London in 1967 was a small world. The musicians who would go on to define rock guitar for the following half-century were moving through the same clubs, the same studios, the same late-night sessions in the same compressed geography of a city that was in the middle of reinventing what popular music could be. They knew each other. They watched each other. They competed with each other with the specific intensity of people who understand that they are operating at the frontier of something and that the person across the room might be slightly further ahead.
Eric Clapton was already a legend. “Clapton is God” had been on the wall for months and the wall was not entirely wrong — he had done things with a guitar that British musicians of his generation had not believed were possible and he had done them so completely and so consistently that the word genius had been applied to him with a regularity that he found both gratifying and privately terrifying.
Jeff Beck was the other kind of legend — the guitarist’s guitarist, the one that musicians talked about in terms that civilians couldn’t quite follow, the man who treated the guitar as a laboratory rather than an instrument and whose relationship with conventional technique was one of productive and deliberate antagonism. He did not play the way you were supposed to play. He played the way the music needed to be played, which was frequently the same thing and occasionally completely different.
And then there was Jimi Hendrix. Who had arrived from America the year before and done something to the London music scene that cannot be fully described in retrospect because the people who witnessed it still struggle to find the language. Clapton had seen Hendrix play and gone home and told his friends that he was considering quitting music. He had not been joking. He had watched someone do things on a guitar that he had not known were physically possible and had experienced the specific crisis of a person at the top of their field watching someone from outside that field redefine where the top is.
The three of them ended up in the same room on a night that was not planned as any kind of event. A party, or a gathering, or the specific kind of late-night musician congregation that happened constantly in London in this period and occasionally produced something that the people present would spend the rest of their lives trying to describe.
Someone picked up a guitar. Someone else picked up a guitar. The third did not need to be asked.
What followed — according to every account from the handful of people who were present — was not a jam session in the conventional sense. It was a conversation. Three musicians talking to each other through their instruments with a directness and honesty and mutual recognition that had not been possible in any other language. They played off each other and against each other and with each other in combinations that shifted constantly, each of them responding in real time to what the others were doing, each of them pushing and being pushed.
No one recorded it. This fact has been described by music historians as one of the great losses in rock history.
The people who were in the room that night are in agreement on one thing above all others: that what they witnessed was beyond what any of the three men did individually. That the combination produced something that the parts did not contain separately. That for several hours in a room in London in 1967, the three greatest rock guitarists alive were playing together and the music they made was the best any of them ever made and it existed only in that room and then it was gone.
Clapton has spoken about it rarely and carefully. Beck has said that he has never fully recovered from hearing Hendrix play in a space that small. Hendrix died in 1970 and never got the chance to say what he took away from it.
The music is gone. The room is gone. The night is gone.
But the three of them walked out of that room changed. And the music they made afterward — individually, separately, in their own studios and on their own stages — carries somewhere inside it the trace of what happened when they were together.
Listen closely enough and you can almost hear it.