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.

When it comes to putting together a story from other sources, as well as a number of interviews he conducted, Mr. Norman does yeoman’s work. Having lived in England during the era when it became Hendrix’s sometime home and the birthplace of his musical legend, and having written about musicians for so many years, Norman’s wealth of knowledge allows him to bring scenes from this story to vivid life. He also knows how to tell a story engagingly, if at times brashly, and keep the pace brisk.

Norman knows an interesting character when he sees one but, sadly, he misfired when deciding on Jimi Hendrix. Even a fan of the great guitarist, after reading this book, would conclude the man himself is not that interesting. That’s not to say Jimi’s life and career wasn’t 'spellbinding,' as the title suggests but Jimi, as a man without the guitar, was kind of dull and drug addled.

Norman weaves artistic achievement, personal struggles, and management difficulties together, making the tragic outcome seem if not acceptable then at least understandable. Occasional suggestions of what Hendrix might have been thinking notwithstanding, Norman avoids sounding overly sensationalist and draws heavily on his revered biographies of other key figures of the time for context and color. Readers searching for complete details of Hendrix’s recorded work will need to look elsewhere, as this is by no means a definitive catalog of his output. But as a biography of the legendary ax man, this is the one..

In this rollicking biography, Norman...combines colorful, energetic picaresque...with lush evocations of Hendrix’s sound.

Norman does a fine job recounting the...whirlwind years of his subject’s life.