Everyone knows the myth: Hendrix once called Gibbons the best guitarist in America. It never happened. The real story is better.
By David Cohen, Crosswinds Daily
There is a famous piece of rock trivia that you will hear at every ZZ Top concert, in every Billy Gibbons interview compilation, and in roughly half the comment sections on any YouTube clip of the man playing guitar. It goes like this: Jimi Hendrix once appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and, when asked who the greatest guitarist in America was, named Billy Gibbons.
It is a wonderful story which has been repeated thousands of times. And it almost certainly never happened. The Wikipedia entry for the Moving Sidewalks, Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top band, addresses it directly: on the Cavett show, Hendrix deflected the implication that he was the greatest guitarist, but no interview in which he specifically names Gibbons has ever been located. The quote appears to be one of those rock legends that solidified through repetition rather than evidence — a myth born from the genuine friendship between the two men, inflated over decades into something more quotable than the truth.
The truth, as it happens, is a much better story. And it starts in a municipal auditorium in San Antonio, Texas, on the night of 15 February 1968.
The Moving Sidewalks and a 40-minute problem
Billy Gibbons was twenty-one years old in early 1968 and fronting a psychedelic garage-rock band called the Moving Sidewalks. The lineup was Gibbons on guitar and vocals, Don Summers on bass, Tom Moore on organ, and Dan Mitchell on drums. They were a Houston band, local stars on the Texas teen scene, with a regional hit called “99th Floor” that had topped the Houston charts for six weeks and earned them a deal with Wand Records. They were good. They were not yet famous.
Famous enough, however, to be offered the opening slot on the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first headlining US tour. The Sidewalks would go on before the Soft Machine, who went on before Hendrix. It was the kind of opportunity a young band prays for and has no idea what to do with when it arrives.
The problem was material. The contract required the Moving Sidewalks to play for forty minutes. They did not have forty minutes of original material. They had roughly thirty minutes of their own songs, and they had been filling the gap in their regular club sets with two covers that happened to be by the man they were now opening for: “Purple Haze” and “Foxy Lady.”
Gibbons has told this story many times over the years, and the telling is always the same. He looked at his bandmates and said something to the effect of: “The promoter’s really fussing at us. He’s holding us to forty minutes. The only way we can do it is if we include the Hendrix numbers.”
So they did. They walked onto the stage at Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio on 15 February 1968, in front of a crowd that had paid to see Jimi Hendrix, and they played Jimi Hendrix’s songs before Jimi Hendrix played them. A Texas garage band doing “Purple Haze” and “Foxy Lady” as warm-up for the man who wrote them.
“They were Texas interpretations,” Gibbons has said, diplomatically. Eyewitnesses are slightly less charitable. Marius Perron, a San Antonio musician who was in the audience that night, recalled the band playing the Hendrix songs “way too fast.” Steve Owens, another local musician, remembered the Sidewalks reminding him of the Seeds. Neither was terribly impressed. Gibbons, at that point, was wearing glasses and dancing around the stage. The beard and the swagger were years away.
But there was one person who was impressed, and he was watching from the wings.
“I like you. You got a lot of nerve.”
As Gibbons came off stage after the set, he felt a hand grab him by the shoulders. He turned around and there was Jimi Hendrix, grinning.
“I got to meet you,” Hendrix said. “You got a lot of nerve. I like it.”
That moment — not the invented Cavett quote, not the myth of a public endorsement, but a private encounter backstage in San Antonio — was the beginning of a genuine friendship that would reshape Gibbons’ approach to the guitar and, through him, reshape the sound of American blues-rock for the next half-century.
Hotel rooms and a pink Stratocaster
What followed the gigs was, by Gibbons’ account, an education. Hendrix’s hotel room door was always open to the young Texan, and the two guitarists would sit cross-legged on the floor in front of Hendrix’s portable hi-fi system, listening to records and talking about sound.
One night, Hendrix put on the first Jeff Beck Group album, Truth, and both men sat in silence as Beck tore into his Les Paul with a ferocity that seemed to defy the instrument’s design. Hendrix asked Gibbons how Beck could possibly be getting those sounds. Gibbons, with the confidence of a twenty-one-year-old who had just played “Purple Haze” in front of its composer, shot back: “Jimi, it would probably surprise you to know that Jeff Beck is probably listening to your record trying to figure out what you’re doing at the same time.”
The technical lessons were specific and lasting. Hendrix showed Gibbons how he had modified his Stratocaster’s three-way toggle switch into what was essentially a five-way selector, discovering the “in-between” pickup positions that would later become standard on Fender guitars worldwide. He taught Gibbons how to remove the back scratch plate and take out the spring so the switch would stay in those intermediate positions. He demonstrated the controlled-vibrato technique that produces the famous string squiggle at the opening of “Foxy Lady.” He showed him how to chain fuzz pedals — at a time when most guitarists considered even one Fuzz-Tone to be an extreme choice. Gibbons recalled watching Hendrix chain five of them together.
And at some point during the tour, Hendrix gave Gibbons a guitar: a pink, late-1950s Fender Stratocaster. The reason, according to Gibbons, was that Hendrix thought it was “too pretty to burn” — a reference to his own famous habit of setting his guitars on fire onstage. That pink Strat stayed with Gibbons for the rest of his career. Eleven years later, recording ZZ Top’s sixth album Degüello, he plugged Hendrix’s gift directly into the recording board — the amplifier wasn’t working — and played the clean, stripped-back guitar line on “A Fool For Your Stockings,” a track many fans consider the band’s finest blues recording. The tone on that song is the sound of a dead man’s guitar, plugged into a board by accident, played by the young guitarist he once grabbed backstage and told he had a lot of nerve.
What Hendrix gave Gibbons, and what Gibbons did with it
The specific guitar techniques Gibbons learned from Hendrix — the toggle switch positions, the controlled vibrato, the fearless approach to fuzz and distortion — fed directly into the DNA of ZZ Top. But the deeper lesson was not technical. It was, in Gibbons’ own word, about what Hendrix made “visible.” The invisible possibilities of the instrument — sounds, textures, approaches that the instruction manuals never described — became real because Hendrix had the audacity to try them.
“Through his genius,” Gibbons has said, “the invisible became instantly visible. I took those late-night lessons right into the early days of ZZ Top to the present.”
Hendrix also endorsed the Moving Sidewalks’ onstage theatrics. The band had a contraption that produced a phosphorescent rain shower at a dramatic point in the set — a piece of visual showmanship that had already gotten them fired from an opening slot on a Doors tour for upstaging the headliner. Hendrix, rather than being threatened, actively encouraged it. “That was actually a notion from Jimi Hendrix,” Gibbons told Guitar World in 1994. “He recommended that we continue this entertaining sort of appearance.” The seeds of ZZ Top’s later visual extravagance — the spinning fur guitars, the MTV-era stage design, the sheer commitment to spectacle — trace a direct line back to a quiet word of encouragement from Hendrix in 1968.
And then, of course, the Moving Sidewalks ended. Don Summers and Tom Moore were drafted into the United States Army. Gibbons and drummer Dan Mitchell regrouped, found bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard, and formed the band that would eventually become one of the best-selling rock acts in American history. The long beards came later. The sunglasses came later. The MTV hits came later. But the foundation — the fearless, blues-rooted, tone-obsessed, showmanship-embracing approach to rock guitar that defines ZZ Top — was laid in those hotel rooms with Hendrix, and on that stage in San Antonio where a young man from Houston had the nerve to play “Purple Haze” in front of its creator.
The genteel man
In 2013, the Moving Sidewalks reunited for a concert in New York City. The setlist included three Hendrix songs. Gibbons told the audience: “Jimi taught us half of what we know.” He described the late guitarist as “a genteel man” — a phrase that anyone who knew Hendrix offstage has echoed. The man who set guitars on fire and played with his teeth was, by every private account, quiet, shy, and generous with his time and his knowledge. He opened his hotel room door to a twenty-one-year-old opening act and gave him guitar lessons that lasted a lifetime.
The myth says Hendrix named Gibbons the greatest guitarist in America on national television. The reality is smaller, quieter, and infinitely more human. A hand on the shoulder backstage. A grin. “You got a lot of nerve.” And a pink Stratocaster that was too pretty to burn.
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