Jimi by Janie Hendrix and John McDermott

Jimi
Janie Hendrix and John McDermott
320 Pages
ISBN: # 978-1797220017
Chronicle Chroma
2022

Released to coincide with what would have been Jimi Hendrix's 80th birthday, this archetypal coffee table book is yet another in a long line of biographies recounting the life and times of the archetypal guitar hero. But this one comes in the form of a combination of text and photos that, as suggested by its cover art, depicts the multiple and opposing—and often contradictory—public and private lives of its subject.

As Janie Hendrix, the guitarist's sister and CEO of Experience Hendrix LLC, and author/biographer/archivist John McDermott tell it, Jimi Hendrix's poverty-afflicted early existence was not much less pain-filled than his time in the Army as a paratrooper. Likewise, once the hungry musician rose above the chitlin' circuit, where he spent time backing the The Isley Brothers, the ionic musician hardly had time to enjoy the fruits of his labors in England as he led the three-man Experience through two studio albums out in quick succession Are You Experienced? (Reprise, 1967) and Axis: Bold As Love (Reprise, 1968).

The third longplayer, Electric Ladyland (Reprise, 1968), consolidated Jimi Hendrix' status as a rock and roll star.. But the creation of that magnum opus was a protracted process rife with both fulfillment and frustration: if the abrupt exit of former Animals' bassist Chas Chandler as producer part way through wasn't latent liability enough, there were the dual snafus involving the cover art for the double album: the omission of the late Linda Eastman's photos as Hendrix requested—now in place on the 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition—and differing substitutions by both US and British record labels about which Hendrix knew nothing in advance.

In the context of Jimi, this one sequence of events is a microcosm of the travails Hendrix endured in his stratospheric rise to fame. The pages full of concert ticket and poster reproductions for his shows suggest the relentless tour schedule that conflicted with the man's struggles to nurture his creative impulses.

And while the headlining slot for the legendary Woodstock Festival went to Jimi, due to the ongoing delays in the performances, he ultimately played for only a fraction of the crowd present at the peak of that August 1969 weekend; duly documented from a variety of camera angles, his kinetic presence belies the erratic nature of the performance that included the famous rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."

Further illustrating the erratic trajectory of Hendrix' career is the comparatively abbreviated Band of Gypsys project with drummer Buddy Miles, he of the Electric Flag and his own Express group, as well as bassist Billy Cox, whom Hendrix had befriended when both were in the service. While it yielded one of the few acts of redemptive occasions in an abbreviated career—the fulfillment of an early-career contract dispute via its single eponymous concert LP—the promising venture came to an abrupt halt in much disarray.

The inner design of the three-hundred twenty pages in Jimi mirrors such conflicts. Columns of text opposite the visual images sustain a narrative rife with paradox: even as he filled a concert void left by the retreat from the road by Dylan, The Beatles and the The Rolling Stones, Hendrix was becoming desperate for some stability in his life and he's quoted accordingly in the prose.

Meanwhile, the series of photos that fill the other two-thirds of the content here proffer an even more vivid picture of a man visibly aging even as his appearance otherwise took on the patina of psychedelic splendor (see page two-hundred thirty-one). Oddly, though, especially given that striking visual appeal, even the occasional two-page spreads devoted to Hendrix in action don't quite convey the magnitude of his status at the time, i.e., in the upper echelons of the musical hierarchy of the era.

Thus, in its graphic design as well as the co-authors' matter of fact tone, Jimi parallels its subject's alternately troubled and visionary existence. The over-sized fonts spelling out tributes to their subject approach overkill, for instance, and might well have been reduced in proportion to the reproductions of album covers in the discographical appendix (where track listings for each title might well have been included).

As such, like the very oeuvre of the artist to whom this work is dedicated, this publication is a whole greater than the sum of the parts, the multi-colored, faux 3D images on its gold-embossed cover reflective of its intrinsically fragmented nature.

Comments