Room Full of Mirrors
A Biography of Jimi Hendrix
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'Charles R. Cross has got as close to the truth as anyone yet in his exhaustive and ground-breaking account of the life of the greatest guitarist in the history of rock.'
Observer
'Superb'
Sunday Telegraph
Jimi Hendrix continues to fascinate, and sell huge quantities of albums, even 35 years after his death. Quite apart from his influence on musicians and fans, a large part of the appeal of his sensational life story lies in the thrill of the era whose values he came to stand for. The Sixties still exert a massive pull over pop culture and this is genuinely a book for anyone interested, not only in Hendrix but also in anything to do with the pop culture of the last 40 years.
Meticulously researched and sensitively and beautifully written, this is a labour of love that reveals the nuances, foibles and tragedies of the human being behind the iconic image.
This is the sweeping, authoritative and colourful biography that Jimi Hendrix and that his legions of fans, young and old deserves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cross (Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain) turns his thoughtful eye toward another Seattle music icon, Jimi Hendrix (1942 1970). With a storyteller's eye, he captures Hendrix's difficult, poverty-stricken childhood with alcoholic and largely absent parents, rendering it as tragic yet not without its happy, tender moments. After a stint as an army paratrooper, Hendrix knocked around playing guitar in blues clubs in the 1960s, winding up in New York and eventually London, where he established himself as a guitar god, even earning the adulation of the Beatles, before exploding onto the U.S. scene with a 1967 appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival. While replete with tales of rock star excess, Cross's narrative, based on more than 300 interviews, describes Hendrix as thoughtful and craving some semblance of order to his life, even as it became steeped in drug use. Of Hendrix's death at age 27, viewed by many as a possible suicide, Cross makes the best case yet for it being accidental, portraying Hendrix as exhausted, unable to sleep and likely taking nine sleeping pills without much thought. There are a number of Hendrix bios already available, but Cross's surpasses them all, both in terms of research and execution.
