RobKirkpatrick.com

To mark the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock – which occurred on August 18, 1969, the morning after the festival was officially scheduled to end – here are a couple of related excerpts from 1969: The Year Everything Changed…

American Indians seemed to be much on the minds of counterculture members at the end of the decade. In his short story, “Because my Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock,” Sherman Alexie wrote, “During the Sixties, my father was the perfect hippie, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians.” As part of their back-to-the-land yearnings, many hippies took to Native American fashions as a gesture to the peoples who originally had the land to themselves, before the onset of industrialization brought by European whites. Even Hendrix, himself part Cherokee, performed his famous Woodstock set in a fringed tribal jacket and moccasins. Historian Philip Deloria said that such hippies were merely “playing Indian”: “‘Indians’ could be both civilized and indigenous. They could critique modernity and yet reap its benefits. They could revel in the creative pleasure of liberated meanings while still grasping for something fundamentally American. … Not only in the communes but in politics, environmentalism, spirituality, and other pursuits, Indianness allowed counterculturists to have their cake and to eat it.”

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By the time Jimi Hendrix, the final performer and the festival’s true headline act, took the stage Monday morning, all but roughly 50,000 of the festival crowd had departed, driven away by filth, hunger, and exhaustion. “Having waited up all night, the audience understandably seemed as groggy as we were, and it was horrible to see people packing up and leaving as we came on,” Mitch Mitchell said. “Monday morning was back to the grind for a lot of people who’d come and it couldn’t be helped.”

Monck incorrectly introduced the group—with Mitchell on drums but Billy Cox on bass, Larry Lee on backing guitar, Jumma Sultan and Jerry Velez adding percussion—under the old name of the “Jimi Hendrix Experience.” Hendrix came out dressed in his fringed Native American tribal shirt and jeans and moccasins and red bandana. “I see that we meet again, hmmm…,” he said to the crowd, and reintroduced his new group as Gypsy, Sun and Rainbow….[F]or his instrumental interpretation of Francis Scott Key’s patriotic tune, Hendrix pulled out all stops, bending and torturing the tune’s melody to create an anthem for the land of free love and the home of a brave new world. In his pyrotechnic sound effects, one heard machine guns and falling bombs, the sounds of chaos straight out of the Southeast Asian jungles. David Fricke writes: “If the Experience tried to play power-jazz at the speed of light, Hendrix at Woodstock was a rough prototype for a new black-rock futurism, the missing link between Sly Stone’s taut, rainbow-party R&B and George Clinton’s blown-mind, ghetto-army funk: ‘Dance to the Music’ plus ‘Message to Love’ equals ‘Cosmic Slop.’” “It was the most electrifying moment of Woodstock, and it was probably the single greatest moment of the sixties,” wrote Al Aronowitz of the New York Post. You finally heard what that song was about, that you can love your country, but hate the government.” Hendrix would describe: “They made me sing it in school, so it was a flashback. We’re all Americans, aren’t we? When it was written then, it was played in what they call a very, very beautiful state, nice and inspiring, your heart throbs and you say, ‘Great, I’m American!’ But nowadays when we play it, we don’t play to take away all this greatness that America’s supposed to have. We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly static, isn’t it? You know what I mean?”