Charles R. Cross - Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix

ROOM FULL

OF MIRRORS

A L S O B Y

CHARLES R. CROSS

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain

ROOM FULL

OF MIRRORS

A B I O G R A P H Y O F J I M I H E N D R I X

CHARLES R. CROSS

N E W Y O R K

Copyright 2005 Charles R. Cross

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FIRST EBOOK EDITION: AUGUST 2005

For My Father

who during my boyhood

put an arm around my shoulder

and read me

Prince Valiant comics

CONTENTS

V I I I

C O N T E N T S

C O N T E N T S

I X

AUTHORS NOTE

Biographers often spend time in graveyards copying down epitaphs, but rarely do they stand by watching a cemetery worker unearth a lost grave with a shovel, as was my providence in the course of writing this book. The rediscovery of the grave of Jimi Hendrixs mother was the most chilling moment in the four years it took to write Room Full ofMirrors: It was also unexpected. It occurred only because I simply couldnt believe that Greenwood Memorial Park had no exact location for Lucille Hendrix Mitchells grave, and I pestered the cemeterys office until they finally sent a workerarmed with a shovel and an ancient mapto search the rows of decaying headstones. Biographers who choose deceased subjects are all gravediggers in a way, with a bit of Dr.

Frankenstein thrown in; we seek to bring our subjects back to life, if only temporarily, in the pages of a book. Usually our goal is to animate our characters; rarely are we searching for final remains and ancient caskets. Nothing can prepare one for the moment of standing in a muddy graveyard, watching aghast as a groundskeeper pushes a shovel into the ground like a sloppy archaeologist.

If there was justice in that particular adventure, it springs from the fact that in some twisted way this biography began in that same graveyard, three decades before. It was in Greenwood Memorial cemetery, a few miles south of Seattle, that I first came as a teenage fan to pay my X I I

A U T H O R S

N O T E

respects to one of musics legends. Like any other pilgrim, I couldnt visit Jimi Hendrixs grave without the lyrics to my favorite songs

Purple Haze, Wind Cries Mary, Jimis brilliant take of Dylans All Along the Watchtowerrunning through my memory. Dog-eared albums by the Jimi Hendrix Experience were the soundtrack for my youth, as they were to a whole generation. My father heard enough of Electric Ladyland through the walls of my childhood home that he knew the exact moment to pound on my doorbefore Jimi hit the first fuzz-box pedal.

As a teenager standing by that grave, I knew only small details of Jimis history, but his was a life so outrageous, and lived to such an extreme, that it was ripe for mythologizing. Many of the 1970s press reports I read as a kid turned Hendrix into a god of the electric guitar, and that icon status stripped away his humanity. He became, as he was on a poster on my wall, an image in black light, sporting a larger-than-life Afro, complete with halo. He seemed unknowable, so foreign that he might as well have been from another planet. Some of that mystery came from the genius of his playingwhich, decades later, has never been matchedand some was a haze of record companycreated hype.

This book is my four-year, 325-interview effort to crack that code and to turn that black-light poster image into a portrait of a man. Although I began actual work on this book in 2001, it has been writing itself in the back of my mind ever since my first graveside visit in the seventies. As a writer who specializes in Northwest music, I have always sensed Hendrix looming as a subject to be faced one day, just as an aspiring actor knows that Shakespeares canon awaits.

My own first writing about Jimi came in the early 1980s, when an effort began to construct a Seattle memorial. Though there were some grand ideas for what might be appropriatea public park was suggested, or renaming a streetthe memorial became mired in the eighties Just Say No political furor over drugs. One television commentator argued that to honor Jimi in any way was to glamorize a drug addict.

Those hysterics derailed the initial effort, and the compromise memorial that resulted was a heated rock with Jimis name attached, set in A U T H O R S

N O T E

X I I I

the African savannah section of the Seattle zoo. That spurred me to write a magazine piece in which I called the heated rock racist, xenopho-bic, and evidence that musical heritage and African American culture were disregarded in predominantly white Seattle. The zoo rockwhich remains today, the heating element broken last I checkedmade Jimi Hendrixs grave even more important as a tour stop, since few thought a zoo was an appropriate place to mourn or honor Jimi.

I first met Jimis father, Al Hendrix, in the late 1980s and interviewed him on several occasions about his sons legacy and history. One of my first questions to Al was about Jimis grave: Why did rocks best-known left-handed guitarist have an etching of a right-handed guitar on his tombstone? Al said it was a mistake by the monument makers. Al was not a detail-oriented guy, particularly when it came to his late sons history.

Al was kind enough to invite me to his home, which itself was something of a roadside museum to Jimi. No parent wants to bury a child, and it was Als unkind destiny to outlive his firstborn by three decades. The walls of his house were covered with gold record awards and photo enlargements of Jimi. There, among family photos of Jimi as a baby or in an army uniform, were several images that belong in any sixties photo collage: Jimi burning his guitar onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival; Jimi with the white-fringed jacket onstage at Woodstock; Jimi in his butterfly velvet suit onstage at the Isle of Wight. There were a few pictures of Jimis brother, Leon, on the wall, and, bizarrely, a giant painting of Als deceased German shepherd. On a basement wall was an image familiar to methe same black-light poster of a godlike Jimi that I owned as an adolescent.

I never asked Al Hendrix why Jimis mothers grave had been lost for almost fifty years, and Al died in 2002. In the several years Room Fullof Mirrors took to complete, at least five of my interview subjects have passed away, including Experience bass player Noel Redding. I interviewed Noel on almost a dozen different occasions, but it was nonetheless sobering to realize after his sudden death in May 2003 that my conversation with him two weeks prior was his last telling of his own X I V

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N O T E

story before his passing. There were moments in writing this book when I sensed that the history of Jimis era was slowly slipping away, and that fragility made the extensive research all the more delicate and imperative.

Still, there were conversations I had and places I visited where Jimi Hendrix seemed positively vibrant and almost breathing. On Seattles Jackson Street, the historical center of Northwest African American nightlifeamid storefronts that five decades ago were clubs that hosted local talent like Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Jimione can find pieces of a life still freshly remembered. Just down the street from Twenty-third Avenue, sitting on blocks in an empty lot, is the house Jimi grew up in; it has been saved with an eye to future preservation.