US: 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 career that would redefine the guitar, leave other rock heroes speechless and culminate in 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 and that he had become addicted to masturbation, 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 enlisted to avoid jail after being arrested in stolen cars in Seattle, his home town.
Room Full of Mirrors is being published this summer to coincide with the 35th anniversary of his death on September 18th, 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.