If 6 was 9 and all that

Jimi Hendrix never seems anything less than a fascinating figure, even when all the mythology is trimmed from his long-dead carcass. It takes astonishing short-sightedness to present him in any other way, and yet that’s what this book does.

What appears to have gone so wrong with “Starting at Zero” is that it’s really just an ill-considered companion to a documentary film of the same title that’s been bursting to hit theatres for decades. It now looks like the movie’s time has come, and we can only hope it gives its subject the justice denied him here in print. (The few moments of clips available on YouTube are not promising, however.)

Champing at the bit to stretch his pet project’s legs, the film’s director, Peter Neal, transcribed all the interviews, letters, diary entries and note scraps he’d assembled for someone else to narrate “as Hendrix” in the movie. The book presents them, in more or less chronological order, as Jimi’s life story in his own words, as if the autobiography he never got to write had been channelled from beyond the grave. 

Neal’s name does not appear on the cover, only Hendrix’s. So it’s a bit of a con, which in itself wouldn’t be so bad except that, no matter how many of Hendrix’s words are compiled, you’re not going to get the whole story, not even close. What you get instead is a pop icon of the late 1960s prattling on in the Age of Aquarius language that the “beautiful people” spoke during the hippie heyday.

The only language in which Hendrix was truly gifted was that of the Fender Stratocaster. In speech, as in song lyrics, he was pontificating, inexact, elliptical, self-contradictory, often disingenuous and, in hindsight, appallingly naive, as all of us from that generation once were. Reading 250 pages of his rambling thought process on cosmic travel, aquatic fantasies and an “Electric Church” is roughly 200 pages too many.

A couple of passages are interesting, as when Jimi attempts to explain the technical basis of his guitar sound (too vaguely to be of any real help) and lets slip that “the secret of my sound is largely the electronic genius of our tame boffin who is known to us as Roger the Valve”. He was being coy about naming the gadget wizard Roger Mayer, who created many of his aural effects, thinking it might jeopardise Mayer’s day job with the British navy. Mayer remains an important sidebar in rock history.

It’s amusing when Hendrix has a go or two at Engelbert Humperdinck, who had the Jimi Hendrix Experience (and Cat Stevens) opening for him on a 1967 English tour. The crooner so popular in hi-so Bangkok these days was the epitome of Squares-ville to Hendrix, though the Experience was only slightly more comfortable the following year when they were tagged onto a Monkees tour of the US.

On the other hand, you have Hendrix recounting events with careless or wilful neglect for the truth. There was a drunken brawl at a Swedish hotel in 1968 (Hendrix was a beast when boozing). He was arrested after smashing a window, cutting open his hand. By all other accounts, it was a terrible row and Hendrix behaved viciously, not for the first or last time in his love-peace-groovy life. “Starting at Zero” has only his interpretation, of course:

“I drank quite a bit of schnapps. Then I don’t remember anything. Then I woke up at the police station ... The newspapers made the thing seem bigger than it was. Do they always have to exaggerate? Everybody drinks some alcohol sometimes ... I’m convinced somebody put something in my drinks.” That’s “drinks”, plural, as in every drink, but maybe he just misspoke.

None of the quote sources are given in the book. On the last page, readers are told the credits can be found on the Starting at Zero website, which turns out to be more edifying than the book, though not about Hendrix.

To its credit, the book’s text makes excellent use of clever typography, but unfortunately there are only two photos, both on the cover. The illustrations inside are all line sketches of Hendrix, drawn from photos. This can no doubt be blamed on the same legal battle that Neal waged throughout the 1990s and 2000s with Hendrix’s executors. 

Since 1995, Jimi’s father Al Hendrix and stepsister Janie Hendrix-Wright and their company, Experience Hendrix LLC, have guarded the legacy with iron claws. Only in 2011 did a judge finally order them to let Neal get on with his mission. Neal “rushed” the book out, so to speak, to goose up interest in his movie, which is on the verge of release. “The book was more or less complete in 1993,” it says on the website, and the film was “a rough cut when it was shelved 20 years ago”.

I’m inclined to keep waiting to see if the Hendrix family has anything better up its sleeve.

 

Starting at Zero: 

Jimi Hendrix, His Own Story

Edited by Peter Neal

Published by Bloomsbury, 2013

Available at Asia Books, Bt585

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey