There are encounters between musicians that produce the specific response that serious creative people most fear and most need simultaneously — the response of being shown something that exceeds the framework of understanding you have built across a lifetime of serious practice, something that requires not just appreciation but a fundamental reassessment of what you understood the form to be capable of. Eric Clapton has experienced this response twice in his professional life.
The first time was watching Jimi Hendrix perform at the Bag O’Nails in London in January 1967. The second time was a private session, months later, when Hendrix played him something that had never been performed publicly and that Clapton has described, in the most specific account he has ever given of their relationship, as the most devastating musical experience of his life.
Clapton was 21 years old and had been called God — the graffiti on the London Underground wall was real and recent, and while Clapton’s public relationship with the designation was appropriately modest, the private reality was that he was, by the assessment of virtually everyone who had heard him, the most gifted guitarist in Britain and one of the most gifted anywhere.
He had developed a relationship with the blues tradition that was more complete than most of his British contemporaries — a real understanding of the form, not just the vocabulary but the intention behind it, the relationship between the music and the experience that produced it.
Hendrix arrived in London in September 1966 and began, almost immediately, to dismantle the assumptions of the musicians around him.
The Bag O’Nails performance — which Clapton left early, in the specific state of someone who has encountered something they need to process without an audience — was the first dismantling. The private session several months later was the second, and by Clapton’s account it was the one that produced the most lasting effect.
Hendrix had been working on material that he was not yet performing publicly — pieces that went further than what the Experience had recorded on Are You Experienced, further into the territory of extended improvisation and sonic exploration that Hendrix understood the electric guitar to be capable of.
He played one of these pieces for Clapton privately, in circumstances that the available accounts describe with enough consistency to establish the basic facts: the two of them, in a room, Hendrix with a guitar, the piece lasting somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five minutes depending on the source.
What Clapton has said about the experience — in interviews given carefully and with the specific reluctance of someone describing something they find difficult to discuss — is that the piece was unlike anything he had heard before or has heard since. Not because of what Hendrix was playing technically, which Clapton could analyze and to some degree account for.
Because of what the music was doing beyond the technical — the specific quality of experience it communicated, the emotional and almost physical space it occupied, the way it changed what the room felt like while it was happening.
He drove home afterward. He has said this with the matter-of-factness of someone reporting a sequence of events, and then he has said what came after the drive home with a specificity that he has not deployed about many other moments in his public accounts of his own life. He wept.
Not from sadness in the ordinary sense but from the specific overwhelming quality of having encountered something too large to process in any register other than the one that the body uses for things too large to process.
He has said the weeping was the most honest response he had and that he has not attempted to provide a more sophisticated account of it because he does not believe a more sophisticated account exists.
Hendrix died in September 1970. The piece he played for Clapton that evening was never recorded in a releasable form, or if it was, it is somewhere in the archive of unheard Hendrix recordings that the estate manages and that has not been fully released. Clapton has said the impossibility of ever hearing it again is the specific quality of loss that the music world experienced when Hendrix died, expressed in personal terms rather than cultural ones.