Every Hendrix review should kick off with some blasted kerrr-r-r-r-r-rang, or some kind of noodly wah-wahwah-wahwahwah. Because that’s how we see him.
Hendrix is an icon not a man. A face on a poster or a shadow from some old TV show on his knees with his guitar raised like some terrible and triumphant rock icon, eyes closed, tripping, dipping and flipping through some swampy psychedelic drug rock solo.
Kurt Cobain biographer Charles Cross has surely got his work cut out.
They say:
Guardian: "Charles R Cross has got as close to [the truth] as anyone yet, in his exhaustive and groundbreaking account of the life of the greatest guitarist in the history of rock."
Glide magazine: "To date, no author has painted as full and vibrant a picture of Jimi Hendrix as Charles Cross."
We say:
Cross pulls out the stops with this exemplary text and makes the rock icon a real person.
As a kid, Hendrix liked to play the broom and pretend to be a rock ’n’ roll star and he was given to saying things that now, of course, seem portentous. He was gonna be more famous than anyone and leave his hometown behind - the kind of thing most kids say.
Hendrix struggled, of course, playing in the background as BB King and Little Richard enjoyed the limelight. He often got fired as a result of his pyrotechnics – big stars didn’t want to be upstaged by some two bit nobody, even when the nobody played like nobody else.
Charles Cross focuses on the years and years of struggle. Hendrix would have been playing on other people’s records forever if it wasn’t for the intervention of a former Animal's bassist, Chas Chandler, who brought Hendrix to England and made him a star overnight.
On his first night in England, in swinging London, Hendrix played before a crowd comprised of the legends of the day – Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton etc – and left them all with their jaws round their ankles.
From there on in, he didn’t look back. There follows a dizzyingly brief rise to the top – and then of course the gradual mess of drugs and egos and star tantrums and groupies and all the rest of it.
Where Cross comes into his own – as he did with Cobain previously – is in making the reader feel sympathy for someone who on a roller coaster ride that inevitably comes across the rails.
You want him to say something along the lines of “Hendrix was probably off his tits when he said…” but then you realise the task of the biographer is to remain objective.
All told, Cross has written a smasher. It's a must have for Hendrix fans and even anyone who enjoys well written biographies. You won’t learn how Hendrix made all sorts of strange noises from his guitar, but you'll see how he came to be the man he was.
AUTHOR
Charles R Cross
PUBLISHER
Sceptre
PAGES
372
POSTED...
Wed 30 Aug 2006 at 8:20pm
