Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-war Pop

Charles Shaar Murray once asked B.B. King if he considered Jimi Hendrix to be a bluesman. ‘I consider him to be a musician, a great, great musician.’ And Charles Shaar Murray has written the book that does justice to that accolade. It is more than a biography. Much more. The salient facts of Hendrix’s life are summarized but the book’s purpose is altogether of a higher order. Through a succession of wide-ranging, richly informed chapters the author describes Hendrix’s very individual journey ‘to the other side of town.’ As Charles Shaar Murray says, Hendrix ‘transgressed many boundaries; both arbitrary musical definitions separating blues and soul or jazz and rock, and also those fundamental divides between the archaic and the avant-garde, between individualist and collectivist philosophies, between blacks and whites, between America and Britain, between passive acquiescence and furious resistance, between lust for life and obsession with death.’ ‘Hendrix was Hendrix’ it has been said. Charles Shaar Murray demonstrates the truth of this, compellingly elucidating the ‘unique musical formulation’ that was Hendrix’s art.Winner of the Ralph Gleason Music Book Award on first publication this ambitious and brilliant book, hailed as ‘the most compelling and literate essay on rock since Greil Marcus’ 1975 Mystery Train’, is being reissued with a new introduction to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Hendrix’s birth.

Reviews of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-war Pop

The artistry of this book matches that of its subject. – Nick Tosches