Is that really charismatic Jimi Hendrix in a newly released sex tape or just a cynical hoax?

His legend doesn't need to be embellished: his dazzling, revolutionary musicianship, taste for sexual and chemical escape have already combined to make him one of rock's greatest stars.
His tragically early death cemented his place for ever in the rock 'n' roll hall of fame.
But now comes a peculiarly modern twist on Jimi Hendrix's extraordinary celebrity.
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Wandering ways:   was often unfaithful to his British girlfriend Kathy Etchingham

A Californian video company - famous for selling the home-made blue movie starring ex-Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson and her rocker husband Tommy Lee - is preparing to release what it says is a sex tape featuring Hendrix, who died nearly 38 years ago.
Jimi's taste for groupies is already legendary - model Linda Keith recalls once finding him in bed with no fewer than seven women, and his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham caught him intimately engaged with a fan in the bathroom after a gig.
"She asked for my autograph," Jimi shrugged by way of explanation.
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Ladyland: Hendrix with two fans - the rock star had an eye for members of the opposite sex

But could this sensational 11-minute curiosity really feature Jimi Hendrix, who died aged 27 after taking nine extra-strength sleeping tablets and choking on his own vomit?
In the grainy footage, a man who resembles the star can be seen frolicking with two naked brunettes. He undeniably has a moustache like Hendrix's, but the film is rather tricky to interpret.
The bedroom is barely lit and the man's face appears on camera for only a few moments.
There is no audio at all, and his eyes are closed throughout. You can see that the man in question is wearing plenty of rings, and, yes, Hendrix loved to wear rings.
He is also wearing a bandana, another Hendrix trademark. The movie 'star' also seems to be - not to put too fine a point on it - seriously out of it on drink or drugs.
But are any of these circumstantial snippets enough to convince anyone it is truly Hendrix?

Smut: The Hendrix sex tape

Rather depressingly, Vivid Entertainment is banking on making a fast buck from people whose curiosity overwhelms any qualms about indulging in posthumous voyeurism.
They think plenty of people will be willing to part with a little cash in order to see what could be a music legend in an intimate moment.
Maybe they are right, for Hendrix continues to cast a great shadow. His three studio albums still sell briskly, earning his estate around £7 million a year, and his influence is cited by every one of the world's great guitarists.
And so Jimi Hendrix, The Sex Tape ('The film you never thought you'd see!') is on sale this week for $39.95 - around £20.
It's available by mail order and as a download via the internet, and is sure to sell like hot cakes.
So - hoax, fiddle or genuine article - how did this come so belatedly into the public arena?
The tape was brought to Vivid Entertainment by a broker named Howie Klein.
He says the reel came to him from a 'collector' who stumbled upon it at a London auction of rock memorabilia. The tape was inside a tin box labelled 'Black man'.
Klein claims he recognised Hendrix - and Steven Hirsch, the company's co-chairman set about authenticating it.
Hirsch asked two acquaintances of Hendrix's - Cynthia Albritton and Pamela Des Barres - to do so, and both appear on the tape declaring that the man in question is Jimi Hendrix, the star of Woodstock and Monterey who set his guitar on fire and reduced legends such as Clapton and Townshend to nervous, awed silence at his gigs.
They should know: Des Barres was the girlfriend of Noel Redding, Hendrix's bass player, for two years. An infamous groupie, she also counts Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison among her conquests.
Cynthia Albritton - otherwise known as Cynthia Plaster-Caster - met Hendrix on February 27, 1968.
She and two girlfriends pursued him to room 1628 of the Chicago Hilton, where they indulged in Cynthia's favourite hobby: taking plaster casts of famous men's genitalia.
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Virtuoso: Hendrix made a name for himself in London before becoming a global star

It made her notorious among fellow groupies, and she says she found Hendrix a willing subject.
"He was a terrific sport," Cynthia said once. "Very relaxed. Usually, the more charismatic the rock star, the more uptight they are."
In her haste to speed her trophy away from the encounter, she cracked the cast, and glued it back together in three separate pieces. She now calls it the Penis de Milo.
Now 61, Cynthia is sure the man shown in 11 minutes of grainy footage is Jimi.
"I'm 100 per cent sure it's him," she says. "The facial bone structure is the same. The eyebrows and the moustache are true to the style he was wearing in 1970."
Hirsch - who paid both Des Barres and Albritton for sharing their opinions - said: "I believe that we did our due diligence, and, as a result of that, clearly believe that it's him.
"If they said it wasn't him, I would never have put it out."
Not everyone is so sure. Kathy Etchingham, who was Hendrix's longest-term girlfriend, says the facial resemblance is not quite right.
Interestingly, she says Hendrix would never have consented to being filmed.
"Jimi would never have allowed anyone to see that. In private, he was very shy and would cover up."
Maybe so, although his taste for groupies makes one suspect he was not all that shy, particularly after he and Kathy split up and for the last two years of Jimi's life he juggled a mind-boggling array of girlfriends, both casual and not so casual.
Sexual opportunity was everywhere for the lusty rocker - and he was never able to resist the opportunity. Perhaps this was because, like many great womanisers, he had endured a childhood of poverty and deprivation - and was particularly wanting when it came to maternal love.
His mother, who was still a teenager when she gave birth to him, could not cope and gave up four of her six children for foster care, including Jimi for a time.
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Hippy values: Hendrix pictured with two un-named women in the late sixties

He often went hungry, and said he never forgot that feeling. Hendrix's career took off when he came to London in 1966 and was immediately adopted by the new aristocracy of British rock.
He met flame-haired hairdresser Kathy on his first night in the UK, and they remained together for more than two years.
Jimi was not faithful by any means - especially when he became, almost immediately, enormously famous.
Kathy recalled: "Lots of girls were interested in him. They would sit down and listen to everything he said with big, round eyes - even when he was talking utter gibberish.
"Of course, he had lots of women. They all did."
Their romance was over by May 1969, when Jimi was touring the U.S.
Model Linda Keith, who became friendly with Hendrix via her then boyfriend, Rolling Stone Keith Richards, said Jimi would tell her that his wandering ways were just part of his nature.
"He had this depth with women," she observed. "All the women who say they were the great love of his life - they probably were just in that moment."
But there is no 'love' to be seen in the new sex tape - indeed, there is the possibility that 'Jimi' was tripping at the time it was filmed.
Everyone, including Etchingham, admits Hendrix took copious amounts of LSD, which meant all kinds of boundaries became blurred.
"Our lives were out of focus," Etchingham said once.
After Kathy broke up with him, Hendrix became increasingly exhausted, disillusioned and raddled with drugs.
He made a bizarre proposal of marriage to German fan Monika Dannemann, whom he barely knew.
They never married, and only saw each other for three weeks in two years - but it was in her flat in Notting Hill that he died on September 18,1970.
In the final year of his life, Jimi was in the habit of recording all day, and jamming all night, accompanied always by an endless supply of drugs and sex.
In his last days, he desperately went from woman to woman, proposing to one, Danish model Kirsten Nefer, days after he met her.
Hours later he downed a fateful handful of sleeping pills. "I'm so fed up with playing," he told her. "I'm so sick of burning my guitar."
So this man in the film could, then, quite feasibly be Hendrix in the period just before his death. The behaviour certainly chimes with what we know of him at the time.
But Charles R. Cross, author of the well-regarded Hendrix biography Room Full Of Mirrors, has seen the film and doubts its legitimacy.
Like Etchingham, he says the face and nostrils of the man in the video don't match up to the genuine article. He also thinks the figure in the tape is wearing more rings than Hendrix was known to wear.
"This is someone who looks like Jimi or is pretending to look like him, but it certainly didn't look like a dead-on match to me," he said.
More than that, he said it was "horrible to watch" the film. "I don't want that to be what people today remember about Jimi Hendrix," he said.
Indeed. Perhaps it should be enough just to know - from people who were really there - that he was a man with a considerable sexual magnetism, and an appetite for debauchery to match.
Why must we see 'Hendrix' on such a lurid tape?
As rock star Lemmy from the group Motorhead, who worked as a roadie for Hendrix, puts it: "Chicks were just drooling all over him. It's because of the way he moved - like a cat crossed with a spider."
The poetry of that wonderful image beats the grainy 'reality' of this questionable new enterprise any day.