Rent Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix

Synopsis

He disliked marmalade and cold sheets. His likes included music, mountains, hair, and strawberry shortcake. He immortalized his penis in plaster, set fire to his guitar, and choked to death on his own vomit at the age of 27. Charles R. Cross’s biography of seismic rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix is packed both with small details and riveting testimony from leading rock figures and scene-makers of the sixties. Marianne Faithfull, Hendrix’s friend Eric Burdon, Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding, and Who guitarist Pete Townshend, among others, recast an oft-told story with an impressive array of eyewitness recollections. Cross recounts Hendrix’s early years in Seattle, his musical apprenticeship on the American black entertainers’ Chitlin Circuit, and the salutary effect of his London debut on leading British guitarists like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, whose technical superiority had until then gone unchallenged. Hendrix emerges as a supremely talented, driven individual, whose life and career were derailed by a combination of managerial insensitivity and greed, and by his own attempts to self-medicate his way out of a punishing work schedule. A meticulously assembled combination of hard facts, atmospheric scene-setting, and empathetic writing, ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS is one of the most authoritative and readable of the many available Hendrix biographies.

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