Jimi Hendrix Quotes (1942-1970)

“Purple Haze, all in my brain, lately things just don't seem the same, actin' funny, but I don't know why, 'scuse me while I kiss the sky.”

“We want our sound to go into the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken some little thing in their minds... 'Cause there are so many sleeping people.”

“Well she's walking through the clouds With a circus mind, that's running round. Butterflies and Zebras, and moonbeams, and fairy tales- That's all she ever thinks about. Riding with the wind.”

“Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations. Misses bed check: sleeps while supposed to be working: unsatisfactory duty performance.”

“I want him to be remembered for what he was – not this tragic figure he has been turned into by nit-pickers and people who used to stalk us and collect photographs and 'evidence' of what we were doing on a certain day. He could be grumpy, and he could be terrible in the studio, getting exactly what he wanted – but he was fun, he was charming. I want people to remember the man I knew.”

“I said, "You’re Jimi Hendrix, and anything you do is taken as gospel because of who you are. In the first show, you humped the guitar, you played it with your teeth, you stuck it behind your back. You just forgot to play.””

“We started from the premise that music was a mission, not a competition … That the basis was the blues, but that the framework of the blues was too tight. We'd talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. What's the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas.”

“Jimi Hendrix is very important. He's my idol. He sort of epitomizes, from his presentation on stage, the whole works of a rock star. There's no way you can compare him. You either have the magic or you don't. There's no way you can work up to it. There's nobody who can take his place.”

“I dreamed about Jimi Hendrix he came back for one day was born weepin' out of an egg the mid-wife said and straight away began to pray with lifted head”

“Hendrix had conjured – with his vision and sense of sound, his personality and genius – the most extraordinary guitar music ever played, the most remarkable sound-scape ever created; of that there is little argument. Opinion varies only over the effect his music has on people: elation, fear, sexual stimulation, sublimation, disgust – all or none of these – but always drop-jawed amazement.”

“I remember Cliff talking about how his roommate at Berkeley, a Jewish brother from the Bronx, had introduced him to a far-out guitar player named Jimi Hendrix. "He'll blow your mind, Corn" said Cliff. And he did.”

“Through the 80s, yuppie nostalgia for the halcyon '60s obscured Hendrix's contributions [...] at least in the minds of post-Baby Boomers. Today, record store bins are filled with dozens of pieces of Hendrix product, despite the fact that he sanctioned the release of only three studio albums and one live disc in his lifetime. It's difficult if not impossible for new listeners to access his legacy when the meaningless notion that he was "the greatest electric guitarist who ever lived' is carved in granite on the base of his statue in the rock pantheon.”