Modern guitarists get criticised for smashing guitars, but Jimi Hendrix was celebrated for doing so – here’s why he did it, in his own words
Jimi Hendrix’s onstage guitar destruction has become one of rock’s defining images. According to his former roadie Eric Barrett, however, there was more to it than a simple act of rock ‘n’ roll excess.
In his upcoming memoir Experienced: On the Road with Jimi Hendrix and Beyond, Barrett recalls witnessing countless smashed guitars during Hendrix’s tours, including one particularly painful moment when a pristine Fender Stratocaster met its end during an encore in Bologna.
READ MORE: “The thing was beat to shit”: The time My Chemical Romance’s Ray Toro got to play one of Jimi Hendrix’s Strats
Barrett writes that Hendrix often “took all of his frustrations out on the equipment” at the end of a show.
“He beat the hell out of the amplifiers and poked bloody great holes in the speakers with the neck of his guitar,” Barrett recalls [via The Sunday Times]. “No wonder the last roadie took a bucketload of acid and fucked off mid-tour.”
The destruction was rarely planned, either.
“He’d never warn me before a performance,” Barrett writes. “I don’t think he knew himself until it came time for the encore.”
Keen to save at least some of the band’s gear, Barrett says he’d regularly try to persuade Hendrix to sacrifice one of the older guitars instead.
“Before he went on stage, I’d always point out an old guitar, or one I’d rebuilt, and say, ‘Jimi, if you’re gonna smash a guitar tonight, please use that one.’”
“Sometimes he’d listen to me, other nights he didn’t. I remember one really beautiful Fender Stratocaster; I watched in horror as he destroyed it during the encore in Bologna.”
Eventually, Barrett decided to ask the question countless fans have probably wondered over the years: why destroy perfectly good guitars at all?
Hendrix’s answer, he says, had little to do with theatrics.
“Eric, I just couldn’t get any more out of it, man,” the guitarist told him. “I squeezed every note and every sound that guitar was ever going to give me. It had nothing left to give.”
The anecdote is one of many stories featured in Barrett’s forthcoming memoir, which chronicles his time working alongside Hendrix during the guitarist’s late-1960s rise. Experienced: On the Road with Jimi Hendrix and Beyond will be released on 4 August.
While guitar smashing is part of the fabric of rock and roll – with icons like Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend routinely laying waste to their instruments, those who’ve destroyed theirs in recent years haven’t exactly been met with the same level of adoration.
In 2021, singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers kicked up a storm when she smashed a stage monitor using her Danelectro during a performance on Saturday Night Live. The stunt drew the attention of David Crosby, who called it “childish stage drama”, and DragonForce’s Herman Li, whose issue wasn’t with the smash, but that the guitar wasn’t expensive enough. “Come on, you’re on Saturday Night Live, you can’t be smashing a $500 guitar – too cheap!” he said. The guitar later sold for over $100,000.
Fender Chief Product Officer Justin Norvell even chimed in, noting the “long-standing tradition” of guitar smashing in rock music, and saying Fender was “alright with it”, but that “there’s always a balance that we have to strike”.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
