∎ [PDF] Gratis 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky The Life of Jimi Hendrix David Henderson 9780553259858 Books

'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky The Life of Jimi Hendrix David Henderson 9780553259858 Books

Download As PDF : 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky The Life of Jimi Hendrix David Henderson 9780553259858 Books

'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky The Life of Jimi Hendrix David Henderson 9780553259858 Books

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'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky The Life of Jimi Hendrix David Henderson 9780553259858 Books Reviews

Excellent account of Hendrix's life (drug use and all) with the only critique that I might add is how can Henderson know or even speculate what thoughts went through Hendrix's mind particularly when he lay dying? There is a lot of this type of verbage here, but if you can get around that, this is an invaluable story that definetly puts you into Hendrix's life (a big strongpoint of this book) particularly during the major events (Monterey, Fillmore, Woodstock...) and is well worth the read.
In the late 70's and early 80's there were very few books on Hendrix and this was one of the first (barring the Curtis Knight biography) and probably the most widely distributed volumes on the Hendrix story (Most public libraries have a copy or two). This was the first book I read on Hendrix but it has not weathered well over the years and there are a number of factual problems with it. However, as its already been pointed out, Henderson weaves the tale in a talented fashion and he would have made a good scriptwriter for a treatment of a Hendrix biopic. Henderson is planning to re-release the book in 2008 with updated information revealing a lot of the sources who he could/would not originally reveal. Let's hope with this new edition he makes up for the sins of the past and fleshes out the man from the myth he helped to perpetuate.
This was the first book I read about Hendrix when I was about 13 all of 20 years ago and I have always loved it, and often go back to read parts of it. It's not an accurate biography at all, and there is a certan amount of exaggeration for effect, but somehow it really captured my imagination. It just works really well as book. Henderson has a fair amount of talent as writer, he should have gone further and written a fictional novel based on Jimi's life as the inspiration where he could have taken much more licence-it would have been really wonderful.

For me as a teenager, although obviously quite mythologised, it was a real glimse into a sophisticated grown up world I never comprehended as school girl in the West Midlands in the early 1980's. You really feel as have you got inside Hendrix's head, and are able to appreciate some understanding as to what it was like to live in the ever fabled late 60's.

Hendrix's intimate friends after he made it, seemed so exotic and glamourous to me. This was not 12-year-olds girls and mudsharks, the women of his inner circle that surrounded him seemed so sassy, exotic, senuous, street smart and sexually free. They were grown up seriously well connected young women. These people were not crude boozers and drug abusers, these were connisseurs of fine herbs and substances who lived nocternal lives in fabulous richly drapped apartments and hotels suites far away from the 9-5 grind of the real world. It also seemed such a very creative colourful world with Hendrix not only creating his own music but jamming and creating music with many other notable musicians that came to town. It's probably a complete load of rubbish-but it created a wonderful mystic and I loved it.
This is probably the best book that's been written on Hendrix, but it's not among the best music biographies...just the best on Hendrix. I've read the book a couple times, and it does contain good information. Sadly, the good information is scattered between too much slang, '60's hip talk, and artificial seeming dialect.

As far as the information in the book, it is a pretty thorough look at Hendrix's short life. It includes a lot of good pictures, and more about his time in the Army than any other source I've read. It's not bad for that.

I just wish Henderson wouldn't have used so much dialect and slang. It spoiled the entire experience. It turned a good book into a mediocre one.
David Eichelberger already wrote about one major weakness of this book in his review, though in Henderson's, umm, defense a lot of rock biographies written around the same time adopted a similar tone, cf. "No One Here Gets Out Alive," "Hammer of the Gods," and to a lesser extent, the Bob Marley bio by Timothy White (I think it's "Catch a Fire").

While the dated slang is distracting, the hero-worshipping approach to Hendrix is worse. Hendrix is either responsible for or happened to be within earshot of people talking about a lot of major developments in mid-1960s pop culture, including Eric Clapton's shift to Cream, Pete Townshend writing Tommy, Miles Davis getting into rock, etc. Yes, there is no denying that Hendrix was part of The Scene, and that he was part of the short-term changes happening in that scene, but without stronger evidence and attribution I'm not buying that Hendrix was the key nexus through which all of these changes were taking place. It takes a lot more than just one person to make change happen; Henderson's hagiographic presentation is simply untenable.

But the real deal killer here is the the omniscient third-person voice adopted by Henderson ("Jimi had not spent so much time with brothers in ages. He dug it."). You never really know if what you're reading is (a) something Hendrix said in an interview somewhere that Henderson has paraphrased, (b) something Hendrix said to a friend that Henderson has paraphrased, or (c) something Henderson imagines Jimi must have been thinking. No matter how you slice it, it comes up unreliable. You never know if what you're reading really is what Jimi thought or not.

That said, I give it two stars because it looks like Henderson at least got a lot of his facts right--at least if we are to trust the far superior 2006 Jimi bio by Charles Cross, "A Room Full of Mirrors," as a yardstick for cross-checking the data. Cross doesn't worry about being hip, just about putting down the facts (or at least the facts as the people he interviewed remember them as being) and letting Jimi speak in his own voice wherever possible. Cross is also good at comparing the different ways people remember the same event--something that doesn't seem to have occurred to Henderson as a thing to do. Nonetheless, amid all the bluster and jive talk, it is clear that Henderson did do a lot of research himself.

All in all, though, now that I've reread the Henderson book for the first time in about 20 years (found it buried in my storage space), I feel safe in saying that I have no reason to recommend to anyone other than the Hendrix completist, and that recommendation is pretty lukewarm. Get Cross' book instead if you want to know about Jimi's life and some of his musical influences. Get the CDs if you want to know about the music.

ADDITION I see that this book is in fact a condensed version of a larger book that Henderson wrote called something like "Jimi Hendrix Free Spirit of the Aquarian Age," a title that has not aged well. Apparently, the lack of interviews that I complain about in my review of this book here is a product of the cutting and chopping process Henderson went through to produce a shorter book that could be released as a mass-market paperback. Be that as it may, I can only judge by what THIS book is, not what it could have been. Henderson is said to be editing and updating the "Aquarian" book for new edition, to be released in 2007 or 2008. I'll keep my eyes out for that (though the long, impressionistic descriptions of Jimi's playing of various songs better not get any longer . . .).
This is a terrible book and it came at the very last minute and the book wasn't even worth reading. I have read many biographies about Hendrix and this one was the worst so far.
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