It was a soggy Monday morning, August 18, 1969. Woodstock’s Three Days of Peace & Music were leaking into the beginning of a new week. Pressured by the realities of school and work, the monstrous crowd of 500,000 revelers that had churned Max Yasgur’s alfalfa field into a muddy quagmire had dwindled to fewer than 200,000. Those that remained were about to be rewarded with one of the most powerful performances in rock ‘n’ roll history – Jimi Hendrix was about to play the National Anthem.
During the festival’s planning stages, Jimi Hendrix’s agent, Michael Jeffery, had set Jimi up to be the festival’s closing act on Sunday night. But a weekend plagued with technical gremlins and bad weather had obliterated the concert schedule. Festival organizers gave Jimi the option of playing at midnight on Sunday night, but he chose to wait until morning.
Jimi and his band took the stage at 8AM. It’s worth pointing out that this wasn’t his traditional band. The Jimi Hendrix Experience that had taken the Monterey Pop Festival by storm two summers earlier had broken up. Jimi had hastily assembled a new band called the Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, featuring bassist Billy Cox, guitarist Larry Lee, drummer Mitch Mitchell, and two additional percussionists.
If Jimi and the band were nervous, no one would blame them. Billy and Larry had never performed in front of a large crowd before. To add to their stress, the new band lacked chemistry. Their rehearsals in upstate New York sounded raw and uncoordinated, and a recent performance at Woodstock’s Tinker Street Cinema was received with skepticism.
[credit] GuitarAficionado.com
Jimi’s weapon of choice that day was an Olympic White 1968 Fender Stratocaster, serial number 24098. (Fender re-created Hendrix’s Stratocaster for today’s Hendrix devotees. Check it out here). The guitar body was alder wood, and the neck was maple. The fretboard was made from a separate piece of maple and didn’t have the telltale skunk stripe of all Fender 1-piece necks. Of course, because Jimi was left-handed, the Strat was flipped upside down, and the nut was reversed at the top to get the right string order.
The set started as a typical Jimi Hendrix set and romped through the fan favorites, including “Hear My Train A Comin’,” “Red House,” and “Foxy Lady.” After performing “Voodoo Child,” Jimi and the band began to improvise. “You can leave if you want to,” Jimi told the crowd. “We’re just jammin’, that’s all.”
The impromptu jam session lasted for 30 astonishing minutes and included a quick revisit to “Voodoo Child” and a full version of “Purple Haze.” At one point in the midst of this medley, Jimi stepped forward, unaccompanied, and proceeded to play the National Anthem.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MwIymq0iTsw
While this wasn’t the first time Jimi performed the anthem in concert, it was certainly the first time he played it like this. Power chords were distorted and drawn out. Feedback wound in and out of straight, single notes. In the middle of the anthem, Jimi briefly played “Taps” before returning to finish the song. The effect was immediate and powerful.
Producer and cameraman Michael Wadleigh was behind one of 18 cameras filming the festival. Jimi’s “Star Spangled Banner” is a moment he will never forget. “I remember people literally tearing their hair out,” Michael remembered. “I looked out with one eye and I saw people grabbing their heads, so ecstatic, so stunned and moved, a lot of people holding their breath, including me. No one had ever heard that. It caught all of us by surprise.”
Initially, reaction to Jimi’s soon-to-be-legendary performance was surprisingly quiet. It had occurred in the middle of nowhere, early on a Monday morning, at the end of a historic 3-day festival. It wasn’t until Michael Wadleigh turned his films into the Academy Award-winning documentary Woodstock that the entire nation witnessed Jimi’s national anthem. Reactions were immediate and wildly divided. Some loved the performance, viewing it as a patriotic commentary on the nation’s polarized political climate. Others saw it as just another disrespectful assault on the nation’s heritage.
At the height of the controversy, Jimi appeared on Dick Cavett’s popular late-night show to share his memories and perhaps even his motives for the performance. During the interview, Jimi would provide an explanation as only a true musician could.
“I don’t know, man. All I did was play it. I’m American, so I played it,” Jimi said. “I used to sing it in school. They made me sing it in school, so it was a flashback.”
Cavett would jump to Jimi’s defense, stating, “This man was in the 101st Airborne, so when you send your nasty letters in ….” Cavett then explained to Jimi that playing an “unorthodox” version of the anthem will earn you “a guaranteed percentage of hate mail.”
“I didn’t think it was unorthodox,” Jimi quietly replied. “I thought it was beautiful.”
*Bonus!
Our own Mitch Gallagher reconstructs Jimi’s signature tones with modern gear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wcqO-X0FFE
