ZZ Top legendary guitarist and singer Billy Gibbons told in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine back in 2017 what he learned when he toured with Jimi Hendrix before ZZ Top.
When Billy Gibbons told what he learned when he toured with Jimi Hendrix:
“He was a real technical wizard. He was inventing things to do with the Stratocaster guitar I am confident the designers had no clue would unfold in later years. Jimi had the talent to make that work for him. His technique was very peculiar in that he was playing a right-handed guitar in a left-handed style, upside down. To look at it and try to figure out what he was doing was very daunting.”
“But we got to share opposing hotel rooms always at the end of the hall and the doors were always open. He had a record player delivered each and every afternoon, and he would motion to me, “Come on over here. Lets see if we can figure this out.””
“And we wound up listening to Jeff Beck trying to figure things out. I said, “Jimi, chances are that Jeff Beck is sitting there listening to you saying the same thing. ‘How do we do this?’”
Do you think if ZZ Top started today you guys would still make it?
“If we embraced that same youthful enthusiasm that brought us together in the first place, it might just might well work. We threw caution to the wind and jumped into it with both feet, but all we wanted was to make loud noises, get free beer and chase the girls after the show.”
Jimi Hendrix death
Although the details of Hendrix’s last day and death are widely disputed. He spent much of September 17, 1970, in London with Monika Dannemann. That was the only witness to his final hours. Dannemann said that she prepared a meal for them at her apartment in the Samarkand Hotel, 22 Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill, sometime around 11 p.m., when they shared a bottle of wine.
She drove Hendrix to the residence of an acquaintance at approximately 1:45 a.m. Where he remained for about an hour before she picked him up and drove them back to her flat at 3 a.m. Dannemann said they talked until around 7 a.m., when they went to sleep. She awoke around 11 a.m., and found Hendrix breathing, but unconscious and unresponsive.