Creativity Quote by Alvin Lee

Name-dropping usually reads like bragging. Here it lands as a little historical tremor: Alvin Lee casually placing himself in the same creative weather system as Jimi Hendrix, then letting the awe do the talking. The sentence structure gives it away. Lee doesn’t lead with Hendrix’s approval as a trophy; he leads with the mundane detail - “a few times in fact” - the kind of offhand specificity that signals memory more than mythmaking. The compliment arrives almost accidentally, like a door left ajar on a scene rock history tends to varnish.

The subtext is a portrait of late-60s guitar culture as a feedback loop: competition, mutual surveillance, and real curiosity. “I did this song...” frames Lee as the instigator, but “Jimi loved it” shifts the power immediately. Hendrix becomes the ultimate audience, the one listener who can validate not just performance but direction. Then Lee sharpens the emotional stakes with “huge compliment,” because the praise isn’t “you played great.” It’s “I’m thinking of doing something similar.” That’s peer recognition at the level artists actually crave: not applause, but influence.

Context matters: “I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes” is a blues standard, and Lee’s version isn’t invention from scratch so much as a reinvention through tone, intensity, and arrangement. The implication is that in that era, originality often meant how you transformed tradition, not whether you “owned” it. Lee’s anecdote quietly argues for his place in the lineage - not as Hendrix’s equal, but as someone close enough to have nudged the future.