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Jimi Hendrix's early career in America is a fascinating yet often overlooked history. While he became famous in England in 1967, the five years that Hendrix spent working in the U.S. as a struggling sideman and studio musician-from 1962 to 1966-are critical in understanding his life and later work. Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber's Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Musical Genius (Da Capo Press, 2010) sets out to uncover the history in these years. They turned what normally appears as a footnote, or at best a short chapter in any of the Hendrix biographies, into the focus of their study.
Roby has significant experience writing about Hendrix. The fonner editor of Experience Hendrix magazine, he previously authored Black Gold: The Lost Archive of Jimi Hendrix (Billboard, 2002), which carefully catalogues every lost recorded jam session, recording date, court date and interview. Black Gold is a well-researched and valuable contribution to Hendrix scholarship, but since it is a true catalog of events rather than narrative, is best used by Hendrix-knowledgeable readers who know what they are looking for. Becoming Jimi Hendrix, however, is written by Roby and Schreiber in the style of a biography. It is intended for a broad audience and offers no musical analysis.
The authors compact the first nineteen and a half years of Hendrix's impoverished childhood and early musical experiences in Seattle into a brief introduction. The famous years, beginning with...