11 Jimi Hendrix Quotes That Confirm He’s The Coolest Rock Star Ever

The god of the electric guitar had some things to say.

1.

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“You can get inspiration for a song anytime, because music is just what you feel. The ideas come very easily... I stay in bed most of the time or go to the park... I write some of my best songs in bed, just laying there.”

2.

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“Really I’m just an actor. The only difference between me and those cats in Hollywood is that I write my own script.”

3.

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“I wrote Foxy Lady so long ago by now she’s going to have three kids. We’ll dedicate it to her children, because she’s worn out with it.”

4.

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“The photographers always try to make me look so evil. All the photos I had done for publicity to begin with were picked because I looked so grim. We threw away all the smiley-smiley shots and kept the horrors. That made me a kind of monster.”

Smiley shot, yey!

5.

“I’m just a little bit worried now because I sound a teeny bit like a frog. Last night we were playing so loud that I was shouting on my tiptoes. I felt like my kneecaps were up in my chest nearly. I get kind of tense before a show.”

Photograph courtesy of Ray Rae Goldman archives

6.

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“Eventually I met a guy called Gorgeous George who got me on some tours around the South. Those people were really hard to please. They wanted more and more. Cats used to jump on the guitar and play behind their heads or with their teeth or elbows. Down in Tennessee you have to play with your teeth or else you get shot.”

7.

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“The music’s better now, and the people don’t even know. It’s right in their faces and they don’t even know how to accept it because they have to have gimmicks and imagery to go by. That’s what made me cut my hair off, because of this being a slave to the public. I cut it short to protest.”

8.

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“I want to wake up in the morning and just roll out of my bed into an indoor swimming pool and then swim to the breakfast table, come up for air and maybe get a drink of orange juice, and then swim into the bathroom, and you know... have a shave.”

9.

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“I think I’m a better guitarist than I was, but I have never been really good. The music I might hear I can’t get on the guitar... As a matter of fact, if you pick up your guitar and try to play, it spoils the whole thing.”

10.

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“My dad was a gardener, and he’d once been an electrician. He used to cut my hair like a skinned chicken, and all my friends used to call me ‘Slick Bean.’”

11.

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“Craziness is like heaven. The more you get into it they're going to say, ‘Damn, that cat's really flipped out. Oh, he's gone now.’ But if you're producing and creating, you're getting closer to your own heaven.”

Jimi, you rock.

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Quotes taken from Starting At Zero: His Own Story by Jimi Hendrix, published 27th November 2013