Even gear-smashing, arm-windmilling, bona fide rockstars get insecure sometimes, as the Who’s Pete Townshend learned the hard way when he first met the “monstrous” musician who Townshend feared could woo away his girlfriend. The “monster” in question was no monster at all. In fact, he was quite the contrary, with many describing him as shy and sweet.
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But for people like Townshend looking in from the outside, they knew this rock star and recent addition to the U.K. scene had far more to offer than softspoken pleasantries. From his innate sexuality to the way he played his guitar, Jimi Hendrix was giving his contemporaries a run for their money.
The Who’s Pete Townshend Was Afraid Of This “Monstrous” Rock Star
When Jimi Hendrix first arrived to the U.K. in the late 1960s, he shook the music scene to its core. Between his blues-centric riffs and his proclivity for destroying his equipment on stage, Hendrix especially instilled a new fear in the Who’s lead guitarist, Pete Townshend, who had previously believed he was somewhat of an innovator in these arenas. As if the musical intimidation wasn’t enough, Townshend also felt he had to worry about his girlfriend.
“It was very strange for Eric [Clapton] and me,” Townshend recalled in a 1989 Guitar Player cover story. “We went and watched Jimi at about ten London shows together, and [Clapton] wasn’t with a girl at the time, so it was just me, my wife-to-be, Karen, and Eric, going to see this monstrous man. It got to the point where Eric would go up to pay his respects every night, and one day, I got up to pay my respects, and he was hugging Eric, but not me. He was kind of giving me a limp handshake just because Eric was capable of making the right kind of approach to him. It was a difficult time.”
“You have to remember the other thing about him, that he was astonishingly sexual,” Townshend continued. “I was there with my wife, you know, the girl I loved. You could just sense this whole thing in the room where every woman would just [claps] at the snap of a finger. I mean, there were situations where Jimi would do it. He wasn’t particularly in control of his ego at the time. There was this slightly prince-like quality about him, this kind of imp at work. I found him very charming, very easy, a very sweet guy.”
Jimi Hendrix Had A Way Of Making Plenty Of Rock Stars Nervous
Pete Townshend wasn’t the only guitar player who found themselves intimidated by the late great Jimi Hendrix. Fellow British guitarist Jeff Beck had a similar experience to Townshend—both as a musician and a jealous boyfriend—after first hearing about Hendrix. Beck once recalled waking up to a call from a girlfriend who was gushing over seeing Hendrix for the first time. “I went, ‘Oh, thanks.’ [pretends to hang up the phone] That’s all you wanna hear first thing in the morning. Someone’s outrageous guitar playing.” Once Beck finally heard Hendrix for himself, he said it was “unbelievable.”
Of course, intimidation can serve as a useful tool for artists itching to improve themselves. Such was the case for Townshend, who went on to write the Who’s first breakthrough album, Tommy, in an effort to prove his musicality to himself and the rest of the world (and, more than likely, Hendrix). “I just sort of felt that I hadn’t the emotional equipment, really, the physical equipment, the natural psychic genius of somebody like Jimi,” the guitarist told Guitar Player. “[I] realized that what I had was a bunch of gimmicks which he had come and taken away from me and attached to not only the Black R&B from whence they came but also added a whole new dimension.”
After getting experienced by the Experience, Townshend said, “I had to learn to write, and it became like a new art from a new angle.”
Photo by Chris Morphet/Getty Images
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