Hendrix 'pretended to be gay' to get out of army

Rock legend Jimi Hendrix pretended he was gay to get out of the US Army, a new biography reveals.

Hendrix was discharged from the 101st Airborne division in 1962, launching a musical career that would redefine the guitar, leave other rock heroes of the day speechless and culminate with his headlining performance of The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969.

Hendrix’s subterfuge, contained in his military medical records, is revealed for the first time in Charles Cross’s biography, Room Full Of Mirrors.

Publicly, Hendrix always claimed he was discharged after breaking his ankle on a parachute jump, but his medical records do not mention such an injury.

In regular visits to the base psychiatrist at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in spring 1962, Hendrix complained that he was in love with one of his squad mates, Cross writes.

Finally, Capt John Halbert recommended him for discharge, citing his “homosexual tendencies” – four years before Arlo Guthrie suggested that path for avoiding military service in the protest song, Alice’s Restaurant.

Hendrix’s legendary appetite for women negates the notion that he might have been gay, Cross says. Nor, he contends, was his stunt politically motivated.

Contrary to his later image, Hendrix was an avowed anti-communist who exhibited little unease about the escalating US role in Vietnam.

He just wanted to escape the Army to play music…he had enlisted to avoid jail time after being repeatedly arrested in stolen cars in Seattle, his home town.

Room Full Of Mirrors, titled after an unreleased Hendrix tune, is being published this summer to coincide with the 35th anniversary of his death on September 18 1970, from a sleeping-pill overdose at the age of 27.

It is Cross’s second biography of a popular musician who died at 27 – Heavier Than Heaven, a 2001 bio of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, was a New York Times best seller.

The Hendrix book is culled from nearly four years of research, including access to Hendrix’s letters and diaries, along with military records provided by a collector the author will not name. Cross focuses on Hendrix’s complex personal life and psyche more than his music.

“It’s not how much I know about Jimi’s B-sides; it’s how much I know about the emotional arc of his life,” Cross said in an interview.

The portrait that emerges is similar, in many ways, to that of Cobain. Both men grew up in poverty in Washington state, dreamed from an early age of becoming rock stars, found themselves with more fame than they knew how to handle and eventually retreated into a haze of drug use.

Cross, who lives just north of Seattle, describes Hendrix’s troubled childhood. Jimi’s father Al and mother Lucille both had drink problems. Al, a landscaper, rarely found decent-paying jobs and frequently split with Lucille. Jimi and his siblings were often left by themselves, or in the care of family friends. Jimi eventually flunked out of high school.

Before Hendrix even owned a proper guitar, he played air guitar using a broom, then a battered hunk of wood with a single string. When he was 16, his father bought him a right-handed electric guitar that Hendrix had to restring to play lefty.

After a show in Seattle, Hendrix had a star-struck teenager drive him around his old haunts and allegedly had an affair with French actress Brigitte Bardot, according to Cross.