For me and many others, the seminal book on Jimi is: 'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: The Life Of Jimi Hendrix. "From Seattle and his years in the US Army to London in the Sixties, here is the full story - the songs, the concerts, the flaming guitars, the drugs, the booze and the women and, of course, the incredible musical legacy."
Author David Henderson captures Jimi Hendrix’s intense, apocalyptic and ultimately tragic life in a brilliantly researched biography.
In the latest update, Henderson poses many questions about Jimi's life and death, many of which point to his demise as something other than self-induced.
At the same time, in the same book, the author offers numerous verbatim interviews, and you can clearly see Jimi's decline from the early days, including as a pickup player, to his early stardom, to Britain, and then the really ugly stuff. And you can really see his descent. It made me cry a bunch of times, the first time I read an early edition when I was young, and more recently when I read the new update.
I recall that fateful day, when someone called me before school and said he'd gone. It took my copy of the first album to school, and our teacher let us play our Jimi records while we all signed each others' copies.
That copy of Are You Experienced, resides in a very nice frame, with a similarly old but preserved copy of Born To Run, Led Zepplin II and Abbey Road, on the wall of my son's room.