Room Full of Mirrors
A Biography of Jimi Hendrix
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4.2 • 22 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It has been decades since Jimi Hendrix died, but his music and spirit are very much alive in this vivid portrait by a prominent music journalist.
Charles R. Cross recounts the life of Hendrix, from his difficult childhood and adolescence in Seattle through his incredible rise to celebrity in London's swinging sixties. It is the story of an outrageous life—with legendary tales of sex, drugs, and excess—while it also reveals a man who struggled to accept his role as idol and who privately craved the kind of normal family life he never had.
Using never-before-seen documents and private letters, and based on hundreds of interviews with those who knew Hendrix—many of whom had never before agreed to be interviewed—Room Full of Mirrors unlocks the vast mystery of one of music's most enduring legends.
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.
Customer Reviews
Made it to Chapter 16
I got tired of reading about EVERY sexual encounter. Not for me.