The date was January 1967. The venue was the Bag O’Nails club in London. Eric Clapton was 21 years old and had already been called God — literally, in graffiti on a London Underground wall: “Clapton is God” — by a British public that had decided he was the greatest guitarist alive and that the designation was settled and permanent. He had played with the Yardbirds. He had formed Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. He was, by any reasonable measure, at the absolute summit of what a British guitarist could be.
Jimi Hendrix walked onto the stage of the Bag O’Nails that night and played approximately forty minutes of material that caused Eric Clapton to leave the venue before the set was finished. Not because he was bored. Because he was overwhelmed in a way that required fresh air and privacy to process.
The accounts of what happened next come from multiple sources — from Clapton himself, in various interviews across decades, and from musicians who were present that night or who knew Clapton during the weeks that followed. The version that Clapton has told most consistently is this: he went home, sat alone, and seriously considered giving up the guitar. Not as a dramatic gesture. As a genuine response to having encountered something that called into question every assumption he had made about his own level.
Hendrix had arrived in London in September 1966, brought over by manager Chas Chandler, and had proceeded to move through the British music establishment like a weather system. He sat in with Cream and played Killing Floor — a Howlin’ Wolf song that Clapton knew well — at a tempo and with a ferocity that left the other musicians on stage visibly shaken. He jammed with Jeff Beck. He encountered Pete Townshend. In each case the response was the same: not simply admiration, but the specific disorientation of someone who has assumed they understood the outer limits of something and has just been shown that those limits do not exist.
Paul McCartney was at the Bag O’Nails that night. He has described the experience of watching Hendrix in those early London performances as unlike anything he had encountered before or since — music that seemed to be operating in a different physical space than the music everyone else was making, as though Hendrix had access to dimensions of the instrument that simply were not available to other players.
Clapton did not permanently quit. He went back to music after what people who knew him at the time describe as a period of quiet withdrawal — weeks of listening, reconsidering, rebuilding his understanding of what he was doing and what it was for. He has said that encountering Hendrix was the most significant musical experience of his life and the most destabilizing one. That it required him to start over from a different foundation.
The music Clapton made after Hendrix arrived in London is different from the music he made before. The playing is deeper, more considered, more aware of its own limitations and more interesting for that awareness. The God graffiti stayed on the wall. Clapton never believed it again in the same way.
Hendrix considered Clapton a friend. He said so publicly. He also kept playing like that every night, which is the most honest thing you can do to someone you respect.