Pure Gold

Black Gold: The Lost Archives of
Jimi Hendrix
Steven Roby
Billboard Books

Lynne Bronstein
Special to the Mirror

   Go to the “Music” section of any bookstore and you’ll find dozens of rock star bios offering readers every juicy tidbit their authors were able to dredge up regarding drug and alcohol indulgences, unrestrained sex, destruction of property, arrests, everything except what makes these people important to us -- their music.
   Steven Roby’s “Black Gold,” is different. It’s a biography of Jimi Hendrix devoted to chronicling his music as it developed, and as it influenced and was influenced by his life. Roby, a Hendrix devotee who has worked as a writer and editor for the Hendrix family’s Experience Corporation, did an exhaustive amount of research to come up with a list, not of Hendrix’s legal mishaps or sexual adventures, but of all the recordings, studio and live, that have been attributed to Hendrix.
   The book’s format juxtaposes brief bio sketches of periods in Hendrix’s life with “status reports” on the recordings available from each time period. It is truly remarkable how much material was recorded (much of it bootlegged, back in the days when “illegal” music was sold on vinyl rather than swapped on the Internet). Sometimes recordings of Hendrix jamming with significant musicians of the 1960s turned out to not actually exist, such as a rumored jam with Miles Davis, one of Hendrix’s idols.
   So detailed are Roby’s descriptions of the recordings, as well as the comments he culled from Hendrix’s musical colleagues, that the fan looking for scandalous info will doubtless be bored. (There are plenty of other books about Jimi Hendrix that delve more deeply into his personal life and Roby has listed some of them in a bibliography at the book’s end).
   The biographical sketches in “Black Gold” do touch upon Hendrix’s disorderly private life, his tangled relationships with women, his bouts of depression. But as these sketches alternate with the musical archive information, it becomes clear that Jimi Hendrix was focused on his music -- while others, like his manager and record company, were obsessed only with making money from the novelty act that they thought he was.
   We’re told that during his early years of playing as a sideman for R & B acts like the Isley Brothers and Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix chafed at having to wear suits and play standard guitar licks. He longed to “let his freak flag fly” and when he got the chance to do so, he became a surprise success.
   Three years after his combination of guitar virtuosity and on-stage special effects made him the most talked-about act at the Monterey Pop Festival, a despondent-sounding Hendrix confided to his colleague and friend Richie Havens that he was being brought down so much by his insensitive management that he was having trouble eating and sleeping. He was a man who wrote poetry, a scenario for a movie, a rock opera featuring a hero based on himself. He wanted to experiment with jazz-rock mergers far more complex than the popular “fusion” music of the ‘70s. He succeeded in jamming with jazz greats like Rahsan Roland Kirk and Gil Evans. And all the while, the powers that ran his career kept him on an exhausting touring schedule, sending him to arenas and theatres where fans yelled for him to do “Purple Haze” and smash and burn his guitar like he used to do.
   “Black Gold” offers just enough glimpses into Hendrix’s sadness to make the contrast between the personal conflicts and the enormous output of work chronicled in the archives reverberate with a sense of both tragedy — that this man’s life work was cut short by his untimely death in 1970 — and of joy that there is still so much of his music that can be experienced. For music buffs and especially for anyone who plays the guitar, it will be irresistable to read this book with one’s axe at one’s side, ready to strum or twang a few Hendrix-type licks in homage.