MIDNIGHT LIGHTNING: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience

MIDNIGHT LIGHTNING: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience. By Greg Tate. Lawrence Hill Books. 157 pp. $18.95

In few fields has the label genius been applied more recklessly than in rock ’n’ roll. One of the few rock stars truly deserving the label is Jimi Hendrix, who was not only a virtuoso guitarist and consummate showman but a musical visionary and writer of enduring songs. His career as a headliner was meteoric, from the release of his jaw-dropping debut album Are You Experienced? in 1967 to his drug-related death in 1970 at age

27. The Hendrix industry has thrived in the years since, cranking out countless records, movies, books, tributes, and imitators, as well as endless speculation about what might have been.

Midnight Lightning is the latest and, in many respects, the strangest of the books. Greg Tate, a staff writer at The Village Voice, provides a remarkably astute examination of Hendrix’s protean talents. The effortless precision with which he positions Hendrix in the context of subsequent guitarists is music criticism at its best. But Tate has loftier goals than mere biography or technical appreciation. He seeks to place Hendrix—a black man who was largely ignored by the black community—in a racial context.

Himself African-American, Tate announces up front that "this is a Jimi Hendrix book with A Racial Agenda." Readers who can get past the rhetoric will be rewarded with provocative insights into black America and white America and Hendrix’s singular position at the intersection of the two. But there’s also a bunch of oddball material, including a fabricated review of a movie Hendrix never made and a bizarre synopsis of a novel Hendrix never wrote. Through it all, Tate writes with an engaging, highly stylized voice, which on occasion even manages to evoke Hendrix’s own loopy lyricism.

Despite all the pyrotechnics, though, the book seems not so much searing Hendrix solo as Eddie Van Halen guitar extravaganza, full of impressive licks and memorable riffs but leading nowhere. Tate thoroughly documents Hendrix’s African-American roots, both social and musical, but this knowledge does nothing to explain his incomprehensible leap from sideman on the black "Chitlin Circuit" to white rock ’n’ roll icon. Then again, geniuses by definition are beyond the understanding of mere mortals.

—Preston Lerner