(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Raph_PH)
Thu 12 March 2026 20:45, UK
There are certain musicians in history who are simply incomparable. It’s almost sacrilegious to utter the name in the same sentences as anyone else, let alone someone who came after them and built off their influence, and one of these musical unicorns is certainly Jimi Hendrix.
Armed with a Fender Stratocaster, he paints the archetypal image of a guitar-wielding god. While many have come after him, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Eddie Van Halen, closely threatening his greatest in their own unique ways, there was one particular Californian guitarist who seemed to outrightly channel Hendrix’s inner spirit.
John Frusciante’s Hendrix-inspired style of playing became the beating heart of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ brand of funk rock, which swept the globe in the early 1990s. Barely needing the support of any surrounding guitar players, he uplifted the entire melody of the band’s sound, fluctuating from breezy chord progressions to mind-bending solos, and somehow managed to challenge the virtuoso bass playing of Flea in the process.
He felt like a fresh force to be reckoned with, raising the bar of what many music critics deemed possible with the guitar, but he was always willing to deflect his praise and focus it back to Hendrix, the man who laid the groundwork for him to build on.
“I would hear something like ‘Little Wing’, and I thought it was like three or four guitars at least,” Frusciante recalled, referencing the one specific song that encouraged him to go deeper with his playing.
He continued with an anecdote that sparked the realisation of how he could perhaps emulate the mastery of Hendrix, recalling a time on an Indian reservation where he saw a guy in a band playing the track, “I had it in my head that nobody had ever figured out how to play this song on guitar. Playing ‘Little Wing’, I thought he’d cracked the code. You know I thought it was this monumental thing that I was witnessing and so it was you know moments like that that made me really strive to uncover these secrets.”
While Hendrix has a catalogue of originally written songs that showcase his virtuosity, for the simple fact that his creative brain could lay down things others could only dream of, it was bizarrely a cover that similarly caught Frusciante’s attention. And no, not Hendrix’s most famous cover of all time, ‘All Along The Watchtower’, but his wild cover of the American national anthem.
He added, “I also remember playing for my guitar teacher the moment in the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ of Woodstock, where you hear him feeding back on a note he plays a note and it starts feeding back and then the note, without him picking the note, suddenly becomes like an octave higher and then he’s moving the whammy bar a little bit and then the note becomes an octave or too higher than that even.
“So there’s tons of things like that in his playing. You know simple things like his vibrato and the way that he bent notes, that meant I was striving to make my fingers strong enough to be able to make those sounds.”
Frusciante would never surpass the work of Hendrix, and ultimately, that was fine by him. But there aren’t many contemporary guitarists who can stake quite the claim he can when it comes to matching some of his virtuosic skills. Injecting Hendrix’s skills into his own style, while crafting his songwriting with the Chili’s truly makes Frusciante one of the modern greats.