Crosstown Traffic

The central accomplishment of Murrays extraordinary new book, Crosstown Traffic, is to rescue Hendrix, the towering musical innovator, from the myth he helped fashion. But that is not all: in establishing Hendrixs proper context, Murray, one of Englands premier rock critics, has composed a text that fuses memoir with a sweeping historical discussion of soul, jazz, the blues and the impact of electronic technology on modern pop music. The result is not simply the best book yet on Hendrix but the most compelling and literate essay on rock since Greil Marcus 1975 Mystery Train.

Jim Miller, original editor of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll

about the author

Charles Shaar Murray is an award-winning author, journalist, musician and cultural infidel: the rock critics rock critic (Q Magazine), front-line cultural warrior and original gunslinger (Independent on Sunday). He first appeared in print in 1970 in the notorious Schoolkids issue of OZ magazine. By 1972 he was working for NME, subsequently becoming Associate Editor. Crosstown Traffic, his acclaimed study of Jimi Hendrix, won the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in 1990; a decade later, Boogie Man was shortlisted for the same award. The first two decades of his journalism, criticism and vulgar abuse, to use his own description, were collected in Shots from the Hip. In 2010 he received a Record of the Day for his contributions to music journalism, and a novel, The Hellhound Sample, appeared in 2011. He is currently at work on a somewhat unconventional book about The Clash and playing blues guitar with his band Crosstown Lightnin. He aspires to be the missing link between George Orwell and Robert Johnson.

charlesshaarmurray.com

by the same author

DAVID BOWIE : An Illustrated Record (with Roy Carr)

BOOGIE MAN : The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century

SHOTS FROM THE HIP : The Essential Guide to Blues on CD

This book is dedicated to the memory of
Elizabeth de Gaster (192987)

and to Vernon Reid, Living Colour and
the Black Rock Coalition

This updated edition published by Canongate Books in 2012

www.canongate.tv

This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2012

Copyright Charles Shaar Murray, 1989, 2001, 2012

The moral right of the author has been asserted

First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Faber and Faber Ltd

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85786 774 2
eISBN 978 0 85786 801 5

Typeset by Faber and Faber Ltd

Yeah, uh, dig, brother... its rilly outasite to be here...

Jimi Hendrix, Monterey Pop Festival (18 June 1967)

Despite a sentimental fondness for the venerable solitary genius theory and a well-nigh overwhelming temptation to grab this opportunity to deliver a quick chorus of I did it myyyyyy waaaayyyyyyy, such a fraudulent claim would stick in my throat. Crosstown Traffic is undoubtedly all my own fault, but it wouldnt be here at all, in this or any other form, without the contributions of a small army of people who, doubtless against their own better judgement, pitched in to help me transform a grab-bag of disconnected ideas and vague theories into what I hope is a coherent whole.

My largest debt of honour I owe to my wife, Ruth King, who provided unstinting spiritual, logistic and financial support throughout the entire process, despite the fact that she cant stand Jimi Hendrix and considered it an act of near-suicidal foolishness for me to devote thousands of hours to something like this when I could instead have been earning something vaguely resembling a living by maintaining my regular critical and journalistic practice. What can I say except now the books finished I promise to tidy up my study, Ruthie... first thing tomorrow morning.

Tom Paley, Nigel Levy (who also helped to transcribe the Pete Townshend interview) and Igor Goldkind unhesitatingly volunteered to endure the disruption of their personal and professional lives by offering temporary accommodation and work-space, thereby enabling work on Crosstown Traffic to continue during the Great Redecoration of 1988. Steve Sparks introduced me to the wonderful world of word-processing, while Su Small, Steve Wallington and Andy Oldfield accepted panicky phone calls at unsocial hours, provided Flying Programmer services and generally soothed a highly non-technical two-finger typist through the early stages of Computer Trauma.

My good friend Peter Hogan originally commissioned the book in vastly different form during his days as an editor at the now-defunct Eel Pie Publishing. Later, as my agent, he fearlessly steered it on the storm-tossed course which eventually ended up at Faber and Faber, where Chris Barstow and Tracey Scoffield not only beat the manuscript and, for that matter, the author into shape, but protected me from the righteous wrath thundering about my ears through a succession of perforated deadlines.

John Berry, a tireless collector of Hendrix memorabilia, virtually adopted the project as his own during the extensive period of pre-production, and enthusiastically ransacked his vast archives for rare, unreleased tapes of Hendrixs secret music, and obscure quotes and anecdotes, thereby providing insights into my subjects musical subconscious which it would have been near-impossible for me to have obtained any other way. And my mother, Agnes Schaar Murray, helped me to realize that I was on to something worthwhile back in 1970, when as a messianic young hippie I dragged her to a local cinema to see Woodstock. She sat through the whole thing with a pained expression of someone stoically enduring a bad smell until Hendrix came on to play The Star Spangled Banner for the grand finale. Now that, she said, was marvellous.

More people than I can ever hope or afford to thank adequately provided anecdotes, interviews, insights, opinions and plain old ordinary encouragement over the years since this book (or something like it) was first contemplated. Some loaned records, tapes, books and clippings, some organized interviews or opened their address books, and some told me what I needed to know about things I knew little or nothing about. Others shot holes in my dumber ideas or honed and refined my brighter ones. Others still simply dragged me out for a drink when I was feeling mildly hysterical and desperately needed one.

They are not all quoted directly in the text, but all of them contributed materially to making this book what(ever) it is. In alphabetical order, then, can we please have some of that o-o-old soul clappin for Keith Altham, Alan Balfour, J. G. Ballard, John Bauldie, Alfreda Benge, Larry Blackmon, Peter Boe, Steve Boon, David Bowie, Lloyd Bradley, Felicity Brooks, Tony Brown, Joanna Burn, Will Calhoun, Roy Carr, Stuart Cohn, Richard Cousins, Robert Cray, Johnny Guitar Crippen, Miles Davis, Bernard Papa Doc Doherty, Paul DuNoyer, Mark Ellen, Pete Frame, Debbie Geller, Andy Gill, Corey Glover, Daryl Hall, Barney Hoskyns, Ernie Isley, Wilko Johnson, Nick Jones, Dik Jude, Peter Kameron, Nick Kent, B. B. King, Garrie J. Lammin, Herman Leonard, Ian MacDonald, Tom McGuinness, George McManus, Phil Manzanera, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Bill Nitopi, Rob Partridge, Little Richard Penniman, Noel Redding, Vernon Reid, Marsha Rowe, Vermilion Sands, Jon Savage, Harry Shapiro, David Sinclair, Mark Sinker, Neil Slaven, Mat Snow, Neil Spencer, T. M. Stevens, Barnaby Thompson, Pete Townshend, Tina Turner, Ed Ward, Harold Waterman, the late Muddy Waters, Cliff White, T-Bone Wolk, Bobby Womack, Robin Wood, Ron Wood (no relation), Robert Wyatt and Elizabeth J. Young.