The Strat-wielding Isley Brothers guitarist Ernie Isley has etched his name in the upper echelons of funk, soul, and rock, famously introducing fuzz guitar to a new generation of R&B aficionados.
And it turns out that growing up in the company of Jimi Hendrix had a profound impact on his playing – especially since, as a preteen, Isley was listening to Hendrix before he was listening to anyone else.
Isley recalls how the Hendrix connection first came about, explaining that it all happened because his brothers – Ronald, Rudolph, and O'Kelly – had recruited Hendrix after the guitarist in their backing band, the I.B. Specials, “quit in a huff”.
“They were looking for a replacement,” Isley tells Guitar World in a new interview. “Long story short, they heard there was this guy in Greenwich Village who played better than anybody.
“This was like 1963, and you heard a lot of musicians, but nobody played guitar like him, so they hired him.”
Once they hired him, Hendrix had nowhere to stay, so the family took him into the fold. “We had a spare room at our mother’s house, and they said, ‘You can stay here,’” he says.
“He came into the house, had this brand-new guitar in a case, and they said, ‘Ma, this is the new guitar player we just hired, Jimi Hendrix.’ They said, ‘This is our mother and little brother.’”
Isley vividly remembers Hendrix's early days and how even back then, he was fascinated by his talent. “If you’d come by my house, you would have seen Jimi coming and going in and out the front door.
“Long story short, if you asked me, ‘Who’s the best player out there?’ I’d say, ‘Jimi Hendrix.’ But not because of what’s in your headphones blasting left to right, but because of what I heard him play in my living room without an amplifier.”
For more from Ernie Isley, plus new interviews with Tony Iommi and Billy Corgan, pick up issue 585 of Guitar World at Magazines Direct.
