John Mayer on Jimi Hendrix

John Mayer is fairly eloquent when talking/writing about music. He's had a few articles in Esquire and other magazines, and his blog usually makes for good reading. Since we both write about similar topics most of the time, this entry on his blog was particularly interesting. For the record, THIS LINK is to a post of my own from back in February which basically says the same thing. I'm just copy/pasting the John's whole post here:
"I was listening to Jimi Hendrix in the car today - which in Los Angeles means that I spent a lot of time listening to Jimi Hendrix today -when, to paraphrase the movie White Men Can't Jump, I stopped listening and started hearing Jimi.
I was zoning out to one of the many CDs cobbled together from studio outtakes when I began to wonder how Hendrix could play guitar for so long and still manage to keep me interested. His extended jams sometimes stretched out for longer than ten minutes, and still it all seemed necessary. ('Jam' doesn't really describe Hendrix's playing because it suggests something of less worth than he was actually engaged in.)
So the question posed to myself became 'how?' How did Hendrix get away with sticking so many landings in his soloing while the rest of the guitar playing world are left saddled in their own self-doubt? Was it the drugs? Well, maybe, but in my experience drugs never elevated people beyond their inborn capacity. Was it because he was the first to have assembled the perfect amalgam of Elmore James and The Big Bang, therefore relieving him of constant comparison to someone before him? This is harder to discount, but it's better covered in what I believe is the real explanation.
Jimi Hendrix, whether by chemical escapism or by the luxury of singularity that discovery offers, never played guitar sheepishly. He was so rooted in 'now' (which unfortunately at its most immediate sounding is still only best known as 'then') that he never read over his own ticker tape while he played. Maybe after, sure - that's where self-betterment stems from - but in the act, when thinking about yourself does you no good, there was no judgment. By not considering the expression worthless, he made it momentous.
And maybe that's one of the many things I have left to learn. Maybe I need to bend a note without concurrently wondering if it's going to reach the right pitch; maybe I just start closing my eyes and bending away. And with statistics showing that over 90 percent of my readership doesn't know what a minor pentatonic scale is, I bet this is worth transposing into non-musical terms. So here goes: close your eyes, get out of your own way, and JAM."
well said, John.