The Wind Cries Jimi

Harvey Kubernik and Kenneth Kubernik’s oral history of Jimi Hendrix’s life and career, featuring input from diverse musicians (Bobby Womack, Paul Kantner, Roger Daltrey, Dave Mason, Stephen Stills, members of the Doors and the Who, and others) and more than 100 music-industry insiders, acquaintances, and fans, is several things.

It is a reliving of a multitude of rehearsals, performances, and chance encounters. It is an astute social history of the 1960s. And it is an elegiac celebration of this most romantic, complex man, as superficially macho, sexual, and—in the words of one fan—“dangerous, dangerous,” as he was actually soft-spoken, vulnerable, humble, and, in the words of another, “almost effeminate.”