Jimi and Me: The Experience of a Lifetime

This memoir explores the friendship between Jimi Hendrix and Stathakis, a former television producer and photographer whom Hendrix hired in the last 18 months of his life to create a documentary of his work. Stathakis delves into the start of his career and offers a window into Hendrix’s work in a memoir filled with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Stathakis coauthored it with Chris Epting, who’s written many memoirs about musical artists, including Long Train Runnin’. Stathkis says the purpose of his book is to reveal a side of Hendrix that few knew. He also wanted to clear up misconceptions of his collaboration with Hendrix more than 50 years ago on a film that was ultimately never made. Sometimes his reflections of people, places, and events seem larger than life, and women, especially, are described in hypersexualized terms. But what does shine through are Stathakis’s reminiscences of Hendrix, the person, and the particularly vivid events of Woodstock.