Customer Reviews

Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy

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Forget about the photo-filled leaflets produced by McDermott/Kramer and Mitch Mitchell. "Electric Gypsy" is the only "real" Hendrix biography available.

Shapiro avoids the usual trap of obsessing over his subject, and gets down to the business of telling the story of an amazing life. Even more incredibly, Shapiro writes in such matter-of-fact language that Jimi's life seems real. A far cry from the cosmic freakshow that is Michael Fairchild (see the liner notes to "Blues").

Yes, Jimi Hendrix was human. "Electric Gypsy" portrays him as a human, not a god. If you want to read about Jimi's life without the clutter of some massive cosmic conspiracy, start here.

An exhaustive biography, lacking in lurrid details, but filled instead with the story of Jimi's life, and how his life affected his music.

It seems to me that this author decided that, since most people are interested in Jimi Hendrix for his music, then took that to be the perspective from which this book is written.

The narrative is good, and the pictures are very nice.

However, the most amazing part of this book is the appendices, which take up a full third of the book. They cover all the equipment that Jimi used, and a tremendous list of releases both official and otherwise. The amount of information included in this book is amazing, although some of it is now a bit dated.

Hightly recommended for Jimi fans and guitar equipment wonks of all kinds.

Probably the only book you'll ever need on one of the century's most important rock artists. That does count for something. This mind-boggling exhaustive treatment runs through 500 pages of text, and then dives into a 200-page appendix that details Hendrix's vast recorded output. The writing style is plain and unpretentious and gives you the straight facts on his career. The only downside is that the appendix is poorly organized and unindexed, making it difficult to find anything. Also, there could have been more analysis and discussion on Hendrix's contributions as a composer.

The research is wonderful, the prose style is just fine, the detail is remarkable - I finished the book knowing more than I ever felt I needed to know about Jimi (and being grateful for the knowledge) yet no closer to any understanding as to what made the man tick. Any serious Hendrix fan must own this book, but it is, in an odd way - emotionally incomplete.

Considering that this book was co-written by the man who runs the Hendrix Information Centre, Ceasar Glebbeek, it is a guarantee that this book will be as informative as possible. This bible of Jimi Hendrix has a complete discography which I and many fans alike refer to on a daily basis. Daily accounts of his life, gutar guide equipment guide, you name it this book has it. To put it bluntly this has everything you need from a wonderfully objective viewpoint that tells the story how it should be told.

This is probably the best book that has been written about Hendrix. I think it is co-written by the editor of the excellent Jimi Hendrix fanizine "Univibes", it's an excellent source book, with list and lists of guitars, equpiment, gigs, photographs anything you would wish to know really about Hendrix's career.

The large biography section is brillant and cannot be faulted-although I personaly don't ascribe to the writers theories about Monica Dannneman. I personaly don't think Hendrix wanted to marry Monica- or anyone in particular for that matter-or that she knew Jimi as well as she let on. Cathy Etchingham, Hendrix's London girlfriend for a number of years, dismisses her as stalker in her book. Coupled with the strange and often contradictory statements she made about his death in her hotel room-it raises a lot of questions about her place in Hendrix's life which are hard to guess at.

This is an excellent book , if you like Jimi's music :buy it!
Remember that Caesar Glebbeek is the editor of 'Univibes' an excellent Jimi Hendrix-magazine .

I'm a Jimi Hendrix fanatic, so I guess this might be a little biased, but if you love Hendrix (The man as well as his music), then you will definitely love this book. It is kind of intimidating at first because of its thickness, but once I got into it I found it to be hard to put down. It gives a very detailed take on Jimi's life and does a better job than any other publication I have seen trying to give a 'biography' of his life.

Although no biography of Jimi Hendrix can ever claim to be "Definitive", this book is extremely thorough, covers just about every angle you could want, and is chock full of pictures.

It could be said that Electric Gypsy is a disjointed book thematically, but that's only because it accurately details a disjointed life. Jimi Hendrix, I've come to understand from reading this, was a living contradiction - a counterculture icon who embraced the drug use and fashion, but who was quietly a conservative philosophically opposed to so many of the core ideals of counterculture (the peace movement, embracing communism, etc). Considering how much that cultural split ripped the nation in two, it's amazing that Hendrix could embrace both sides. He was a living contradiction in some ways, but that's an illusion caused by judging him by our standards. In truth, Hendrix was very much an individual. He truly marched to the strum of his own guitar, and that alone makes him worth learning about. Despite his eventual (and still somewhat debatable) self-destruction, that individual spirit reflects the best of American character, as well as the risks inherent to such things. Hendrix was definitely a very American figure. I recommend Electric Gypsy as a good way to understand him.