ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?-JIMI HENDRIX BY NOEL REDDING+PAN

" This is the inside story of the Jimi Hendrix Experience by one of the very few people able and willing to tell it. From 1967-70 the band enjoyed one of the most dazzling and sensational careers in the history of rock music, with a roller-coaster ride through a schedule of sell-out tours and frantic recording sessions that left the band crazed with drugs, stardom and exhaustion, but still capable of producing some of the most explosively inventive and inspirational music ever heard.

Noel Redding, bassist with The Experience since its inception, tells of his early years as a struggling but ever-optimistic musician in the mid-sixties, doing the rounds of nightclubs and dance-halls in Britain and Germany. Then, on impulse, he answered an ad for an audition with Eric Burdon . . . and ended up playing beside a tall, enigmatic man called Jimi Hendrix, who played guitar like no man has before or since.

When Mitch Mitchell joined the line-up, The Experience was born. And though the combination of a black American brought up on the chitlin' circuit and an English rhythm section with its roots in R&B looked unusual to say the least, their success was instantaneous.

Superstardom brought the band the traditional rewards — sex, drugs, adulation - as the music they played became more and startlingly innovative. Fuzz and feedback were born, and the musicians' techniques spread out to embrace sounds that would influence generations to follow.

Redding describes both the making of the music, and the genesis of the phenomenal stage act - all teeth and fire - that would become the hallmark of The Experience's public appearances and often engendered a state of mass hysteria in the audience. He then goes on to explore the tragic and still mysterious circumstances of Hendrix's death.

But the story doesn't end there, for ever since 1970 the band has been haunted by the kind of legal, managerial and contractual turmoil that has become a part of the modern lore of the music business. Redding recounts his own efforts to win just financial reward for the band itself, usually the last people to benefit from the phenomenal income generated during those helter-skelter years, and in doing so tells the story of perhaps the first - though certainly not the last - great rock 'n' roll swindle.

Frank, funny, rich in anecdotes about legendary figures in the story of rock and full of insights into the nature of Hendrix's genius and the way it has been exploited, this is a book that everyone interested in rock music will want to read. "