German magazine Guitar had an interview with AC/DC guitarist Angus Young, during which he discussed Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix. The performer remembered how he felt when he first heard “Purple Haze.”
Angus Young talks about Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page:
“I could play guitar a little bit, but I really got focused on it around the years when I was about 12 into my teenage years, I started to focus more on it. And around when I was about 13-14, that’s when Jimi Hendrix appeared on the horizon. And when I first heard the song ‘Purple Haze,’ I was totally enthralled. ‘How’s he doing that?’ I was just so impressed with it. Plus, Malcolm, my brother, there was a few shows we had also seen.”
Together, the two of us had traveled, and we had encountered visitors from Australia who were similar to the band The Yardbirds. Also, the lineup had recently been altered at the moment. I believe Jeff Beck was there at first. However, when we subsequently saw them, Jimmy Page was playing the guitar instead of Jeff Beck. That was fortunate because, at the time, the sound of the guitar, in particular, popped out at you.
He continued, “So that was really good. But then when along came Hendrix, you kind of went, ‘Woah! This is another level on guitar.’ So I was very much a fan of that. I was not really a good note picker. People – they could hear a song and just pick up the notes. I used to say to Malcolm, ‘You pick up the notes and then show me.’ [Laughs] So he would do that. He’d pick out all the notes of anything I wanted to know, and then he would just show me, and then I would play it like he showed me… But I had a host of styles.”
“From other family members who played, you pick up a bit of Chuck Berry, you pick up a bit of blues, and some folk tunes. So I had a bit of a variety of different stuff – even some early traditional jazz stuff. My sister, she was always getting me different records and stuff, ’cause she knew we were interested in doing stuff. It wasn’t so much guitar. I heard Louis Armstrong play on the trumpet, do a solo, and I’d go, ‘I like the notes,’ and I’d learn the notes… So I had quite a bit of variety. When I look at all the players who I admire, there’s a lot of players. You can go from A to Z – there’s a lot of players.”