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."
"Offstage he was, quite surprisingly, somewhat of a shy character,” Gibbons confirms. “You could say he was almost a retiring person… until you put a guitar in his hands. And when he stepped into the light, it was a different story altogether. He became a showman and a guitar pyrotechnics extraordinaire.
"I had a girlfriend from Texas who found herself on holiday in London, and she had the foresight to pick up a copy of the first Jimi Hendrix Experience record [Are You Experienced, ’67] and forward it to the States. I had my hands on it early on, certainly before its US release. And I remember standing at the turntable with eyes wide and jaw dropped. I was seventeen when that record landed in my lap and I was ready to just soak it up. There was hours spent just listening to the way he phrased his stuff."
"We were fortunate to be able to interpret our versions of 'Foxy Lady' and 'Purple Haze'. They were Texas interpretations. On leaving the stage I was grabbed by the shoulders and there was Hendrix smiling. He said: ‘I got to meet you. You got a lot of nerve! I like it.’
Billy Gibbons
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