Room Full of Mirrors

Room Full of Mirrors, A Biography of Jimi Hendrix by Charles R. Cross

Category: Musical biography Grade: B+

First a little about why I picked this book this time. Last week was a sad week for the Austin music scene. Clifford Antone, one of the key figures in making Austin the Live Musical Capital, died of heart attack at the age of 56. Clifford opened the first incarnation of Antone's over thirty years ago. Over the last three decades, he has brought just about every major name in blues and R&B to Austin. He loved what he did and promoted not only the big names but the talented side men and the often overlooked originators of the blues.

Carolyn and I got a chance to get to know Clifford just a little bit in the last couple of months. Clifford loved to teach people about the music he loved so much. Our family first connected with him during the '04-'05 school season. He taught a semester long course at UT - Clifford Antone's History of Blues and Rock - and Dan spent two semesters as his TA. This spring, we underwrote a series of four lectures by Clifford at the little Uptown Theatre in Marble Falls. They were an absolute blast. Clifford was a walking encyclopedia and, mostly through is enthusiasm, taught us a lot about the music that changed the world. He will really be missed.

So, as I was listening to people like Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Big Momma Thornton, I decided that the next book up should be about one of the big names in blues or rock. The one I really wanted to read next was Guralnick's new bio of Sam Cooke. Its on the way, so more about that one later. I've had this bio of Jimi Hendrix for a while and decided to give it a go.

Hendrix was a bottle rocket. He came out of nowhere. As a teenager, with a mother who drank herself to death and a father who wasn't around much, he lived in near total poverty. There were times in his late teens when the only reason he had anything to eat was that he hung around a hamburger joint and took whatever they were going to throw away at the end of the day. Initially, he taught himself to play guitar by playing a broom!

In his early twenties, Hendrix moved to New York to try and make it and had a moderately succesful career as a guitarist for other stars -- Curtis Knight and even James Brown. In spite of this, he was never really able to get much of a career off the ground. His big break came at the age of about 23, when he was invited to come over to England by Eric Burdon of the Animals. This was the height of the music scene in England with the Beatles and the Stones tearing up the charts. Almost overnight, Hendrix became the hottest rock/psychedelic star in Europe.

It still took a while for him to make back in the states. He never was particularly popular with the black audiences since he had left R&B/blues behind for the wild, inventive music that he played. It took Monterey Pop and later, Woodstock, to really make him as an American star.

Cross writes well and doesn't shy away from the negative aspect of Hendrix's life. Given Jimi's public image and tragic end, he comes across in Cross's book as a reasonably shy and somewhat grounded man up until his last days. I have to admit that, at the time, I wasn't a huge Hendrix fan, but when I think of the psychedelic music era two of the three sounds that come to mind are his -- Purple Haze (with the great line "'scuse me while I kiss the sky") and Jimi's unforgettable solo guitar rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Give his visibility, its hard to get your head around the fact that Jimi's entire life was less than 28 years long!

This book isn't the music grabber of some of the earlier ones I talked about, but its definitely worth reading, especially if the music of the 60s is a big part of your life.

(BTW -- the third sound of psychedelics is Iron Butterfly's incredible Ina Gada Da Vida.)