Acid Blues (Slight Return)

Jimi Hendrix covered the national anthem on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, on August 18, 1969, the last day of Woodstock. The melody had been composed by John Stafford Smith for a London musicians club in 1776. In the years that followed, various celebratory lyrics were written to accompany it on both sides of the Atlantic before Francis Scott Key, having witnessed the end of the British navy’s daylong bombardment of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry in 1814, penned what became known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Among the Americans killed that day were a Black soldier and a woman cut in two by a mortar shell as she resupplied the troops, but the next morning, when the acrid smoke cleared, the 15-star flag still flew over the fort. Key’s lyrics were printed in dozens of newspapers and became an instant patriotic hit, though not until 1931 did the song become the official national anthem.

Hendrix’s performance as the final act of the Woodstock festival began around nine o’clock Monday morning, about 10 hours late. It had rained overnight, drenching festivalgoers and compromising the sound system. Most of the peak crowd—estimated by Joni Mitchell to have been “half a million strong”—had already trudged homeward through garbage and puddles and mud, and many of the 40,000 stragglers who remained were still asleep when Hendrix took the stage.

Without words, at this hour, it takes them a moment to make out the melody through the haze of distortion, of what sounds like scattering quarks and dislodged muoniums oscillating at zero-point energy, but as soon as they do, they lock onto it. Those lucky few in attendance can see that the Voodoo Child is all business. A red bandana bisects his barely medium-size afro, this to go with a white-fringed Navajo poncho, blue velvet bell bottoms, and scruffy white moccasins. The moccasins and turquoise-beaded poncho are salutes to his Native American heritage through his father’s mother, Zenora Rose “Nora” Moore, a vaudeville dancer and singer who had helped raise him. Her grandson’s backward and upside-down white-on-white Fender Stratocaster is going ballistic, and this time there’s no showboating, no dental or behind-the-back picking to distract us. We’re getting the musical steak now, much less of his usual sizzle. No somersaults, chartreuse feather boas, ritual lighter fluid, Sergeant Pepper frock jacket. No amp-humping, either. Hendrix respects the anthem too much, though never uncritically. Except for the 10-inch fringe on his sleeves flapping like a white owl’s wings as both hands work the Strat, he may as well be standing at ease with his old 101st Airborne unit.

Ten months earlier, at the Mexico City Olympics, the 200-meter sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos had used their medal ceremony to protest racial injustice in the country they triumphantly represented. Smith won the gold, Carlos the bronze. As the American anthem played, each runner bowed his head and raised a gloved fist in a Black Power salute. Surely Hendrix had seen this, and surely he’d approved. Surely he knew that Smith and Carlos got suspended from the U.S. Olympic team and received numerous death threats. What he couldn’t have known was that 47 years later, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick would take a knee during a series of pregame anthems. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color,” he said. His courage galvanized a movement and cost him his lucrative career. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell belatedly admitted it was wrong for not listening to him and like-minded protesters, but it was too late for Kaepernick, who was blackballed from professional football. His politics were deemed bad for any team’s business, even those desperate for his Super Bowl–caliber talent.

Back at Woodstock, many more notes whang and toggle, feeding back hard through 100-watt Marshall amplifiers and the rickety towers of speakers flanking the stage. Hendrix is making the white Fender speak with a vengeance, playing instead of singing the lyrics. He warps “the rockets’ red glare” into painterly shrieks, onomatopoeia at 130 decibels; “bombs bursting in air” becomes blistering napalm cacophony, incendiary payloads arcing down into the jungle, burning Charlie’s hooches and melting his flesh. Beethoven, under the circumstances, might have played it like this, inventing contrapuntal alignments and vertical tone combinations, hammering away through a Fuzz Face on a jangly Rickenbacker 12-string or a Synclavier keyboard, much as the composer’s Fifth Symphony bolstered the French Revolution (though he later turned his back on Napoleon) and his Ninth’s “Ode to Joy” celebrated all sorts of human resilience. As “proof through the night that our flag was still there,” Hendrix, deadpan, interpolates George M. Cohan’s “Over There,” flashing us back to the Great War, “the War to End All Wars,” then plays taps for a moment before driving home the martial motif on “the land of the free and the home of the brave” by making his ax trill like bagpipes.