Starting at Zero, His Own Story by Jimi Hendrix, edited by Alan Douglas and Peter Neal – review

There exists a multiplicity of books about the greatest musician, magician and mystery of rock'n'roll, but they are inevitably interpretative and often didactic, often with an axe to grind in the antagonistic mire that Jimi Hendrix's "legacy", and ownership of his music, has become.

Alan Douglas and Peter Neal, by contrast, were friends of Hendrix who loved him and his muse enough to fade away and let him speak for himself, and they have collected and ordered the lambent morsels here – notes, diaries, interviews, letters, pensées – to give us the closest we'll get to a Hendrix autobiography.

The book contains both snippets that confirm hunches one had about both man and music, and others that confound the stereotype of a wild, reckless genius who played himself into an early grave in 1970. There is the timid Hendrix who, when not working, preferred to be indoors listening to records; the Hendrix entranced by the music of Bach and Mahler; the Hendrix who wanted to see the campus rioters of America learn from their Japanese counterparts and equip themselves with helmets and "Roman shields".

We learn that the schoolboy Hendrix was persecuted not for being black, but for being Native American: "Indians are bad," insisted his teachers. Peers bullied him for wearing ponchos made by the "groovy mother" he saw so little of.

Having enlisted in the military as a way to avoid conviction for car theft, Hendrix "hated the army immediately"; he was horrified by its ritualised sadism. It is important to remember that Hendrix was not another peacenik superstar, but a soldier who rejected war for peace.

Indeed, Hendrix's radicalism and rejection of the "everyday mud world we're living in" comes across in these pages as profoundly spiritual and revolutionary. He is fascinating on race; he writes about his personal experience of segregation and abuse, yet his life and music commute between black and white, the blues and his greatest inspiration, Bob Dylan. He occupies a place above and beyond race, and knows it. "There is no such thing as the colour problem," he insists. "It's a weapon for the negative forces trying to destroy the country. They make black and white fight each other so they can take over at each end. That is what the establishment is waiting for." Unhappy in Harlem, which he found "cold and mean", he bloomed in Greenwich Village and, famously, found fame in England.

As with all artists, Hendrix is most compelling when talking about his craft and influences. Most of his songs, he reveals, "were about 10 pages long" and had to be edited. Apart from Dylan and the blues masters, he singles out Mike Bloomfield's Electric Flag and Jefferson Airplane as his muses. What he calls "freak-out psychedelic" music does not interest him – this is not what he thinks the Experience is doing. "I don't want anybody to stick a psychedelic label around my neck. Sooner Bach and Beethoven. Don't misunderstand me, I love Bach and Beethoven, I have many records by them, also by Gustav Mahler." He loves to be called "the Paganini of the guitar", but when voted the world's greatest guitarist by readers of Melody Maker, responds: "That's just silly."

The Experience rehearsed little; most of the band's playing time was onstage, where "I forget everything, even the pain". He describes his work as an endless quest "to make the note come out a little different", and the most gratifying section of the book is his description of experimenting with an Admiralty sonics expert called Roger Mayer. Mayer invented a machine called the Octavia, which makes a note "come through a whole octave higher", and he "rewired my guitars in a special way to produce an individual sound".

The final sections are poignant. It's impossible not to look for signs of prescience in the literary narrative of stars who die young but the indications here are that death was the last thing on his mind in summer 1970. Tired of the music industry's demands, Hendrix is impatient with his extraordinary, searing sound, in that way that separates great artists from good or competent ones; he writes about fatigue at playing his hits, about wanting to stretch himself and his music in the directions indicated by the Electric Ladyland album, to improvise more on stage and cut a new record entitled First Rays of the New Rising Sun – hardly the thoughts of a man with a death wish.

Hendrix even writes of a pioneering new sound he wants to create at his newly completed studio in New York, "something else, like with Handel and Bach and Muddy Waters and flamenco". It confirms what Patti Smith once told me, about a conversation she had with Hendrix sitting on the studio steps, as he took a break from the opening party. He planned to work, he told young Patti, on "music unlike anything he'd written, or anyone had heard, before" on his return from the Isle of Wight festival and a tour of Europe.

But Hendrix never returned. And I'll never forget the afternoon of September 18 1970, when, aboard the bus from school, I learned from the front page of the evening paper that Hendrix – whom I'd heard play just a few days before – had died by swallowing his own vomit after taking sleeping pills, a block from my home. I wrote in chalk on the empty pavement outside the Samarkand Hotel, Notting Hill, 'Kiss the sky, Jimi", and hid while a man washed it away.

Unsurprisingly, the book ends with a better epitaph, Hendrix's own: "When I die, just keep on playing the records".