ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS ALSO BY CHARLES R. CROSS Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS A BIOGRAPHY OF JIMI HENDRIX CHARLES R. CROSS N E W Y O R K Copyright © 2005 Charles R. Cross All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298. ISBN 1-4013-8282-7 Hyperion books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details, contact Michael Rentas, Assistant Director, Inventory Operations, Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, 11th floor, New York, New York 10023, or call 212-456-0133. FIRST EBOOK EDITION: AUGUST 2005 For My Father who during my boyhood put an arm around my shoulder and read me “Prince Valiant” comics AUTHOR’S NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi PROLOGUE: ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND April 9, 1967 CHAPTER 1: BETTER THAN BEFORE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON January 1875–November 1942 CHAPTER 2: BUCKET OF BLOOD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA 1875–1941 CHAPTER 3: OVER AVERAGE IN SMARTNESS . . . . . . . . . . . 26 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON September 1945–June 1952 CHAPTER 4: THE BLACK KNIGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON July 1952–March 1955 CHAPTER 5: JOHNNY GUITAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON March 1955–March 1958 CHAPTER 6: TALL COOL ONE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON March 1958–October 1960 CONTENTS CHAPTER 7: SPANISH CASTLE MAGIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON November 1960–May 1961 CHAPTER 8: BROTHER WILD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 FORT ORD, CALIFORNIA May 1961–September 1962 CHAPTER 9: HEADHUNTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE October 1962–December 1963 CHAPTER 10: HARLEM WORLD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 NEW YORK, NEW YORK January 1964–July 1965 CHAPTER 11: DREAM IN TECHNICOLOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 NEW YORK, NEW YORK July 1965–May 1966 CHAPTER 12: MY PROBLEM CHILD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 NEW YORK, NEW YORK May 1966–July 1966 CHAPTER 13: DYLAN BLACK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 NEW YORK, NEW YORK July 1966–September 1966 CHAPTER 14: WILD MAN OF BORNEO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 LONDON, ENGLAND September 1966–November 1966 CHAPTER 15: FREE FEELING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 LONDON, ENGLAND December 1966–May 1967 CHAPTER 16: RUMOR TO LEGEND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 LONDON, ENGLAND June 1967–July 1967 CHAPTER 17: BLACK NOISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 NEW YORK, NEW YORK August 1967–February 1968 CHAPTER 18: NEW MUSIC SPACEQUAKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON February 1968–May 1968 CHAPTER 19: THE MOON FIRST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 NEW YORK, NEW YORK July 1968–December 1968 VIII C O N T E N T S CHAPTER 20: ELECTRIC CHURCH MUSIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 LONDON, ENGLAND January 1969–May 1969 CHAPTER 21: HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 TORONTO, CANADA May 1969–August 1969 CHAPTER 22: GYPSY, SUN, AND RAINBOWS . . . . . . . . . . . 267 BETHEL, NEW YORK August 1969–November 1969 CHAPTER 23: KING IN THE GARDEN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 NEW YORK, NEW YORK December 1969–April 1970 CHAPTER 24: MAGIC BOY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA May 1970–July 1970 CHAPTER 25: WILD BLUE ANGEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 MAUI, HAWAII July 1970–August 1970 CHAPTER 26: THE STORY OF LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN August 1970–September 1970 CHAPTER 27: MY TRAIN COMING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334 LONDON, ENGLAND September 1970–April 2004 EPILOGUE: LONG BLACK CADILLAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON April 2002–April 2005 SOURCE NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 C O N T E N T S IX Biographers often spend time in graveyards copying down epitaphs, but rarely do they stand by watching a cemetery worker unearth a lost grave with a shovel, as was my providence in the course of writing this book. The rediscovery of the grave of Jimi Hendrix’s mother was the most chilling moment in the four years it took to write Room Full of Mirrors: It was also unexpected. It occurred only because I simply couldn’t believe that Greenwood Memorial Park had no exact location for Lucille Hendrix Mitchell’s grave, and I pestered the cemetery’s of- fice until they finally sent a worker—armed with a shovel and an ancient map—to search the rows of decaying headstones. Biographers who choose deceased subjects are all gravediggers in a way, with a bit of Dr. Frankenstein thrown in; we seek to bring our subjects back to life, if only temporarily, in the pages of a book. Usually our goal is to animate our characters; rarely are we searching for final remains and ancient cas- kets. Nothing can prepare one for the moment of standing in a muddy graveyard, watching aghast as a groundskeeper pushes a shovel into the ground like a sloppy archaeologist. If there was justice in that particular adventure, it springs from the fact that in some twisted way this biography began in that same grave- yard, three decades before. It was in Greenwood Memorial cemetery, a few miles south of Seattle, that I first came as a teenage fan to pay my AUTHOR’S NOTE respects to one of music’s legends. Like any other pilgrim, I couldn’t visit Jimi Hendrix’s grave without the lyrics to my favorite songs— “Purple Haze,” “Wind Cries Mary,” Jimi’s brilliant take of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”—running through my memory. Dog-eared al- bums by the Jimi Hendrix Experience were the soundtrack for my youth, as they were to a whole generation. My father heard enough of Electric Ladyland through the walls of my childhood home that he knew the exact moment to pound on my door—before Jimi hit the first fuzz- box pedal. As a teenager standing by that grave, I knew only small details of Jimi’s history, but his was a life so outrageous, and lived to such an ex- treme, that it was ripe for mythologizing. Many of the 1970s press re- ports I read as a kid turned Hendrix into a god of the electric guitar, and that icon status stripped away his humanity. He became, as he was on a poster on my wall, an image in black light, sporting a larger-than- life Afro, complete with halo. He seemed unknowable, so foreign that he might as well have been from another planet. Some of that mystery came from the genius of his playing—which, decades later, has never been matched—and some was a haze of record company–created hype. This book is my four-year, 325-interview effort to crack that code and to turn that black-light poster image into a portrait of a man. Al- though I began actual work on this book in 2001, it has been writing it- self in the back of my mind ever since my first graveside visit in the seventies. As a writer who specializes in Northwest music, I have always sensed Hendrix looming as a subject to be faced one day, just as an as- piring actor knows that Shakespeare’s canon awaits. My own first writing about Jimi came in the early 1980s, when an effort began to construct a Seattle memorial. Though there were some grand ideas for what might be appropriate—a public park was sug- gested, or renaming a street—the memorial became mired in the eight- ies “Just Say No” political furor over drugs. One television commentator argued that to honor Jimi in any way was to glamorize “a drug addict.” Those hysterics derailed the initial effort, and the compromise memo- rial that resulted was a “heated rock” with Jimi’s name attached, set in XII A U T H O R ’ S N O T E the African savannah section of the Seattle zoo. That spurred me to write a magazine piece in which I called the heated rock racist, xenopho- bic, and evidence that musical heritage and African American culture were disregarded in predominantly white Seattle. The zoo rock—which remains today, the heating element broken last I checked—made Jimi Hendrix’s grave even more important as a tour stop, since few thought a zoo was an appropriate place to mourn or honor Jimi. I first met Jimi’s father, Al Hendrix, in the late 1980s and inter- viewed him on several occasions about his son’s legacy and history. One of my first questions to Al was about Jimi’s grave: Why did rock’s best- known left-handed guitarist have an etching of a right-handed guitar on his tombstone? Al said it was a mistake by the monument makers. Al was not a detail-oriented guy, particularly when it came to his late son’s history. Al was kind enough to invite me to his home, which itself was something of a roadside museum to Jimi. No parent wants to bury a child, and it was Al’s unkind destiny to outlive his firstborn by three de- cades. The walls of his house were covered with gold record awards and photo enlargements of Jimi. There, among family photos of Jimi as a baby or in an army uniform, were several images that belong in any six- ties photo collage: Jimi burning his guitar onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival; Jimi with the white-fringed jacket onstage at Woodstock; Jimi in his butterfly velvet suit onstage at the Isle of Wight. There were a few pictures of Jimi’s brother, Leon, on the wall, and, bizarrely, a giant painting of Al’s deceased German shepherd. On a basement wall was an image familiar to me—the same black-light poster of a godlike Jimi that I owned as an adolescent. I never asked Al Hendrix why Jimi’s mother’s grave had been lost for almost fifty years, and Al died in 2002. In the several years Room Full of Mirrors took to complete, at least five of my interview subjects have passed away, including Experience bass player Noel Redding. I inter- viewed Noel on almost a dozen different occasions, but it was nonethe- less sobering to realize after his sudden death in May 2003 that my conversation with him two weeks prior was his last telling of his own A U T H O R ’ S N O T E XIII story before his passing. There were moments in writing this book when I sensed that the history of Jimi’s era was slowly slipping away, and that fragility made the extensive research all the more delicate and imperative. Still, there were conversations I had and places I visited where Jimi Hendrix seemed positively vibrant and almost breathing. On Seat- tle’s Jackson Street, the historical center of Northwest African Ameri- can nightlife—amid storefronts that five decades ago were clubs that hosted local talent like Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Jimi—one can find pieces of a life still freshly remembered. Just down the street from Twenty-third Avenue, sitting on blocks in an empty lot, is the house Jimi grew up in; it has been saved with an eye to future preservation. Stop by the flower shop on the corner, and the ladies behind the counter will remember Jimi from Leschi Elementary School. Across the street at a Starbucks, there’s a gray-haired gentleman sipping coffee every morning who once danced the jitterbug with Jimi’s mother, Lu- cille. And in the retirement home on the corner, eighty-eight-year-old Dorothy Harding sits in a wheelchair and tells stories of being Jimi’s babysitter and of the stormy night he was born. In Seattle’s black community, most people knew, and know, Jimi Hendrix as “Buster,” his family nickname. In the text herein, he is fre- quently called by that name, particularly by family. I’ve also taken the narrative liberty of using the spelling “Jimi” throughout Hendrix’s life for consistency and to avoid confusion with Jimi’s best childhood friend, Jimmy Williams, who shows up in this history often. Hendrix did not use the spelling “Jimi” until he was twenty-two, but even then he remained “Buster” to most of those who knew him in Seattle. Searching for Buster led me to Jackson Street many times, and also to shadowy corners of London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Harlem, Greenwich Village, and other points across the globe. It put me in beer- strewn dance halls in northern England where the Experience once played, and in dank Seattle basements where a teenage Jimi Hendrix practiced guitar with neighborhood boys. It led me to dusty census rec- ords, and to graveyards like Greenwood Memorial, where I watched XIV A U T H O R ’ S N O T E