"He would play that broom so hard, he would lose all the straw," said one of the many adults who were part of this "never-ending shuffle" for food and shelter. But it was a long time before the shy, polite Jimi got his hands on an actual guitar, even a one-stringed instrument.

Meanwhile, he flunked out of high school and developed the sense of detachment that would make him a permanent drifter, coupled with the eagerness to please that made him welcome anywhere. When he moved to Nashville to become a back-up musician (and to encounter racial prejudice that was new to him after multicultural Seattle), he made himself endlessly adaptable. He played with such a weird range of performers that he had a musical biography that nobody would have believed. Weirdest of all: Jayne Mansfield.

Cross, who also investigates his subject's stint in the army and thinks that he feigned homosexuality and various health problems to be discharged from the service, does a fine job of illustrating how this range of musical influences made Hendrix so uncategorizable - and so experienced. With his eventual wild-man mélange of borrowed tricks (he took the gimmick of playing guitar behind his back from T-Bone Walker), he had a style that would have looked ridiculous in either Nashville or Harlem (where he also spent some apprentice time). But then he got to Greenwich Village in New York City and began wowing white kids from Long Island.

By 1966, he was ready for London, where his audience suddenly included a Who's Who of (by Cross's reckoning) often catty and envious white rock royalty, with whom he had little in common. "That was hard work," Hendrix said after socializing with Eric Clapton. And he was catnip for the groupies who kept him constantly cheating on one girlfriend or another. Once he had asked a high school sweetheart: "Do you really think I'll have fans?" Now, caught with a fan in a women's bathroom, he tried out a priceless excuse: "She wanted my autograph."

The least interesting part of "Room Full of Mirrors" comes after Hendrix reached his pinnacle of stardom. Much of this has been described elsewhere, if sometimes in embarrassingly racist and dated terms. (Rolling Stone labeled him a "psychedelic superspade.") Drug use made him blurry and rambling, with an increasingly weird affinity for science fiction. An overloaded touring schedule left him exhausted. When he died at 27 after taking too many sleeping pills (accidentally, Cross argues), he was buried in a flannel logger's shirt, the ultimate affront to his gypsy flamboyance.