"I really thought I was pretty good before I saw Hendrix, and then I thought: Yeah, not so good"
About this Quote
It is a bruised little confession that doubles as a love letter to a rival genius. Brian May isn’t just admitting insecurity; he’s sketching the moment a musician’s internal ranking system gets violently recalibrated. The first clause - "I really thought I was pretty good" - carries the quiet swagger of a player who’s earned his chops. Then Hendrix enters like a weather event, and the second clause lands with that deadpan sting: "Yeah, not so good". The phrasing matters. May doesn’t say "Hendrix was better". He describes a self-perception collapsing in real time, as if his own talent shrank under a new, harsher light.
The subtext is less about humiliation than about scale. Hendrix didn’t simply play faster or cleaner; he expanded what electric guitar could be: sound as physical force, feedback as vocabulary, technique as spectacle and risk. For a meticulous architect like May - the guy who built his own guitar and stacked harmonies into cathedrals - Hendrix represented a different kind of authority: raw, improvisational, bordering on anarchic. That clash makes May’s reaction believable and culturally telling.
Context helps: late 60s London was a pressure cooker of virtuosity, ego, and reinvention. Hendrix arrived as an outsider and instantly rewrote the room’s rules. May’s humility, offered decades later, also signals rock’s healthiest tradition: lineage. Great players don’t just compete; they get haunted, corrected, and ultimately propelled by the artists who show them the ceiling was never the ceiling.
The subtext is less about humiliation than about scale. Hendrix didn’t simply play faster or cleaner; he expanded what electric guitar could be: sound as physical force, feedback as vocabulary, technique as spectacle and risk. For a meticulous architect like May - the guy who built his own guitar and stacked harmonies into cathedrals - Hendrix represented a different kind of authority: raw, improvisational, bordering on anarchic. That clash makes May’s reaction believable and culturally telling.
Context helps: late 60s London was a pressure cooker of virtuosity, ego, and reinvention. Hendrix arrived as an outsider and instantly rewrote the room’s rules. May’s humility, offered decades later, also signals rock’s healthiest tradition: lineage. Great players don’t just compete; they get haunted, corrected, and ultimately propelled by the artists who show them the ceiling was never the ceiling.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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