Jeff Beck on Stevie Ray and Jimi Hendrix

Photo: Aaron Rapoport

Jeff Beck: “I think Stevie Ray was the closest thing to Hendrix when it came to playing the blues,” 

When I saw Jimi we knew he was going to be trouble. And by ‘we’ I mean me and Eric Clapton, because Jimmy Page wasn’t in the frame at that point. I saw him at one of his earliest performances in Britain, and it was quite devastating. He did all the dirty tricks – setting fire to his guitar, doing swoops up and down his neck, all the great showmanship to put the final nail in our coffin. I had the same temperament as Hendrix in terms of ‘I’ll kill you’, but he did in such a good package with beautiful songs.

I don’t want to say that I knew him well, I don’t think anybody did, but there was a period in London when I went to visit him quite few times. He invited me down to Olympic studios and I gave him a bottleneck. That’s what he plays on Axis: Bold As Love. We hooked up in New York and played at Steve Paul’s club The Scene.

Stevie:  I feel like I’ve gotten more in touch with the blues. It’s usually when I go and see somebody play who’s playing clubs and isn’t used to running around in a fancy tour bus and playing arenas. There’s a difference there. On one side of the coin, it’s like, “The guy sounds that way so we can’t sell him,” but on the other side of the coin is, “I’ve been sold, so I can’t sound like that.” Every time I get to hear somebody sound real, once again I get the chance to come home, inside. That makes me want to play that way even that much more and still snicker when someone says, “Hey, the record sold!” 

( From Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan by Alan Paul)