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Bottom of the pile
8
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
9/100Critics
7/100Scholars
Author:
Philip Norman
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
September 15, 2020
A new biography of one of rock music's most outrageousâand tragicâgeniuses.
What The Reviewers Say
The short life and spellbinding music of Jimi Hendrix have been well covered by other writers, and, with the exception of some new and dreary information about his death, there are not a lot of surprises in Wild Thing.
Wild Thing is good on Hendrix’s meteoric impact on Swinging London (and then the world), the crater he left in consciousness. It’s not quite as good on the precise electric-acoustic dimensions of that crater. But that’s always the challenge with Hendrix: How to describe, how to even verbally gesture at, the extraordinary sounds he made? Or to reconcile this diffident, melancholy man with the Promethean audacity of his art?.
Always entertaining, if a little glib in places, the Sixties chronicler Philip Norman tells an archetypal crash-and-burn story of sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, dodgy gangster managers, debauched tours, bitter feuds, more sex, more drugs and even more sex.
... a brisk and efficient accounting of a brief life.
