E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dark star Jimi Hendrix’s brilliant flame-out BY TED DROZDOWSKI
	Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix By Charles R. Cross. Hyperion, 384 pages, $24.95.
	Related Links Charles R. Cross's official Web site Matt Ashare reviews Charles R. Cross 's 2001 Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain.

Of all rock’s dead stars, none burned as brightly or quickly, or flared out as dramatically, as Jimi Hendrix. From 1967 to 1970 the Seattle-born guitarist recorded five albums and stacks of unfinished tracks that changed rock and roll by pushing the tonal and emotive qualities of his instrument further than any other musician with the possible exceptions of Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

No wonder so much mythology has been spun in his wake. And it still clouds the entire arc of his life, from birth and childhood, to his slow rise from the chitlin circuit to the top of pop stardom, to his death on September 18, 1970 at age 27.

Through meticulous research Charles R. Cross, who also wrote the Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven (Hyperion), has blown away the hearsay lazily sustained by earlier Hendrix books. Cross based much of Room Full of Mirrors on more than 325 interviews with Hendrix’s associates, family, and early caretakers — many of whom had never been formally interviewed about Jimi. His doggedness even led to the discovery of the lost gravesite of Hendrix’ mother Lucille. Contrast this to the last prominent Hendrix biography, British journalist Charles Shaar Murray’s 1989 Crosstown Traffic (St. Martin’s Press), which is largely a bone-headed cobbling together of vague sociological theories, long-standing falsehoods (like Hendrix’s lie that he left the Army after breaking his ankle in a parachute training jump), and the recycling of research by his more industrious journalistic predecessors.

The guitarist’s other biographers generally describe Jimi’s raising as middle class, but Cross’s cleanly composed narrative built largely from interviews tells the story of a boy born to poor, troubled parents torn by alcoholism and unfaithfulness. Young James would have gone hungry more often than he did if not for a coterie of family friends, relatives, and the parents of his playmates who often fed him and let him sleep in their homes while his father spent nights on gambling and boozing benders. As a dad, Al Hendrix was something of a monster, though not so much physically as psychologically abusive. He and Jimi never really made peace before Jimi died.

Whether Jimi was rightly busted for stealing a car or was just joy riding with the wrong teens isn’t clear, but his decision to join the Army was clinched when he was given a choice of enlistment or juvenile hall. And despite his own (undocumented) claim of a training injury, Jimi engineered his exit over a period of months by claiming he was gay — a risky gambit in the military today, let alone in the early 1960s. Given his reputation as a ladies’ man and the apparently valid paternity claims pending at the time of his death, that seems absurd, yet Cross’s research reveals that Hendrix may have had occasional homosexual relations.

Despite his self-made military discharge, Hendrix considered himself a veteran and was, despite his lust for drugs and free love, politically conservative. He took issue with anti-war protesters and no matter how trippy his patriotic explanation of his performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock seemed, he was sincere.

Most important is the matter of Hendrix’s death in his London flat. After 30 years of speculation as to whether ambulance attendants could have kept him alive, it’s obvious Jimi was deceased when they arrived, and, indeed, when Monika Dannemann awoke next to him and called the Animals’ Eric Burdon, who rushed over to remove drugs from the apartment. Until his death, Hendrix’ story could have been penned by Horatio Alger. Now at least it’s been accurately written.