through his pioneering approach to the fretboard and formative use of effects like distortion and wah, he made the entire world sit up and pay attention. Not only did he earn droves of fans within days of his 1967 debut’s release, Are You Experienced, but the already established rock guitarists, such as Pete Townshend, found themselves caught off guard; they each knew they had to strive to do something genuinely compelling with their sounds, or risk becoming relics of the past.

It speaks volumes about Hendrix’s impact and significance that his time in the sun was brief. In the three short years between Are You Experienced hitting the shelves and his tragic 1970 death, he played a key role in pushing music and culture into its future.

That said, Hendrix wasn’t wholly unique. While he was open about the great blues players who inspired him when forming his distinctive lefty approach, according to Love frontman Arthur Lee – a fellow Black rock innovator with whom he was close friends – Hendrix stole his iconic hippie aesthetic from him.

In the documentary Love Story, Lee discusses how Hendrix decided to pilfer his look after seeing his attire on the front cover of his band’s 1966 self-titled debut. He claimed: “His brother told me that Jimi Hendrix took a look at my first album and said, ‘I think I’ll try it this way.’ He stole my dress attire, mate, and I don’t appreciate that shit, but [laughs] I can’t play the guitar like him at all.”

Either way, it didn’t matter so much to Lee; he and Hendrix were such good friends fighting the same fight that they were practically separate sides of the same coin. They even planned to form a band and wanted Steve Winwood and percussionist Remi Kabaka for the lineup. However, it never happened due to Hendrix’s sad passing. Ironically, they wanted it to be called Band Aid.

Despite Lee always thinking Hendrix ripped his look off, the pair embarked upon many capers together. Reportedly, they first met in the mid-1960s at Los Angeles’ Gold Star Studios when Hendrix was working with Rosa Lee Brooks to record a version of one of Lee’s songs, ‘My Diary’.

This kicked off a brilliant friendship, and on St Patrick’s Day in 1970, Lee and Hendrix recorded music together. After Love completed their European tour, they linked up with Hendrix at London’s Olympic Studios. According to Lee, everyone took mescaline apart from himself, with him choosing to stay sober to “steer the ship”. Somehow, they managed to record three tracks. One became the classic ‘The Everlasting First’ from Love’s 1970 album False Start, and another was the Hendrix cut ‘Ezy Rider’. The other was the obscure jam ‘Loon’, which remains one of the most cultish moments in Hendrix’s oeuvre.

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