A conversation with
Roger Mayer
Roger and Jimi in 1968
huge amount of reverb, then you’ve got
it—you’ve got it on the soft part of the
song, you’ve got it on the loud part of the
song. You’ve got it all night long, haven’t
you? That isn’t going to change, whereas
if you’re making a record you can move
from echo to dry; you can do all sorts
of things. So the amount of control on a
record—it’s a far more satisfying experience to actually make a record that can
be heard thirty years later and still be
appreciated. You can’t say that with a live
performance. Only the people that were
there heard it live, and I’m not talking
about some sort of quasi-live recording
that might have been overdubbed four
weeks later, you know? [laughs]
And he was excited, I’m sure.
Oh, yeah, obviously. We were obviously
on the same page from day one.
So did you just go into the studio with
him after that?
I hate to focus on the past, but how did
you meet up with Jimi?
I met him in a nightclub a few days after
my 21st birthday. I just went up to him
and I talked to him—everybody was
there, you know, the Stones, the Who,
McCartney. I just said, “Listen man, I’m
really into guitar sounds and I’ve done a
few for Page and Beck and these people.”
Well, I went to one gig at Chislehurst
Caves about two weeks after I met him
and showed him one of the first Octavias
backstage. He played through it and said,
“Can you do that to it?” and I said, “Yeah,
Jimi, you know these things are improving
week by week as we get more feedback
on it.” And he said, “Right; I’m playing at
a club called the Ricky-Tick at Hounslow in
about another week. Why don’t you bring
it along to the gig and after the gig we
can go back to Olympic Studios. I gotta
record a couple of solos for a couple of
tunes I’ve got.”
So after the gig—it was a very low ceiling
at the gig, and he put the neck of his guitar through the ceiling; it basically fucked
the machine heads on the top of his guitar, right? And we didn’t have a spare guitar then, so we went back to Olympic
