Mike Daley - essay - Jimi Hendrix at WoodstockLand of the Free:
Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Bethel, NY. 18 August 1969
Mike DaleyThe first histories of rock, Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City and Carl Belz's The Story of Rock, appeared in the late 1960s, at a time when rock journalism was in its first full flowering and the music itself had entered a period of consolidation. Rock, for better or worse, had reached its first stages of maturity with the development of the album as an artistic unit, and endorsements from the likes of Leonard Bernstein and the British musicologist Wilfrid Mellers were lending a certain legitimacy to the work of those artists and groups in the vanguard of mainstream popular music making. The time was ripe for rock literati to bestow rock with a historical narrative; rock needed a historical thread to make sense of its unprecedented popular success and its rapidly splintering stylistic branches.
But histories can never be innocent of the human need to mythologize, and these early histories of rock set a process in motion whereby the short history of this music would be understood in terms of a creation myth and a linear model, derived from Renaissance-era historiography, of style development as a tripartite model of primordial beginnings, classic flowering, and a final period of decadence and decay. Both Gillett and Belz saw this period of decadence stemming from the stylistic fragmentation and increasing commercialism of late 60s rock, the period in which they were writing. This is common among writers of contemporary histories of artistic movements, the urge to see the present as the denouement of the narrative. Predictably, this model has been somewhat stretched in later histories of rock, with the final part of the model dragged along closer to the writer's present.
This brings us to the historical moment that is the subject of my chapter, Jimi Hendrix's appearance at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair on 18 August 1969 at Bethel, New York. In recent years, Hendrix's set has come to synecdochically represent the Woodstock festival's mythos as a cultural signpost in rock history. This assessment of Hendrix's impact qua Woodstock, is, I will argue in this chapter, a relatively recent formulation, fueled by the pervasiveness of the Woodstock film and retrospective judgments about Hendrix's overall artistic importance in the grand scheme of rock history. More specifically, Hendrix's symbolic heft has come to be focused on one particular song from his set, “The Star-Spangled Banner”.
The story behind the Woodstock festival has been oft told, so I summarize it only briefly here. Michael Lang, a twenty-four-year-old former head shop proprieter, had organized the successful Miami Pop Festival in 1968, which had featured the Mothers of Invention, John Lee Hooker, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and a host of others. Spurred on by the triumphant Monterey Pop festival of 1967 (where Hendrix made his American debut after forming his trio and recording Are You Experienced? in England), large-scale rock festivals were big business in 1969. Lang, after a move to Woodstock, had conceived of an alternative recording retreat based on the "Recording Farm" and "Operation Brown Rice" collectives in California. Woodstock, long established as an artists' colony, was home to a strange admixture of moneyed rock stars, struggling musicians, and conservative farmers. After meeting with investors Joel Rosenmann and John Roberts, Lang decided to launch the recording facility with a gala concert in the area. This concert idea was soon to expand into a plan for a large scale festival.
By the summer of 1969, the Hendrix Experience had completed their last American tour. Bassist Noel Redding marked the occasion by resigning from the band and Hendrix began to formulate plans to put together a new band. His evolving Electric Church concept was freer and more experimental, more communal, than the tight Experience power-trio had been. Feeling burned by his clashes with Redding, Hendrix sought to create a supportive, fluid backdrop for his music, unmarred by ego clashes. He was concerned with surrounding himself with trustworthy compatriots, which meant for him musicians that he had known pre-fame. Mike Jeffrey, distrustful of Hendrix's new direction, nonetheless rented an eight-bedroom house for his charge near Woodstock, at the end of Tavor Hollow Road near the villages of Shokan and Boiceville. Hendrix, in turn, put his old army buddy Billy Cox on notice to step in on bass, who at Hendrix's request looked up another old friend, guitarist Larry Lee. Jerry Velez was a Puerto-Rican born, Bronx raised percussionist that Hendrix had met at the Scene club in New York. He was one of the first to be invited to stay at Hendrix's Shokan retreat. Another percussionist, respected for his work around Woodstock, was Juma Sultan, and he was quickly pulled into the fray. The new group, to be dubbed Gypsy Suns and Rainbows, was almost complete.
While Hendrix vacationed in Morocco, his newly minted band tentatively rehearsed at the Shokan house. After Hendrix's return, the lineup was consolidated, after some waffling over the choice between Mitch Mitchell and Buddy Miles, on Hendrix's old Experience partner Mitchell. By all reports, rehearsals proceeded fitfully. As Hendrix's road manager Gerry Stickells recalled:Rehearsals, as I remember they called them, consisted of getting stoned and talking about how great it was going to be. The fact that they kept adding people to the lineup proved to me that it wasn't together. They went along because someone else was paying the bills.
As the Woodstock gig drew closer, Hendrix taught the band to play some old hits like "Purple Haze", "Fire" and "Foxey Lady" as well as working up some newer songs and some jam-based instrumentals.
As the August 15 opening day approached, the organizers of the Woodstock festival found matters reeling out of control. The venue changed twice, only becoming solidified when a local dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, offered to rent 600 acres of his prime farmland to the organizers for $75,000. The site was 100 miles north of New York and 70 miles west of Woodstock, the originally projected home of the festival. On August 7 the promotion company held a pre-festival concert for the workers preparing the site. One of the performers, the Earthlight Theatre, stripped naked for their set, which prompted eight hundred local residents to sign a petition to stop the festival. But by then, the mass pilgrimage to Bethel had begun. An estimated 30,000 people were on site before security, food service or medical aid was in place. The Woodstock Festival had begun. With little in the way of security or fencing, most of the concertgoers simply walked on in, and soon enough it was declared a free festival. Only about 60,000 of the 400,000 who attended Woodstock paid to get in.
The talent roster at Woodstock was one of the most impressive ever assembled. Beginning with Richie Havens, the Friday show included Country Joe McDonald, John Sebastian, The Incredible String Band, Sweetwater, Tim Hardin, Bert Sommer, Ravi Shankar, Melanie, Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez. Saturday brought Quill, Keef Hartley Band, Santana, Mountain, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, the Who and the Jefferson Airplane. Sunday's lineup consisted of Joe Cocker, Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, the Band, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Johnny Winter, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Sha Na Na, with Hendrix taking the final slot.
By the time the concert had gotten underway, the site was virtually impossible to reach by car, and many performers flew to the site by helicopter. Hendrix and his band ended up making the trip in two station wagons. He was unhappy about the media reports of the size of the gathering, and by 4:00 on Sunday, was refusing to play. The fee, $18,000, was small by his standards, though he was the highest-paid performer at the festival. In any case, Mike Jeffrey stepped in and convinced Hendrix to play on the basis of the prestige of the engagement.
With rain delays and poor planning, Hendrix and his group didn't take the stage for their festival-closing set until 8:00 Monday morning. By then, fewer than 30,000 audience members remained. The Woodstock film depicts well the haggard hordes, the scattered garbage, the hard morning air, the grey skies. The camera focuses on Hendrix's guitar with an astringent clarity, his guitar notes sharp and clear.One of the abiding images of the place and time of Woodstock is Jimi, in white-beaded leather jacket, blue jeans, gold chains and a red head-scarf standing centre-stage alone sending out 'The Star-Spangled Banner' as a series of shock waves across the audience in the early-morning light.
The performance, to put it lightly, was loose and somewhat confused, the band showing its lack of rehearsal and perhaps the unreadiness of some of the musicians. In any case, the contributions of the two percussionists are inaudible to this listener, at least in the released mixes of the concert. Larry Lee's guitar, when it is audible, is usually horribly out of tune, and his abilities are not up to the task of trading licks with Jimi Hendrix. Even Mitch Mitchell, Hendrix's longtime cohort, Mitch Mitchell, sounds confused and unfocused. This is perhaps due to the nonexistent stage monitoring more than anything. Hendrix himself seems to be struggling himself, though still playing at a level that few have equaled. Charles Shaar Murray is decidedly more damning in his assessment:
Never in his two and a half years with the Experience had Hendrix exhibited such disregard for professionalism, not even during that band's formative weeks when, with a paucity of original material, cover versions of songs had been performed with as much enthusiasm as could be mustered. On stage at Woodstock, the same Jimi Hendrix who had refused Noel Redding the opportunity to perform "She's So Fine" - even when fans had shouted requests for the number - allowed guitarist Larry Lee to traipse off-key through two songs, “Mastermind” and the Impressions' “Gypsy Woman”4.
Listening to the Hendrix:Woodstock CD, which is more complete than previous releases but still missing Larry Lee’s two vocal turns, the encore of Hey Joe and other elements, as well as being partially reordered, there are some sublime moments here. “Voodoo Chile”, “Villanova Junction” and “Izabella” stand out for me. But surely the highlight of the set, and the portion that has come to symbolize Hendrix at Woodstock as well as a few other things, is “The Star-Spangled Banner”.
Coming out of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)/Stepping Stone”, Hendrix plays the opening salvo of “The Star Spangled Banner” in the lowest position on the neck, using open strings where possible, his new Univibe rotating-speaker effect pedal warbling the pitches. Mitch Mitchell is filling in the background with tom and cymbals builds in free rhythm. The crowd, roused to their greatest excitement of the set, cheers wildly. Hendrix adorns the simple anthemic melody with scoops and articulations like a lone gospel singer. This vocal interpretation continues through the first two stanzas, with some trumpet-like trills appearing later on. With feedback beginning to encroach on the held notes, Hendrix engages the wah pedal to up the treble ante. He follows the B section line “and the rockets’ red glare...” with the wail of a falling bomb and its subsequent explosion, mashing his Stratocaster’s vibrato bar to its lowest position. Some rolling confusion follows, screaming voices, machine gun ratatats, unearthly strangled cries, a mother’s futile wails. Then the line “the bombs bursting in air”, followed by a low-toned siren, some unplaceable sounds of unreality, another bomb assault, twisted metal and bodies, a trickle of blood. “Our flag was still there” leaps up to a keening, pure-toned quotation of “Taps”. The final stanza beginning with “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave” is given a straight treatment but is filtered through ululating pickup toggle switch effects, with the word “wave” held through successions of fed-back harmonic overtones. With a strangled stop, Hendrix resumes with “o’er the land of the free”, with the final note of the line again left for dead to have its fundamental pitch leached out by the feedback decay, and a final bomb’s fall to earth. After a short serious of portentous, incongruous chords, Hendrix segues into a perfunctory “Purple Haze”.
In early journalistic accounts of the Woodstock Festival, not much attention is given to Hendrix’s appearance. He doesn’t rate a mention in Charlie Gillett’s 1971 revision of Sound of the City, and Greil Marcus merely namechecks him in his eyewitness account, preferring to focus on Country Joe MacDonald and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. As late as 1986, the writers of Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll mentioned Hendrix only to report his performance fee. It seems that in the years immediately following the festival, the music was dwarfed by the perceived social importance of the event. But around 1989, Hendrix’s appearance starts to take on a new profundity. Not coincidentally, this date was the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, when reassessments of the festival and the ensuing years of rock history were placed under some journalistic scrutiny. Likewise, the rerelease of the Woodstock and Woodstock II concert compilations on CD caused some critics to see Hendrix in a new light vis-a-vis the festival and its symbolic meaning. In a review of this CD issue, Steve Sutherland of Melody Maker opined:...the best of all the participants captured here is Jimi Hendrix, whose “Star-Spangled Banner”, bleeding into “Purple Haze” is among the most staggering of the live excursions he left to posterity. While his stuff on Woodstock II is mainly pedestrian by his blinding standards, “Star-Spangled Banner” blasts the American Dream to tatters and his “Haze” falls like nuclear confetti, both bitter and celebratory
Harry Shapiro, in his excellent Hendrix biography Electric Gypsy, offers a cogent analysis of the meaning of “The Star-Spangled Banner” vis a vis the revolutionary spirit of the times. He comments on the white, affluent audience demographic, pointing out that “just being at Woodstock was as close to an act of revolution as most of the audience ever came Shapiro also notes that Hendrix’s own attitude towards the war in Vietnam was rather ambivalent. He had served as a paratrooper some years earlier, and in interviews Hendrix expressed some worries about the encroaching “yellow danger” in Southeast Asia.Did you send the Americans away when they landed in Normandy? That was also interference...but that was concerning your own skin. The Americans are fighting in Vietnam for a completely free world. As soon as they move out, they [the Vietnamese] will be at the mercy of the communists. For that matter the yellow danger [China] should not be underestimated. Of course, war is horrible, but at present it’s still the only guarantee of peace
Clearly Hendrix had a more conflicted view of the war in Vietnam than would be suggested by many of the commentators on the semantic meaning of “The Star Spangled Banner”. Charles Shaar Murray, in his beautifully rich Hendrix biography and 60s cultural history Crosstown Traffic, makes a case that Hendrix’s performance articulated the complexities of the Vietnam problem more acutely than any other artistic expression.
The “Star Spangled Banner” is probably the most complex and powerful work of American art to deal with the Vietnam war and its corrupting, distorting effect on successive generations of the American psyche. One man with one guitar said more in three and a half minutes about that peculiarly disgusting war and its reverberations than all the novels, memoirs and movies put together. It is an interpretation of history which permits no space for either the gung-ho revisionism of Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris or the solipsistic angst of Coppola and Oliver Stone; it depicts, as graphically as a piece of music can possibly do, both what the Americans did to the Vietnamese and what they did to themselves.
In any case, though, Hendrix’s rendition of the anthem pushed some powerful buttons in the years following Woodstock, as that festival increasingly came to symbolize the last hurrah of the love and peace era. The Altamont festival later that same year, with its air of dread, was itself filmed and released as Gimme Shelter, complete with an on-camera murder. It provided a bitter bookend to the idealism and naivete of the 1960s. Woodstock has come to represent a unique moment of community, and Hendrix’s appearance in particular symbolizes the freewheeling spirit of the era as well as the troubled heart of the antiwar movement.