Room Full of Mirrors

Seattle rock historian Charles Cross takes a deep and sensitive look at the complex life of the short-lived father of acid rock. Beginning with Hendrix's family roots in Arkansas, Virginia, and British Columbia, actor Lloyd James narrates this chronicle of the guitarist's troubled childhood in Seattle, his apprenticeship along the "Chitlin' circuit" and in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, his stellar rise as a phenomenon in England, and his drug-and-alcohol-fueled descent to death. James's intensity and emotion make his reading compelling despite his overtly "white bread" voice. Surprisingly absent from this recording are musical sound bites to illustrate Hendrix's musical style. Nevertheless, ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS is a beautiful and unforgettable audio biography. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

June 27, 2005
Cross (Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain
) turns his thoughtful eye toward another Seattle music icon, Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970). With a storyteller's eye, he captures Hendrix's difficult, poverty-stricken childhood with alcoholic and largely absent parents, rendering it as tragic yet not without its happy, tender moments. After a stint as an army paratrooper, Hendrix knocked around playing guitar in blues clubs in the 1960s, winding up in New York and eventually London, where he established himself as a guitar god, even earning the adulation of the Beatles, before exploding onto the U.S. scene with a 1967 appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival. While replete with tales of rock star excess, Cross's narrative, based on more than 300 interviews, describes Hendrix as thoughtful and craving some semblance of order to his life, even as it became steeped in drug use. Of Hendrix's death at age 27, viewed by many as a possible suicide, Cross makes the best case yet for it being accidental, portraying Hendrix as exhausted, unable to sleep and likely taking nine sleeping pills without much thought. There are a number of Hendrix bios already available, but Cross's surpasses them all, both in terms of research and execution.