When Jimi Hendrix Upstaged Eric Clapton

At Their First Meeting, Jimi Pulled Out All the Stops

In American jazz and blues circles, there’s an old variation of cat-and-mouse called “head-cutting,” where a musician outperforms an unsuspecting competitor in front of an audience. The best practitioners tend to combine sublime musicianship with jaw-dropping stage moves – “showboating,” as Stevie Ray Vaughan called it. With his uncanny ability to perform music he’d heard on the radio and records, the 1930s bluesman Robert Johnson, whose music Jimi admired, was expert in this area. In our 1989 interview, Johnny Shines, who’d traveled with Johnson, described what would happen when they’d play for tips in Handy’s Park in Memphis: “Now, a guy over here have a big crowd, and we’d strike up over there and probably pull half his crowd or all of his crowd. If you pull all of his crowd, that’s what we called ‘head-cuttin’.’ You know – we just cut his head!” During the early 1950s, another of Jimi’s musical heroes, Muddy Waters, specialized in cutting heads at “blues contests” around Chicago. As Muddy told it, “Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, and myself, we would go around looking for bands that were playing. We called ourselves ‘the Headhunters,’ ’cause we’d go in and if we got the chance we were gonna burn ’em.” Although none of London’s rock elites were as yet aware of it, Jimi Hendrix, intentionally or not, was already a master head-cutter.