Jimi Hendrix Said 14 Words Before He Died — Eric Clapton Has Carried Them for Over 50 Years

Jimi Hendrix Said 14 Words Before He Died — Eric Clapton Has Carried Them for Over 50 Years

The phone rang at half past 11. Clapton almost didn’t answer it. He had been asleep for an hour and the ringing pulled him back slowly and for a moment he lay in the dark deciding whether to let it go. Then he reached for it. The voice on the other end said, “It’s Jimmy. I need to talk to someone who plays guitar.” The date was September 17th, 1970. By the following morning, Jimi Hendrix would be dead. To understand the weight of that phone call, you have to understand what the

two men were to each other, which was something that did not fit neatly into any of the categories that the music industry preferred. They were not close friends in the ordinary sense. They did not spend long evenings together or confide in each other about their private lives or move in the same daily social circles. What they shared was something more specific and in its own way more intimate than friendship, a mutual recognition that went beyond admiration and into something closer to kinship. They were two people who

understood from the inside what the other was doing with a guitar. And in a world where very few people could offer that particular kind of understanding, the recognition between them carried a weight that their relatively limited time together did not fully explain. Clapton had first encountered Hendrix in late 1966 when Hendrix arrived in London from New York with a reputation that had preceded him through the transatlantic grapevine of musicians and managers and people who paid attention to such

things. The story of their first meeting has been told in various forms over the years and the details vary depending on the telling, but the essential fact is consistent. Clapton heard Hendrix play and was shaken in a way that he had not been shaken before. He was already by late 1966 one of the most celebrated guitarists in England. The walls of London had been spray-painted with the words Clapton is God, an accolade that embarrassed him and that he found at 21 more burden than compliment. He had

spent years developing a relationship with the guitar that he believed was as close to complete as it could be. Hendrix made him feel like a beginner, not in a diminishing way. Clapton was not a man given to easy envy or competitive bitterness, but in the way that a genuine encounter with greatness recalibrates your sense of what is possible. He said in later years that hearing Hendrix play for the first time was one of the most important musical experiences of his life, not because it discouraged him, but because it expanded

his understanding of the instrument he had dedicated himself to. It showed him a door he had not known was there. The two of them existed in the years between 1966 and 1970 in a relationship of mutual respect that occasionally became genuine warmth, but never quite resolved into close friendship, partly because of the different orbits their careers placed them in, and partly because both men were, in their different ways, somewhat private about the things that mattered most to them. They played

together informally on a handful of occasions. They spoke at industry events and parties with the ease of people who do not need to work hard to find common ground. They followed each other’s work with the specific attention of musicians who are genuinely curious about what another musician is doing and why. By September of 1970, both of them were in difficult places. Clapton’s difficulties were partly personal and partly artistic, the complicated aftermath of his unrequited feelings for Pattie Boyd,

the creative pressure of following up work that had already been called definitive, the beginning of the dependency issues that would shadow him for the next two decades. He was 25 years old and had already been famous for 5 years, and fame had not turned out to feel the way he had imagined it would, which was a discovery that left him unsure what to do next. Hendrix’s difficulties were of a different order and a different severity. The years between 1967 and 1970 had been years of extraordinary creative output and

extraordinary personal chaos, touring schedules that would have broken most people, management disputes, the pressure of being the most celebrated guitarist in the world at 27, the particular loneliness of a kind of fame so large and so sudden that it outpaced any ordinary human framework for understanding it. By September 1970, he was exhausted in a way that sleep did not fully address, and the people around him were worried about him in ways that some of them expressed and some of them did not. He called Clapton at half past

11 on the night of September 17th. Clapton answered the phone in the dark and heard the voice say, “It’s Jimmy. I need to talk to someone who plays guitar.” He sat up. He said, “I’m here.” What followed was a conversation that Clapton has described over the course of more than 50 years only in fragments. He has never given a complete account of it, and he has said more than once that he does not intend to, that there are things said in private conversations between two people that belong to those

two people, and that the fact of one of them being dead does not transfer ownership of those words to the public. This is a position that deserves respect, and it will be respected here. What can be said is drawn from the fragments Clapton has offered and from the testimony of people close to him who have described in general terms the effect the conversation had on him in the days and weeks and years that followed. They talked for a long time. Clapton has said it was more than an hour, possibly closer to two. He has

said that Hendrix was not incoherent or alarming in any way that would have suggested immediate danger. He was tired, and he was reflective, and he was, in the way that people sometimes are in the small hours of the night, more honest than he might have been at a different time of day. He talked about the guitar. He talked about what it felt like to play at the level both of them played, the particular burden of it, the way the instrument demanded everything and gave back something that was not

quite peace, but was as close to it as either of them had found. He talked about the future in the way that people talk about the future when they are not sure they believe in it. Not with explicit despair, but with a kind of tentative quality, as if the future were a place he was not certain he had a reservation for. Clapton listened. He talked back. He said in the fragments he has offered that he tried to give Hendrix what the call seemed to be asking for. Not advice, not solutions, but the simple presence of someone who

understood. Someone who played guitar and knew from the inside what Hendrix was describing. The loneliness of the instrument, the way it asked for more than you had and then asked again. The strange grief of loving something so completely that ordinary life felt by comparison slightly unreal. At some point near the end of the call, Hendrix said something that Clapton has quoted directly on the few occasions he has spoken about that night. He said, “The music is the only true thing. Everything

else is just the story we tell around it.” Clapton has said that he did not know in the moment that this was a statement of conclusion. That it sounded at half past one in the morning like the kind of thing that people say when they are tired and honest and talking to someone who will understand. He said good night. Hendrix said good night. The call ended. Clapton went back to sleep. He woke the next morning to the news that Jimi Hendrix had died. The exact circumstances of his death, the combination of sleeping tablets and

alcohol, the details of what happened in the flat in Notting Hill in the hours after the phone call ended, became in the days that followed the subject of the kind of intense public scrutiny that attends the sudden death of someone very famous. Clapton did not participate in that scrutiny. He withdrew from it entirely. He did not speak publicly about the phone call for many years. When he finally began to speak about it in interviews given decades later, what he described was not grief in the simple

sense, though grief was certainly present, but something more complicated. The The of holding a conversation that you understood in retrospect had been a farewell without having understood it in the moment. The weight of the last things said, viewed from the other side of their finality. The way a casual good night becomes in memory the most significant words you ever exchanged. He said that the line stayed with him. The music is the only true thing. Everything else is just the story we tell around

it. He said he had turned it over many times in the years since trying to understand exactly what Hendrix had meant by it. Whether it was a statement of faith or a statement of resignation, whether it expressed love for the music or exhaustion with everything surrounding it, whether it was the kind of thing you say when you intend to go on playing or the kind of thing you say when you are not sure you do. He said he had arrived at different conclusions at different times in his life and that he

was not certain any of them were correct and that he had eventually made peace with not knowing. What he was certain of was the effect the call had on how he approached his own life afterward. Not immediately. The immediate aftermath of Hendrix’s death was a period of shock and grief and the complicated emotions that attend the loss of someone you admired enormously but did not know as well as you wished you had. But over the years and particularly in the long years of his own recovery from addiction, the

memory of that conversation returned to him with increasing clarity and increasing significance. The music is the only true thing. Everything else is just the story we tell around it. Clapton has said that this line became in some ways a kind of anchor for him during the hardest periods of his life. Not a philosophy he could articulate cleanly or defend in an argument, but a felt truth. The knowledge, rooted in the memory of that last conversation, that the guitar was not incidental to who he was, but essential. That the story

around it, the fame, the industry, the relationships, the decades of chaos, was real and consequential, but secondary. That underneath all of it, there was the instrument and the music and the truth that moved through both of them when everything else fell away. He founded the Crossroads Center in Antigua in 1998, a treatment facility for people struggling with addiction. He has said many times that his own recovery required him to find again the thing underneath everything else, the reason he had started playing in the first

place before the fame and the chaos had obscured it. He has not said publicly that Hendrix’s last words to him were part of that rediscovery. But the people who know him well, who were present in the years of his recovery, have noted that he spoke about that phone call during that period more than at any other time, as if the memory of what Hendrix said had become, in the context of his own fight to survive, a piece of evidence about what was worth surviving for. Jimi Hendrix died on September

18th, 1970. He was 27 years old. He left behind a body of work that permanently altered the landscape of what a guitar could do and what music could sound like. And he left behind in a flat in London on the night before he died, a phone call that lasted nearly two hours and ended with a good night that neither man knew was a goodbye. Eric Clapton answered the phone because he reached for it in the dark instead of letting it ring. He has lived with that decision for more than 50 years, with the call

itself, with the words said in it, with the good night that was a goodbye, with the line that has stayed with him longer than almost anything else anyone has ever said to him. The music is the only true thing. Everything else is just the story we tell around it. Hendrix said it at half past 1:00 in the morning, tired and honest and talking to the one person he had called because he needed to talk to someone who played guitar. And Clapton heard it and said good night and went back to sleep and woke up the next

morning to a world in which Jimi Hendrix was gone and those words were all that was left of the last conversation they would ever have. If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs to be reminded that underneath everything, the the noise, the chaos, the story we tell around it, the music is still there, waiting to be true. There is something that deserves to be said about the nature of that particular kind of loss, the loss of a conversation’s future. When someone dies hours after

speaking with you, what you are left with is not only grief for the person, but a strange, permanent incompleteness. Every conversation carries within it the implicit assumption of continuation. The things left unsaid, the questions unasked, the responses not yet given, all of these exist in the ordinary flow of a relationship as deferrals rather than absences. There will be time to say it later. There will be another call, another evening, another chance. When the person dies, all of those deferrals

become permanent. The conversation does not continue. It simply ends at the exact point it ended, and everything that was going to come after it disappears. Clapton has spoken about this quality of the loss, the way the phone call did not feel while it was happening, like a final thing. Hendrix sounded tired. He sounded honest in the way that late-night conversations produce honesty. He sounded like a man who had called a friend to talk through something difficult, which was something that people did and then continued their

lives afterward. There was nothing in the call, Clapton has said, that would have caused him to understand it as a farewell. He listened the way you listen when you expect the conversation to be one of many more. He said goodnight the way you say goodnight when goodnight means see you soon. The next morning changed the meaning of everything that had been said. This is one of the things that grief does that ordinary life does not prepare you for, the way it retroactively transforms the past. The

last conversation becomes the last conversation, not at the moment it happens, but at the moment you learn it was the last. Everything said in it is suddenly freighted with a significance it did not carry in the saying. The casual words become profound. The silences become meaningful. The good night becomes a goodbye. And you are left holding a conversation that has changed shape entirely, trying to understand it with tools that were built for a different kind of understanding. Clapton held that

conversation for 50 years and arrived eventually at something that was not quite peace, but was close to it. He arrived at the understanding that what Hendrix had given him in those two hours on the night of September 17th was not a burden, but a gift. The gift of being the person Hendrix called. The gift of being the one who answered. The gift of being trusted in the small hours of a night that turned out to be the last one with the kind of honesty that only comes out when someone needs to talk to

someone who will understand. He needed to talk to someone who plays guitar. Of all the people Jimi Hendrix could have called on the last night of his life, he called the one person he knew would understand what the guitar actually meant. Not what it produced. Not what it represented in terms of fame or legacy or cultural significance. What it felt like. What it asked of you. What it gave back. The private interior truth of being in a relationship with an instrument that demanded everything and returned something that could not be

named, but could, if you were lucky and if you worked hard enough, be played. Clapton understood that. He still does. And on some nights, more than 50 years after a phone rang at half past 11 and he reached for it in the dark, he sits with the guitar and plays and somewhere in the playing he finds the thing that Hendrix was talking about. The only true thing underneath all the stories, patient and unchanged, and still entirely itself.