Pretty much everyone—including living guitar gods Eric Clapton, Zakk Wylde, Buddy Guy, Joe Satriani and beyond—has covered the music of Jimi Hendrix at one point or another, sometimes live, sometimes in the studio.
Case in point: Jeff Beck recorded a powerful version of Hendrix's "Manic Depression" in the early Nineties.
Beck's recording (which you can hear below in the middle video) features Seal on vocals and is one of the true highlights of 1993's Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix, which also features a killer version of "Stone Free" by Clapton.
Throughout the years, however, Beck also has tried his hand at a few other Hendrix tunes during his live shows, most notably "Foxey Lady."
In the fan-shot video below (top video), however, Beck and his band (including bassist Tal Wilkenfeld and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta) play a three-song Hendrix medley. They start off with "Little Wing," then move into "Foxey Lady" and finally revisit "Manic Depression." The footage was shot May 10, 2014, at WTC Golden Hall, Sao Paulo, Brazil, during Best of Blues 2014.
"It was amazing to see [Hendrix] play, and I’d met him before I saw him perform," Beck told Guitar World in 2010. "I saw him at this tiny little club in London, with all of these 'dolly birds,' which is what they called girls dressed in their miniskirts. I think they all thought he was going to be a folky, Bob Dylan–type of character [laughs], and he blew the place apart with his version of [Dylan’s] 'Like a Rolling Stone.'
"I just went, 'Ah…this is so great!' It overshadowed any feelings of inferiority or competitiveness. It was so amazing. To see someone doing what I wanted to do… I came out a little crestfallen, but on the positive side, here was this guy opening big doors for us.
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"Instead of looking on the negative side and saying, 'We’re finished,' I was thinking, No, we’ve just started! I was delighted to have known him for the short time that I did. It was the magical watering hole of the Speakeasy, the club where we hung out in London, that enabled that to happen. It was the one place you could go and be guaranteed to see Eric or Jimi and have fun playing. Those places don’t seem to exist anymore."
Damian is Editor-in-Chief of Guitar World magazine. In past lives, he was GW’s managing editor and online managing editor. He's written liner notes for major-label releases, including Stevie Ray Vaughan's 'The Complete Epic Recordings Collection' (Sony Legacy) and has interviewed everyone from Yngwie Malmsteen to Kevin Bacon (with a few memorable Eric Clapton chats thrown into the mix). Damian, a former member of Brooklyn's The Gas House Gorillas, was the sole guitarist in Mister Neutron, a trio that toured the U.S. and released three albums. He now plays in two NYC-area bands.
