As a professional rock and roll singer, it's hats off time to Mick. Oh, I'll get big arguments about that but people who would argue the point don't understand rock and roll singing. It's not about range, power, or technical perfection. It's all about emotion and style. Mick knows how to sing without necessarily using words. Like Robert Plant, he often uses sounds alone to express emotions. A case in point is "Going Home" on the Aftermath album which consists of 11 minutes of Mick having sex with a microphone. Jimi Hendrix was actually embarrassed by his own singing because as a great musician, he recognized and understood the great singers. In the recording studio, he was the master of guitar but he recorded his vocals over and over and over again until he got something that he could just live with. But I put Jimi in the same class as Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. These are great artists who were all perfectly capable of putting across their own unique songs in a way that nobody else can. I'm not a fan of Dylan's voice and when The Byrds recorded Dylan songs, they did a good job but they lack Dylan's sarcasm and his almost bored feeling with his own poetic brilliance. I'm a big fan of Bob Marley and I like his voice, but I recognize that he's not a great singer. It just so happens that I love Jimi's voice. I hear Bob Dylan's influence and I know that Jimi was a fan of Bob's voice and of his lyrics. But Jimi did something very unusual vocally and in the theater, it's called an "aside". Jimi had a wonderful habit of flipping off little spoken phrases, very often interrupting himself while he was singing and it came off as being totally COOL. When it comes to singers, people either like them or they don't and all I can say is that as a professional singer, Jimi's voice works for me big time.

So in conclusion, it's not necessary to be a great musician to be a rock star, just like it's not necessary to be a great actor to be a movie star. This should be self evident and there are way too many examples in both fields to start listing them. But Jimi was a genius guitar player, a unique and atomicly powerful performer, a great songwriter, a very good singer, a super nova sex star, and a world class personality on top of everything else. That's why I call Jimi Hendrix the Number One Rock Star of All Time.