New Books In Music

After his incendiary performance at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix almost immediately went from obscure musician to pop superstar in America. But as Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber reveal in Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, Hendrix was far from an overnight sensation. Drawing on an impressive research base, the authors have unearthed the early 1960s prehistory of Hendrix’s well-known but all-too-short life in the spotlight. They show that before his artistic and cultural breakthrough Hendrix had worked as a guitar-playing sideman for some of the biggest R & B acts of the 1960s, including Ike and Tina Turner, the Isley Brothers, and the incomparable Little Richard. In doing so, they paint a vivid and compelling portrait of a massively influential musician whose genius did not suddenly emerge after he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, but rather evolved during endless nights of gigging in b