Future ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons was still in his teens when he founded Houston, Texas psych-blues band The Moving Sidewalks, and secured a booking to support The Jimi Hendrix Experience at shows in Fort Worth and Houston in February 1968. The Moving Sidewalks were required to play a 40-minute set each night in their contract, and Gibbons quickly realised that the only way that his band could stretch their set to the required length was by including the two Jimi Hendrix covers they regularly played at gigs, his 1967 singles Foxy Lady and Purple Haze. It's not as if Hendrix would notice, right?
Wrong.
"I'll never forget the opening night, we played Foxy Lady and were going into the intro to Purple Haze, and I happened to look over to the side of the stage, and there in the shadows was Jimi Hendrix with his arms folded, grinning," Gibbons recalled in a later TV interview with US broadcasting legend Dan Rather. "He made a bonded friendship right off the bat."
