The time Jimi Hendrix met Paul McCartney at a fancy event, and couldn’t handle it: “Paul McCartney’s walking towards me… What shall I do?”
Jimi Hendrix could make a guitar scream, set it on fire and generally look like the coolest man in the room. Put him in front of Paul McCartney without a guitar to hide behind, though, and even Hendrix got the nerves.
That’s what happened when the late legend was invited to a star-studded event at London’s Post Office Tower, as his former roadie Eric Barrett recalls in a new interview with Uncut.
With Hendrix arriving without his usual six-string safety blanket, things got particularly tense when he spotted Beatles star Paul McCartney heading his way.
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“Jimi was invited to an event at the Post Office Tower, in the revolving restaurant at the top. Gerry [Stickells, tour manager] couldn’t take him, so I said I’d go along with him,” Barrett recalls. “I have no idea what the function was but I went to loads of events like that, just happy to get the free beer and a canapé and spend some time with Jimi.”
There was just one problem: Hendrix didn’t have his guitar.
“Jimi didn’t have a guitar, so he didn’t have a prop, something to hide behind,” Barrett explains. “We walked in and he saw who was there and started speaking out the side of his mouth: ‘Eric, Eric… Paul McCartney’s walking towards me… What shall I do?’ I told him to relax, it would be fine. Paul McCartney came over and was showering him with praise, but Jimi wasn’t good at that at all.”
According to Barrett, Hendrix was similarly uncomfortable around other famous musicians, despite being a hero to many of them himself.
“He was so shy, he didn’t know how to respond. And he was like that with all the stars he met,” says the former roadie. “He didn’t seem to understand why they were looking up to him. If he had met Paul McCartney in the studio, he’d have been much more comfortable.”
Barrett’s years on the road with Hendrix produced no shortage of memorable stories. In an excerpt from his new memoir, Experienced: On the Road with Jimi Hendrix and Beyond, he also looks back on the guitarist’s habit of destroying his instruments onstage – and what Hendrix told him when he finally asked why.
“Eric, I just couldn’t get any more out of it, man,” Hendrix explained. “I squeezed every note and every sound that guitar was ever going to give me. It had nothing left to give.”
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