Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber, “Becoming Jimi Hendrix” (Da Capo, 2010)

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 backwater juke joints and dive bars from Nashville to New York City.

Steven Roby is a San Francisco-based photographer and the author of three books on the life and legacy of Jimi Hendrix: Black Gold: The Lost Archives of Jimi Hendrix, Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, and his latest, Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews and Encounters with Jimi Hendrix. He can be reached through his blog.

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