“Back home in London, the calculus had changed. On November 25, 1966, while the Yardbirds were wrapping up another U.S. tour, a seismic shift was felt at the Bag O’Nails, a rock ’n roll hangout on Kingly Street in Soho.
Terry Reid, a teenager with an explosive voice who sang with Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers and had toured the States in 1965 with the Yardbirds, Ike & Tina Turner, and the Rolling Stones, was at the bar drinking a Mateus and Coke when he noticed a procession of familiar faces trickling into the empty club.
First Brian Jones, then Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Bill Wyman . . . What the fu . . . “Someone tapped me on the shoulder,” Reid recalls. “I turned around, and it was Jimi Hendrix, who I knew from the States. I asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” “Oh, man, I’m going to get up and play,” he said. “I’m pretty nervous, man. I haven’t really played in London before. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Word was out on the left-handed guitar phenom, and the rock cognoscenti kept streaming in. Eric Burdon, Denny Laine, Donovan, Ray Davies . . .
Paul McCartney.
Reid noticed Jimi patching the club’s Hammond organ amp into a stack of Marshalls identical to another stack of Marshalls on the other side of the stage. Two Marshall stacks in a small club. Reid remembers thinking, “Holy ****! This is going to make an impression.”
A few minutes later Jimi ambled onstage while his sidemen, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, slipped behind their instruments. “Hello, everybody,” he whispered into the mic, grinning from ear to ear. “My name is Jimi, and I’d like to play a couple of things for you. The first tune I’m gonna play is a little thing I know is close to your heart. It’s number one on the charts at the moment, a lovely little rockin’ thing.”
Reid racked his brain: What was number one on the charts? And what might be close to his heart?
“It’s a little thing called . . . ‘Wild Thing,’ ” Jimi purred.
Wild Thing! Reid says, “It was the most hated song, and the Troggs were the most hated group.” Before it had time to sink in, Jimi whipped his hand across the strings of his guitar and made a sound like whur-onnnnnnng, launching into a straight three-chord change, and the entire room went nuts.
All the guitar gods were sitting right in front of the stage, while Jimi tore through solo after solo, playing with his teeth and ****,” Reid recalls. “All the English guitar players saw the future right there. They thought they had it all sewn up, but you never knew what was lurking right around the corner.
Jeff Beck’s reaction was indicative of his cronies’. “It was kind of hard to grapple with that f****r,” Beck recalled of his first encounter with Hendrix at the Bag O’Nails. “He hit me like an earthquake. I had to think long and hard about what I did next." [Unquote]
Note: While there's no video of that magical night, here's Jimi doing Wild Thing at Monterey Pop about 7 months later:
