Pete Townshend is largely credited as one of the first guitarists ever to smash a guitar on stage. However, Jimi Hendrix managed to build quite a reputation for the almost ritualistic way he destroyed instruments – even going as far as to set them on fire.
Eric Barrett, who served as Hendrix’s roadie during his heyday, was just 21 when he found himself on the frontline of the guitarist’s stagecraft.
“During the last number, Jimi took all of his frustrations out on the equipment,” he writes in an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Experienced: On the Road with Jimi Hendrix and Beyond – published by The Sunday Times – as he looks back on his first run of shows with Hendrix in 1968.
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“He beat the hell out of the amplifiers and poked bloody great holes in the speakers with the neck of his guitar. No wonder the last roadie took a bucketload of acid and fucked off mid-tour.”
While Barrett can’t clearly remember whether Hendrix “set fire to anything” during that first short tour of Italy and Switzerland, he confirms the legend did go out of his way to smash “plenty of guitars and amps.”
In typical rockstar fashion, “He’d never warn me before a performance. I don’t think he knew himself until it came time for the encore.”
As a responsible roadie, Barrett tried his best to save a couple of Jimi’s guitars from this fate.
“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,’” he continues.
“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.”
Backstage after the show, Barrett was left wondering why Hendrix would deliberately smash perfectly good guitars.
Hendrix’s reply? “‘Eric, I just couldn’t get any more out of it, man. I squeezed every note and every sound that guitar was ever going to give me. It had nothing left to give.’”
In a 1968 interview with reporter Jay Ruby, later published in the November 1991 edition of Guitar World, Hendrix reflected on his guitar-smashing antics, giving more insight into why he did it.
“It was just because we felt like it,” he said. “It might have been because we had some personal problems.
“You feel very frustrated, and the music gets louder and louder. You start thinking about different things, and all of a sudden, crash, bang. Eventually it goes up in smoke.”
By that point, Hendrix had already set fire to his guitar at London’s Finsbury Park Astoria in 1967. He famously repeated the stunt at the Monterey Pop Festival that same year, inspiring generations of guitarists, including Kurt Cobain, Matt Bellamy and Phoebe Bridgers.
