More Hendrix experiences

James McNair
"It's funny the way people love the dead," says Jimi Hendrix in Starting at Zero. "You have to die before they think you are worth anything." Like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, Hendrix is a member of the "'27 Club", that ill-starred and strikingly large body of rock stars to pass away aged one score and seven years. It's remarkable, then, that 44 years after his death in September 1970, many would argue that Jimi remains unsurpassed as the electric guitar's most innovative and exhilarating exponent.
His comment above is prescient. Hendrix's untimely death elicited a kind of cultural canonisation that by now seems immovable. PBS's prestigious documentary series American Masters just profiled him in Hear My Train A Comin', while the biopic All Is By My Side, starring OutKast's Andre 3000 as Hendrix, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Even at a more playful level, Jimi still absorbs us. Sachs Media Group recently created an online Rock & Roll Heaven depicting how Jimi and other stars might look were they alive today.
Alan Douglas and Peter Neal's Starting at Zero is a beautifully illustrated book with elegant black-and-lilac typography – even the odd, guitar-shaped column indent. Chronological in its approach, it juggles quotes from a wealth of archive interviews, Jimi's diary entries, letters home and more to stitch-together his story in a text comprised solely of his own words.
This approach is delicate though not indefensible, but there's a bigger beef to be had here, namely the press release's brazen claim that the book is a "posthumous memoir". That rather calculating assertion implies an intentionality on Hendrix's part that simply wasn't there; a rigorous ordering of his thoughts for posterity that he didn't undertake.
Hendrix aficionados will know that Alan Douglas has form when it comes to second-guessing Jimi's wishes. A record producer as well as an author, he has overseen several posthumous Hendrix albums that generated controversy. Peter Neal, meanwhile, is a filmmaker who made Experience, one of the first documentaries about Hendrix, in 1967-68.
The pair do (just about) acknowledge the slightly moot nature of their book, but there's an awkwardness to Neal's introduction, which, seemingly anticipating some flak for their modus operandi, attempts to justify it.
"[The book] began to develop of its own free will, so much so that I began to wonder, if this is 'ghost writing', exactly which one of us is the ghost?" Neal writes. That hint of beyond-the-grave approval seems convenient. It also seems remiss that one has to visit www.startingatzero.net to discover the sources of the quotes used here. Why no appendix in the book? Would that make the papered-over joins between those quotes all too visible?
Despite these gripes, Starting at Zero grips. The intrinsically chatty nature of reported speech makes for an easy read, and Jimi's poetic turn of phrase can be a delight.
In 1967, when one interviewer enquires about his ambitions, Hendrix replies: "You never know what shape clouds are going to be before you see them."
Gigging in New Orleans in August 1968, meanwhile, Jimi riffs on the United States' attendant racial tensions and the seeming irony of his security arrangements.
"Can you imagine?" he ponders. "Southern police protecting ME!"
The book's first section, spanning Hendrix's birth in Seattle in 1942 through to his honourable discharge from the US army in 1962, offers much to chew on. The tasselled Mexican jacket that Jimi's part-Cherokee grandmother gifts him (he cherishes it despite taunts from schoolmates) seems an early badge of his individuality, but his sartorial flamboyance later provokes jealousy: "I am the King of Rock 'n' Rhythm, and I'm the only one who's going to look pretty on stage," Jimi recalls Little Richard, one of his first employers, decreeing. The guitarist must surrender his frilly shirt or face a fine.
The sense that Hendrix really paid his dues kicks in when he details his mid-1960s existence in New York, where his winning a talent contest at Harlem's Apollo Theatre was clearly no passport to luxury: "Sleeping among the garbage cans between them tall tenements was hell," says the guitarist. "Rats runnin' across your chest … I even tried to eat orange peel and tomato paste."
Naturally, it's when he moves to London and forms The Jimi Hendrix Experience that he talks more about the music that made his name. It seems extraordinary that The Wind Cries Mary was ready to be mastered about six minutes after Hendrix had first outlined its arrangement to bandmates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, but this factoid also goes someway towards explaining the enduring freshness of Hendrix's oeuvre.
The book brings Hendrix's pragmatic intelligence to the fore ("Flower power will not get you up the hill if you run out of gas, will it?"). It also highlights his modesty – "Me, the world's greatest?! [guitarist]. That's silly," and we are reminded that photographing a plethora of naked women for the UK sleeve of Electric Ladyland took place without his knowledge. "Oh to have been a fly on the wall!," one thinks further in when reading of Jimi returning to his alma mater, Garfield High School, Seattle, in February 1968 to a play a gig with the school band in the gymnasium.
By 1969, he is one of rock's first campaigning environmentalists and an artist taking increasing care over how he presents himself. "I don't want to be a clown anymore," he says, referencing the guitar-torching, playing with his teeth showmanship that had led the British tabloids to label him The Wild Man of Pop. He's also suffering from exhaustion, close to financial ruin due to various legal fees, and a target for fellow blacks who accuse him of playing white music for white people.
Thankfully, Jimi's ambitions for the future make happier reading. "I would like to write a story for the stage and compose music for it," he says. "Take Greek mythology, or your old stories about the Vikings and Asgard. I'd like to present that on stage with light and lots of sound. Or perhaps a space war between Neptune and Uranus."
That the guitarist had serious reservations about his soulful singing voice is well-documented, as is his acknowledged debt to the lyrical prowess of Bob Dylan. It's useful that Starting at Zero corrals Jimi's key thoughts on these and other familiar themes (his controversial re-working of The Star Spangled Banner and his late-period involvement with the Black Panther Party, for example), but the swathes of context and back-story one can find in Jimi biographies such as Charles Shaar Murray's Crosstown Traffic or Charles R Cross's Room Full of Mirrors illuminate Hendrix's life in a way that these first-person snapshots simply cannot.
To be fair, the reverse is also true, but ultimately, Starting at Zero feels a little contrived; somewhat compromised by the hoops it has to jump through to masquerade as memoir. Hendrix completists will find it irresistible, but they'll likely have misgivings about its methodology.
James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.