"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.
RSS