Review: 'Jimi Hendrix: The Stories Behind the Songs'

Jimi Hendrix is one of Rock & Roll’s definitive artists, and quite likely its most original and innovative musician. However, his recording career as leader of the Experience and solo artist lasted less than four years. During that time he put out just four albums, but his unreleased recordings became a cottage industry starting with 1971’s The Cry of Love. There is enough of that material in circulation that David Stubbs was able to put together a whole book called Jimi Hendrix: The Stories Behind the Songs in 2003. The book critiqued and analyzed every available Hendrix recording, while placing it all in historical context.

Seventeen years later, Stubbs has updated The Stories Behind the Songs to include more recent archive digs such as 2018’s Both Sides of the Sky. I have not read the original edition, but considering the very modern lens through which Stubbs reads songs, I wonder how much of the old content the author has revised. Hendrix was an amazing musician, and a very good—often exceptional— songwriter, but his lyrics regularly suffer from the groupie-devouring misogyny of the sixties rock scene, and Stubbs regularly calls Hendrix out on the artist’s sexism. If Stubbs was as in tune with such issues way back in 2003, I applaud him. The fact that several sloppy errors that I’ve learned were in the original publication (crediting Jr. Walker’s “Shotgun” to The Temptations, referring to “May This Be Love” as “Waterfall”, listing Noel Redding as a member of the Band of Gypsys, etc.) have not been corrected suggests that this new edition  may not have been so thoroughly overhauled. 

As for Stubbs’s takes on the music, he and I sometimes part ways— his dismissal of my favorite track on Axis, the infectiously funky “Wait Until Tomorrow”, as the album’s “most disposable number” and a “comedy number” left me bewildered—but that’s to be expected when opinionated writers collide with opinionated readers.

Overall, Stubbs does a satisfying job of covering Hendrix’s material and telling the man’s personal story through the song discussions. The biographical aspect of The Stories Behind the Songs might have been even stronger if Stubbs discussed all the songs in chronological order rather than the jumbled order in which they appeared on posthumous albums, but he still delivers the stories behind the songs, which is all his book really promises. That it also offers a basic biography and a flood of fab color and B&W images of its dazzlingly photogenic subject is icing on the psychedelic cake.