“It’s interesting. When I think about Jimi, he really did start the heavy metal thread.”
Metallica’s Kirk Hammett suggested that Jimi Hendrix started “the heavy metal thread”, arguing that the overbearing presence of the Vietnam War in the late guitar hero’s lifetime proved to be a key factor in shaping his unmistakable sound.
Whether it’s blues icons, rock’s old guard or young metal trailblazers, there’s hardly a player out there who *wasn’t* inspired to some extent by the guitar wizardry conjured by Jimi Hendrix. “He was like a being from outer space”, says The Police’s Andy Summers, who’s said to be the first player Hendrix encountered in the UK, adding that the “Purple Haze” mastermind single-handedly outclassed the entire London scene.
Speaking to Guitar World in a new interview, Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, yet another rock great inspired by the late guitarist’s life and works, said that the Vietnam War and Hendrix’s military experience might have influenced the sound he became famous for:
“I could be completely off the mark on this but I think the fact that he was in the army, and it was during the Vietnam War, and he was all geared up to go to Vietnam and fight.”
“He was in the [101st Airborne Division] and got out because he injured himself as a paratrooper. I think that the specter of war, the Vietnam War, and battle, was a huge influence on him, sonically. I think that he wanted to capture that huge militaristic sort of force of power in his guitar.”
He added:
“With songs like ‘Machine Gun’ and ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, it feels like it was kind of like a bit of an inspiration there. Big jets moving, bombers, people in battle, distress, crying; the Vietnam War just added a lot of darkness to his playing, and also I think the civil rights movement added a lot of darkness to his playing.”
While it is Black Sabbath who are usually credited for being the godfathers of metal, the exact origins of the genre are difficult to pinpoint and there are many hypotheses out there. Hendrix usually isn’t mentioned all that frequently in this context given the rather lengthy list of his other accomplishments, but Hammett thinks he should be credited for it as well:
“It’s interesting. When I think about Jimi, he really did start the heavy metal thread.”
“I believe he was very instrumental in what we now know as heavy metal. But he also created psychedelic music. He definitely created a heavier type of music than what was known at the time. And he pretty much single-handedly created psychedelic music, just by how he played guitar.”
Kirk concluded:
“There was nothing as visual as his guitar playing before him. Maybe The Yardbirds? With Jimmy Page? But the psychedelic stuff that Jimi Hendrix did was like motion color pictures, like movies. ‘Are You Experienced?’, the music is so visual, all these images. He created two types of music, just like that! Thank God for that.”
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