Biography: Charles R Cross's previous book, Heavier than Heaven, was a biography of Kurt Cobain, a rock star from Seattle who changed the face of music, did too many drugs, and died at the age of 27.
His new book, Room Full of Mirrors, is a biography of Jimi Hendrix, a rock star from Seattle who changed the face of music, did too many drugs, and died at the age of 27. Does Cross have a one-track mind? He certainly seems to have a methodical one, as this exhaustive biography shows.
Jimi Hendrix's childhood was not a happy one; his parents Al and Lucille were both heavy drinkers who couldn't hold down jobs, and the family lived in extreme poverty. As a result of their parents' neglect, Jimi and his younger brother, Leon, were frequently forced to beg for food from kindly neighbours, and often stole food from supermarkets out of pure necessity. After Leon, Lucille gave birth to four children who were all born with severe physical birth defects. All were given up for adoption. Al denied that he was the father of most of his children, even those who looked very like him. He and Lucille split up and got back together again on a regular basis, but neither paid much attention to the welfare of their children.
Understandably given his turbulent background, young Jimi failed to thrive at school. He did, however, already show a passion for music, especially the guitar. When he was 14, he bought a battered acoustic guitar that had belonged to his landlady's son. "He only had one string," recalled a family friend. "But he could really make that string talk."
Music became his passion, a passion fuelled by the acquisition of an electric guitar two years later. Or as Cross says, "the guitar became his life, and his life became the guitar". A spell in the army served to further Hendrix's musical dreams, and when he left the army he started playing guitar with a series of big r'n'b and soul artists. But it was when he moved to London that he became a star. Soon the shy, science-fiction loving kid from Seattle was worshipped by everyone from Eric Clapton to the Beatles.
Cross has seemingly interviewed everyone who ever met Jimi Hendrix, and the result is an exhaustive account of the guitarist's life. Cross doesn't attempt to explain the depths of Hendrix's psyche, and for that we can probably be grateful. For the most part, this book is straightforward reportage. But Cross seems remarkably uninterested in why Hendrix behaved the way he did, or in what made him tick. There's no analysis or discussion at all. While this objective stance is good in theory, in practice it can make for dull reading over more than 300 pages.
Hendrix was obviously a complex character: usually a gentle, friendly man, he was prone to outbursts of violence when drunk, usually directed against women (John Lennon and Paul McCartney once had to stop him hitting his girlfriend with a phone). He shocked The Who's guitarist, Pete Townshend after the Monterey Festival by going into a rage and hurling racist abuse at him. He chatted up several girlfriends by telling them they looked like his dead mother. A Freudian's dream, yes, and surely a biographer's dream too. But Cross gives less attention to Hendrix's sporadic girlfriend-beating or abusive father than he does to his choice of new guitar.
It's a curiously joyless book, too. Not because of the many tragic elements in Hendrix's history, but because Cross's writing is devoid of any sense of humour. There's no sense of fun, even when he's describing the happiest, healthiest times of Hendrix's life. His resolutely ponderous style renders even outrageous and potentially amusing incidents (such as Hendrix's meeting with a novice Cynthia Plastercaster) dry and uninteresting.
Added to that, he doesn't seem capable of convincingly depicting a different cultural era. Hendrix arrived in London at a time when the counter-culture, exemplified by magazines as Oz and IT, was at its height. He became absorbed into a music and cultural scene that to many people at the time - often naively - seemed to be genuinely capable of changing the world.
There's absolutely no sense of that in this book. Apart from references to contemporary chart-topping bands and Hendrix's imaginative clothing choices, the action might have been taking place in Croydon in 1982. It's the same when the action moves back across the Atlantic, where Cross shows himself to be as incapable of recreating the darker world of West Coast hippies as he is of evoking the world of their eccentric pastoral English equivalents.
Room Full of Mirrors isn't a bad book, and its dry, determinedly neutral style will be a point in its favour for many people. It's not all plodding, either - Cross is at his best when discussing Hendrix's experience of racial attitudes, particularly the difference between London, where naive but well-meaning hipsters regarded him with awe, and the US (in one telling passage, Hendrix gets off the plane in New York after partying with the Beatles in London, to find himself addressed by a rich white woman, who automatically thinks he's a porter). And those looking for a detailed factual account of Hendrix's life won't find anything better than this. That said, though, it is perhaps one for truly devoted fans only.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist
Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix By Charles R Cross. Sceptre, 384pp. £18.99