Book clears up some of the haze about Seattle icon

"Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix"
by Charles R. Cross
Hyperion, 400 pp., $24.95

In the mid-1950s, years before Jimi Hendrix performed "Purple Haze" and Booth Gardner became Washington state's governor, Gardner was Hendrix's football coach at Leschi Elementary.

"He was no athlete," according to Gardner. "He wasn't good enough to start; to tell the truth, he really wasn't good enough to play." Hendrix didn't last long on the team, or as a member of Boy Scout Troop 16, but he did demonstrate a talent for art, even sending his drawings of automobiles to the Ford Motor Co.

His fascination with the guitar came later, after exposure to a Little Richard sermon, a friend's 78 rpm blues records, and an Elvis Presley concert at Sicks' Stadium. After seeing the 1954 Western, "Johnny Guitar," he wanted to carry a guitar with him the way Sterling Hayden did in the movie.

"Like many teenagers, Jimi saw the guitar as a fashion accessory," writes Charles R. Cross in his impressive new Hendrix biography, "Room Full of Mirrors," to be published Wednesday. "Two months after the concert, Jimi drew a picture in his notebook of Elvis holding an acoustic guitar, surrounded by the titles of a dozen of his hit records."

The instrument quickly became much more than an accessory, as Hendrix's performances started to excite audiences in Greenwich Village and in England, where his band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, really took off.

That's also where he died, in September 1970 at the age of 27, apparently because he mixed his usual drugs with too many of his girlfriend's extra-strength sleeping pills. His Seattle funeral was attended by several famous fans, including Miles Davis, John Hammond and Seattle's mayor at the time, Wes Uhlman.

The event was tinged with irony. Neglected by his frequently unsupportive father (who called his music "lazy") and a hard-drinking mother who died young, Jimi and his siblings moved around a lot, barely equipped to survive their latchkey childhoods. Some were even farmed out to foster care.

"When Jimi had left Seattle in 1961 at eighteen, he was essentially run out of town by the police department," Cross writes. "Now the mayor of the city wore a black suit to honor its most famous 'fallen son.' "

While there have been dozens of Hendrix biographies, they're often filled with more legend than fact. Cross, the former Rocket editor who wrote "Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain," aimed at setting things straight, conducting 325 interviews over four years and comparing their content with official records that sometimes told a different story.

For instance, that rout in 1961 — the result of two arrests for riding in a stolen car. According to Hendrix's late father, Al, Jimi "didn't have to serve any time." But police records show that Jimi spent more than a week in jail.

After that, he was given a two-year sentence that would be suspended only if he joined the Army. He chose the Army over prison, but he didn't last long. Pretending to be homosexual, he was released in mid-1962.

"Jimi never admitted his subterfuge, even to close friends," writes Cross. To explain his discharge, Jimi claimed to have broken an ankle while parachuting. This kind of backstage drama often overshadows Hendrix's musicianship in the book, although Cross makes up for it with his vivid accounts of the concerts at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight.

Jimi's brief military experience took him to the South, where he got acquainted with Kentucky and Tennessee, their music and their prejudices. Although he'd witnessed subtler forms of racism in Seattle, he was shaken by the contemptuous behavior of some Southerners, especially a security force that walked off the job when Jimi arrived at a concert with a blonde on his arm.

Hawkish on the Vietnam War, sporadically generous toward his family, unreliable as a performer, incapable of fidelity to his lovers (Brigitte Bardot and apparently Janis Joplin were among his conquests), Hendrix comes across here as a complicated artist who sensed that he wouldn't be around for long.

"Next time I go to Seattle," he told a friend in 1970, "it'll be in a pine box." That fatalism is reflected in much of "Room Full of Mirrors," which takes its title from a bleak Hendrix song about the identity-shattering nature of celebrity.

"Like a carnival mirror, his fame had distorted so much that it had become a prison of sorts," writes Cross. "Jimi's career was now something he wanted to escape."

Or, as Hendrix said it in a spoken-word version of the song: "Tell this idiot to get the hell out of me, and get me out of this damned mirrored room!"