Credit: Far Out / Bent Rej / Joan Sorolla
November 8th, 2026 · 1:00am GMT
When he first broke into the mainstream, anyone who was trying to master the six-string and cement themselves in the world of rock at the time was intrigued by how much Jimi Hendrix was switching things up.
He wasn’t just a great guitarist, but he was animalistic in the way that he approached the instrument, bringing a brand new means of playing to what was evidently becoming the most quintessential instrument in rock. One of the biggest guitarists in the world at the time was Jeff Beck. Thanks to his work with The Yardbirds and his unique playing style, he was also separating himself from the herd of other guitarists who were trying to make it in rock.
And yet, despite his clear talent, when he watched Hendrix play live for the first time, he said he didn’t feel like a guitarist. “He came on, and I went, ‘Oh, my God’,” he recalled. “He had the military outfit on and hair that stuck out all over the place. They kicked off with [Bob Dylan’s] ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, and I thought, ‘Well, I used to be a guitarist’.”
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Jimi Hendrix wasn’t just how good he was, but how good he was at putting his exciting live sound onto studio recordings. There are a lot of musicians who had a great live sound but were never able to properly lay it on wax. However, when you listen to Hendrix’s albums, it’s pretty clear that this is a musician who can take you to a live performance from the comfort of your own home with his exciting playing style. The song ‘Stone Free’, which was recorded 60 years ago, is a great example of this.
The song bends genres in the way it’s hard rock through and through, and he is also able to inject elements of funk into it, enough to get people dancing. The vocals, with the catchy chorus, shine through, but the star of the show, as is always the case with a song by Hendrix, is the guitar playing. The way he glides up and down the fret is something to marvel at, and it’s a style of musicianship that people can’t help but feel somewhat attached to. Plenty of guitarists were moved by songs like this, but none more so than Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore.
Blackmore was always happy to admit how much Hendrix had influenced him, as he often called the Seattle-born guitarist one of the best there ever was. And when he and Deep Purple started to make a name for themselves, he said that he felt as though the band were very much stepping up to fill Jimi Hendrix’s shoes.
“We were just taking over, in a way, from someone like Hendrix,” said Blackmore. “Very musical, very bombastic, but we tried to develop certain riffs that we had, and we did borrow from Hendrix a lot”.
Further reading: From The Vault
He may well have taken that responsibility a bit too seriously when it came to writing the song ‘Speed King’. The song has a real Hendrix feel to it, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given Blackmore admitted that he put the track together by essentially ripping off two of the former’s tracks. These were ‘Fire’ and the aforementioned funk-infused banger ‘Stone Free’. Just four years after recording the song, Blackmore took his adoration very seriously and ripped off the Hendrix track. He was also happy to admit to it.
“’Speed King’… That was based on ‘Stone Free’, Jimi Hendrix,” said Blackmore when discussing the Deep Purple track, concluding, “I really liked his stuff at the time. And it was a little bit of ‘Fire’. Do you remember ‘Fire’ by Jimi Hendrix?”
