An uncontroversial opinion: Jimi Hendrix is the greatest rock n roll guitarist there ever was (and probably ever will be). For a period in my teen years the studio albums were on repeat, I wore the t-shirt until it faded and started ripping at the armpits, I continue to cherish the otherworldly aspect of his image, yet until now I was almost completely unaware of Hendrix's early life, as seen in Charles R. Cross's biography, Room Full of Mirrors (2005). Growing up in Seattle in the middle of the 20th century, he endured practically everything that could stunt or extinguish a life: Desperately poor, often not knowing where his next meal would come from. Two alcoholic parents. The early death of his mother (his father forbid him from attending the funeral). A broken family. Frequent moves from one place to another. Academic problems that eventually forced him to drop out of high school. An instance of sexual abuse. Racism. Without music, he once said, he would have ended up in prison, a fate he avoided the first time by joining the military and the second by luck, a fate his own brother didn't avoid. Although he had his dreams and ambitions, and the physical advantage of long fingers, it's not so much that he was uniquely tough or naturally talented. He didn't vow to get out any way, any how, and just happen to use music for that purpose. It was obsession that saved him. He strummed a broom until the straw came off. His first real guitar was an acoustic with one string someone was about to toss into the garbage. He strapped it to his back and, with cardboard in his shoe to cover up a hole, wandered around town pursuing the sound of musicians rehearsing. They let him stay and shared a tip or two. A boarder at his home was a blues fan and shared her records with him. At her husband's urging, Hendrix's father reluctantly bought him a cheap electric guitar, no amp, but refused to let him play lefthanded (something about the devil) or practice too much (due to the threat he might seize the instrument and return it, Hendrix found a place outside of home to store it). From then on, the instrument was almost never out of his hands. As in: Practicing before bed. Sleeping with the guitar on his chest. Waking up and resuming practice. Practicing on the way to a gig. Practicing on the way from a gig. Going to the movies with it and strumming through the film. His drug taking would begin with amphetamines to stay up longer, to wring out even more practice time from the day. And, for the entirety of his life, 27 years, he barely took a rest.
After pretending to be gay to get himself discharged from the Air Force, he stood outside Fort Campbell on the Tennessee/Kentucky border with hundreds of dollars in his pocket from unused leave. He went into a jazz bar and got drunk. Hours later he found himself with $16, not enough for bus fare. He thought better of calling home for the money and instead snuck back onto the base he'd just successfully escaped to sleep in his old bunk. And he stole the guitar he'd sold, possibly to prove to his superiors that he'd truly descended into madness, to a fellow soldier. To survive, he began living as he would for years: couchsurfing, or staying with women he met in clubs for as long as they would have him. He never held down one day job. From Nashville to Vancouver to the theaters, bars, pool halls, and BBQ joints that made up the Chitlin Circuit. Hendrix learned to play blindfolded, behind his back, and with his teeth. During this part of the book onward, a dazzling parade of cameos commences (though not every encounter is pleasant): Sam Cooke. Otis Redding. Curtis Mayfield. Tommy Chong. Bobby Womack.
He turned 21 the day before John F. Kennedy was assassinated. A month later he moved to New York.
His first girlfriend there, Lithofayne Pridgeon, felt her only competition for his attention was his guitar. He won an amateur competition at the Apollo. He met the Isley Brothers and watched the Beatles's first appearance on Ed Sullivan with them. They hired him. He toured with the group and recorded some singles. But tiring of how strict they were, and how little seen he was in their revue-style setup, he joined another tour. During a break in Memphis, he paid a visit to Stax Records to meet guitar hero Steve Cropper. A secretary informed him and he told her to tell the guy he was busy recording. When he was finished, the secretary told him the guy was still waiting. He'd sat there all day. Hendrix was surprised to discover Cropper was white. He mentioned he played a little guitar himself and listed some of his recordings. The admiration, it turned out, was mutual. Hendrix lost track of all the groups he supported. He joined Little Richard's band and angered him by wearing a satin shirt. "I am the only Little Richard! I am the King of Rock and Roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off!" (That's one of the cleaner Little Richard stories.) To get off the road, he focused on becoming a studio musician. He signed a contract without reading it and got out of it only because the label fell apart. He joined a band with a pimp as a front man. He signed another contract without reading it which would cause legal problems for him in the future. He recorded a bad song with Jayne Mansfield. Back on the road, with a racially integrated group, in the South, the musicians weren't allowed to leave the backstage area for breaks. He told friends about a dream he had that the year 1966 would change his life. But he was still going hungry. He had no protection against the New York cold. And once again he had a hole in his shoe. He joined another band in Harlem and shocked his fellow musicians with how fast he learned their material. Gigs didn't pay enough. He began dating a prostitute, Diana Carpenter, and they shared their dreams and dark personal histories. One day he came home to find a john choking her. He saved her. She became pregnant with his child. He insisted she stop working the streets and attempted to support them on his earnings from music but eventually they resorted to theft to get by. A store owner caught them and chased them with a baseball bat for several blocks. Without saying anything, Carpenter went back to the streets. When Hendrix found out, he beat her. Carpenter was arrested by an undercover cop and, since she was underage, she was given the choice of jail or a bus ticket home to her parents. She took the ticket and, at home, gave birth to a daughter. Since Hendrix had no fixed address, she lost hope of contacting him. Another prostitute he dated bought him a guitar. She introduced him to an influence on his look and stage act, The Spider King, who brought the limbo to the USA. Playing a show to a near-empty room, Hendrix was spotted by Keith Richards's then-girlfriend, a model named Linda Keith. She invited him to her table to share a drink with her and her friends. They stayed for the rest of his show and later that evening, hanging out at her place, she offered him acid. He declined but said he'd like to experiment with LSD if she had any. He took it, looked in a mirror, and thought he was Marilyn Monroe.
Jimi insisted to close intimates that he played colors, not notes, and that he "saw" the music in his head as he played it. His description of his creative process has an eerie similarity to what Dr. [Albert Hoffman, who discovered lysergic acid diethylamide] wrote about his own first acid trip: "Every acoustic perception...became transformed into optical perceptions."
Keith also played him an album he hadn't heard yet, Blonde on Blonde. Hendrix, always careful to style his hair properly, took out the curlers he kept in his guitar case and curled his hair in front of her as he spoke freely about his disappointing career. She played him rare records from Keith Richards's personal collection. They put Blonde on Blonde on again. Hendrix started playing along to it, admitting he didn't have his own guitar. She resolved to go out and get him one. Hendrix visited Greenwich Village. In Harlem he was an alien but the Village crowd accepted him. He went to the Cafe Wha?, where Bob Dylan played years earlier, for an open mike and afterward the manager invited him to return. For whatever reason, Hendrix left his guitar there and the next night, when he found that it was gone, had to borrow one. It was righthanded. Without hesitation, he flipped it upside down and played it that way. He was invited to return. He met strangers in a music shop and formed a group. This time he would be the leader. They played mostly covers, remade as Hendrix songs: Wilson Pickett, The Troggs, Howlin Wolf, Dylan. He played around with electronic devices to alter his guitar sound. Other guitarists started showing up to watch his rehearsals. Getting thoroughly outplayed provoked mixed feelings. Linda Keith wasn't sure about getting romantic with Hendrix. She once walked in on him in bed with seven women. She decided he wasn't one for monogamy. Still, she worked to promote him to powerful industry figures she knew, out of sheer enthusiasm for his skills. The Rolling Stones's manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, attended a show and passed. Seymour Stein of Sire Records passed. The Stones came to a show and only Richards paid close attention: What was his girlfriend doing with this Hendrix guy? (Presumably he didn't know that Keith had borrowed a guitar of his without asking and Hendrix smashed it.) So things weren't looking good until Chas Chandler, bassist for the Animals, attended a show and discovered what Keith and Hendrix's small fanbase at the cafe had. Spilling a milkshake on himself, Chandler thought: "He's the best guitarist I've ever heard." He introduced himself to Hendrix and they talked business. Chandler, who was on the verge of leaving the popular group and going into management, suggested he take his act to England. They parted with a plan.
The Animals tour concluded and Chandler was back in New York to follow the plan and take his prospect to his home country. Hendrix had to be tracked down over several days. He wavered. He needed papers. These were obtained. Finally, he came to think that he could survive there as he had in the US. He landed in Heathrow Airport on September 24th, 1966.
Earlier in the year, doing research on the right John Coltrane biography to read, a critic somewhere suggested that the problem with jazz biographers is that, in ecstasy over the music, they tend to try matching language with subject by writing jazzy. Charles R. Cross doesn't try to write psychedelic rock n roll. He's the sober attentive journalist: no 20-minute verbal drum solos, just the facts. It's a lucid account with one minor but notable structural misstep. The common approaches to introducing a biography are either to begin from the beginning or with a representative scene from later in life as prologue. Or something else significant about the figure. Instead Cross starts awkwardly with an unrepresentative scene that builds to a mildly amusing punchline. Nowhere else does he go to such lengths for the broad gag, to the book's benefit.
As for the latter half of Room Full of Mirrors, no less absorbing than the former, the reader learns, among other things, the origins of a cliché, one of the first I was ever aware of as a young music fan: the sex, drugs, and rock n roll lifestyle. Hendrix was one of its first casualties.
