Before the giant beard, before the MTV stardom and spinning fur guitars, before he was seen onstage with bandmates playing 17-string basses, and even before the band that made him famous existed, Billy Gibbons was plying his six-string trade with the Moving Sidewalks, a true Nuggets-era psychedelic/garage-rock band. What can you say? The man's lived many lives.
Though they never quite made it big nationwide, the Moving Sidewalks' biggest single, 99th Floor, was enough of a hit in the band's native Houston, Texas to give the group some momentum as rock fully entered its tie-dye era.
That wind at the Moving Sidewalks' backs was enough to convince promoters to stick the band on the bill with some budding rock juggernauts when they rolled through town, particularly one James Marshall Hendrix, for whom the band opened in 1968.
Latest Videos FromGuitar World
Gibbons and co's usual set, mind you, featured multiple Hendrix songs. Incredibly, the band kept that set – Purple Haze and Foxy Lady included – when opening for the man himself, something they cheekily chalked up to a lack of material.
Far from being angry, Hendrix was actually impressed by the sheer gall of his openers, and struck up a friendship with Gibbons.
Try to contain your shock, but during their time touring together, prime-era Hendrix made quite an impression on the young Gibbons. The rulebook-shredding that millions of guitarists only got to hear on record, Gibbons got to see up close and in-person.
“It was just wild. He knew all the tricks – five-way position on the toggle switch before it was five-way, bending the wang-bar up so that it'd go down farther, immobilizing the strings... it was just great to be near him to see all this stuff he was doing instinctively,” Gibbons recalled with some wonder in a 1984 Guitar World interview.
“I remember one night he came ripping into the hotel room and said, ‘Um, do you know this?’ and he'd slap down a lick that would last for 10 minutes. I'd shake my head and say, ‘Uh, no. Could you run through it maybe once more?’”
In a more recent interview on the YouTube show Rock & Roll High School, the ZZ Top man recalled another hotel room hang with Hendrix, during which the two guitarists sat in wonder listening to Truth, the debut album from the Jeff Beck Group.
Hendrix, Gibbons said, was himself left in awe by the album, asking Gibbons how Beck could've gotten such otherworldly sounds out of his Les Paul.
“I said, ‘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!’”
