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.
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