Inexperienced

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

Hyperion, $25

“I have always sensed Hendrix looming as a subject to be faced one day,” writes chronicler of dead Seattle rock icons Charles R. Cross (Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain), “as an aspiring actor knows that Shakespeare’s canon awaits.” Looks as if it’s the Voodoo-Chile-as-Forrest-Gump mythology that calls Cross like a siren.

So it’s reasonable to assume then that a biographer of Cross’s stature would shed some light on exactly how Hendrix was able to leap from the chitlin circuit, where he played with Otis Redding and Little Richard, to swinging London, where his model-bedding rivals included Jagger and Richards. No such luck. Previously unpublished correspondence shows Hendrix to be a purveyor of prose both purple and hazy—an image completely at odds with the intelligence, sexiness and ferocity of the gum-chewing badass captured at Monterey Pop. Cross doesn’t mediate and, perhaps unwittingly, allows his subject to register as little more than a counterculture-touring noble savant who bought a lucky ticket in the empty-vessel sweepstakes. In a library filled with lilting insight (David Henderson’s ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky) and encyclopedic devotion (Harry Shapiro’s Electric Gypsy), the chief gimmick of Room Full of Mirrors seems to be its ability to reflect away from Hendrix himself at every turn.