In 1967, the year Jimi Hendrix became the toast of London, a bartender at a working-class pub in Liverpool mistook the rock star for someone far less glamorous.
"Sorry, mates, we can't serve your sort in here," the crusty old barkeep told Hendrix and his bandmate, Noel Redding. "We got rules, you know."
The humorous story is recounted in Seattle music journalist Charles Cross' new book,Room Full of Mirrors.
Hendrix and Redding puzzled over the bartender's rebuff. Both musicians wore purple scarves around their necks and "halos of frizzy hair," Cross writes. Hendrix was dressed in wine-red velvet trousers, a frilly pirate shirt, ancient British military jacket and black cape.
Hendrix wondered if he was being discriminated against because of his skin color, though such problems were unusual at the time in England.
His second thought was that his military jacket, a relic of the glory days of the British Empire -- purchased at a flea market -- might be offensive to English war vets. It had given him problems before.
When pressed for an explanation, the bartender angrily pointed to a sign on the door.
"If we let one of you in, the whole goddamn place will be full of your sort, and that's no way to run a pub," he bellowed.
Redding collapsed in a fit of laughter after finding a circus poster on the pub door, with a note below it that read, "No Clowns Allowed."
"There's a circus up the street, and this chap doesn't want any clowns in here," Redding told an incredulous Hendrix. "He thinks we're clowns."
Redding's anecdote is one of hundreds of well-researched stories in Cross' book that creates a more intimate portrait of the flamboyant rock star from Seattle than previous biographies.
"It took several interviews with Noel to get the entire story, but it's a very powerful one because it's an entryway into talking about the larger issues that Jimi faced," Cross said in an interview.
"His race was something he was thinking about a lot. And his outlandishness was a challenge. Jimi Hendrix was almost like an alien on this planet. He'd look that way if you saw him on the street today. But in the staid world of the 1960s, he was a trip everywhere he went. Being mistaken for a circus clown when at that point you're the hottest star in England illustrates the strange contrasts of his life."
Fans who think they know
everything about Hendrix, the legendary guitarist who died in London in 1970, will be intrigued by Cross' book, the follow-up to Heavier Than Heaven, his New York Times bestseller on Kurt Cobain.
What Cross unearthed about Jimi's childhood is funny, poignant, provocative and sometimes disturbing. While living at the Rainier Vista apartments in the mid-1950s, with one of many families he stayed with when things weren't going well at home, Jimi made an "otherworldly" prediction about his future: "I'm going to leave here, and I'm going to go far, far away. I'm going to be rich and famous, and everyone here will be jealous."
But Jimi, often called Buster by family and friends, was so poor that he was often forced to scrounge for food. He begged for leftovers at a burger joint across from Garfield High School.
Years later, when he returned to Seattle in 1968 to perform his first Seattle concert after becoming famous, Hendrix appeared at an assembly at his alma mater, Garfield High, where students who had no idea who he was -- and had never heard his songs on black radio stations -- began heckling him.
"At the time, Garfield was highly politicized and the Black Power movement was blooming," a student recalled. "To have this strange, hippie musician come along bothered kids."
One of the book's more startling revelations is the story of Hendrix's elaborate ruse for getting out of the Army in the early 1960s by feigning homosexuality. He told the base psychiatrist an outrageous story about how he had developed sexual desire for his bunkmates.
Cross learned of the ruse after locating Army records that hadn't previously been public.
The tale of Hendrix's discharge from the Army is one of many personal revelations that make Room Full of Mirrors unusual among Hendrix biographies. The reality of his life didn't always match the myth. "It's a great example of the contrast between what really happened in Jimi's life and what Jimi told people," Cross said.
Cross did more than 300 interviews for Room Full of Mirrors, a book as challenging to write as Heavier Than Heaven. "The main difference with this book was that I had never met Jimi Hendrix, and I wasn't an African American growing up in Seattle," Cross said. "So it was a different emotional terrain that required a lot more historical research."
The story of Hendrix's childhood offers what Cross calls "a secret history" of the African American experience in Seattle in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. "The history of African Americans in Seattle is something that hasn't been written about much," Cross said. "We like to think of Seattle as this white, liberal place. We put the blinders on. And the truth is that Seattle did not have the overt racism of the South; it was more economic and housing based."
Cross pieced together the story of Jimi's mother, Lucille, who died in 1958 under mysterious circumstances. Jimi was deeply devoted to her and later wrote songs about her.
At Renton's Greenwood Memorial Park, where the remains of Jimi and Al and other select family members are entombed in an elaborate new crypt, Cross hounded cemetery officials to find the lost, neglected grave where Lucille Hendrix Mitchell had been buried.
"I still cannot believe that Al Hendrix let his ex-wife, Jimi's mother, be buried in a pauper's grave without a headstone .... It just shows you the spiteful meanness of this family and their secrets," Cross said.
"I'm trying to write cultural history, not rock history," he said.
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