. Pat said: “Either the dog goes or you two go”. So Jimi said: “Why don’t I go and you keep my dog? I’ve got to move on anyway”. He was quite quiet as a flatmate: Quaaluded-up all the time. And spliffed. Very laid back. He’d just sit back and play right-handed or left-handed guitar – that ambidextrousness blew my mind. If I try to play left-handed it’s like giving a child a guitar. 
We used to get out the acoustics and swap blues licks, sometimes for him to warm-up before a show. He always said: “I don’t like my voice”. And I’d say: “Don’t worry, your guitar playing takes care of that.” He was a very sweet man. I remember him walking out of Ronnie Scott’s on the night he died. He had his arm around a girl and I shouted after him: “Oi, Jimi, say goodnight!” I was in tears when I found out the next day. I couldn’t believe it
Wood was with Hendrix on his final, fateful night. "I was with him at Ronnie Scott's the night he died. He was walking down the stairs with his arm around this girl and I said to him, 'Jimi, say goodnight' – and he didn't turn round, I said, 'Jimi, say goodnight!' and he turned round really slowly, out of his brain, and just gave me a little stoned wave. And that was the last the world saw of him. Very sad, very sad departure."
I went to the Crawdaddy in Richmond and Keith Relf of The Yardbirds was ill one night, and they said:” Anyone in the audience play harmonica?” And all my friends said, “He does.” They pushed me up on stage. So I did my first gig with them and Eric and all the boys called me back after the gig. “Go and get that guy who looks like Cleopatra.” ‘Cos I had my hair like that…
memories of The Faces Too many to say… it was mad, madness all the time, total full-tilt all the time. It was hard travelling in the early days, going to Redruth in Cornwall for a tenner to split between the band. We used to write in lipstick on the side of the van so it would look like we were popular and it started a craze.
“In the Beck Group, Jeff was heavily influenced by the Chicago blues and Vanilla Fudge, bands like that coming out of the woodwork,” Wood recalls. “So we would do a blend of all the influences, plus a little bit of Beach Boys, a little bit of the blues. We put all these things into a melting pot.
“I also learned an aspect during the Beck days of how to look anew at the six strings of the guitar, from playing the four strings of the bass,” Wood says, having been switched by management to bass for the Beck Group gig. “I took the bass to another level, in my opinion.
“I used to hang out with people like Larry Graham and John Entwisle. Great players. It was inspiring and competitive, ” he recalls. “And it was the funk years, too. Players like Stanley Clarke have told me that I was a heavy influence on the way they played, unbeknownst to me. A lot of bass players I meet nowadays love those Truth/Beck-ola days. And I used to take a lot of cues from the drummers, like Aynsley Dunbar, Mickey Waller, as well.
“I learned a lot about the approach to the bass guitar from drummers. So the time I had away from the guitar while I was playing the bass was handy, because I came in knowing the kind of slide aspect and with a new vigor and enthusiasm when I went back on it with the Faces.”
