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.
A couple more reverb-charged chords and it’s over. There’s nothing much, really, to say. We’re agog. We’ve all heard plenty of renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—by marching bands, pianists, string quartets, altos and tenors and baritones, perhaps the odd basso profundo. We’ve watched Whitney Houston lip-syncing it at Tampa Stadium as flags waved and fighters screamed overhead. We’ve seen tenor Jim Cornelison of the Lyric Opera of Chicago rousing veterans and other Blackhawks fans night after night at the United Center, and a blue-haired Jack White playing just the melody on his vintage Kay Archtop acoustic (the “Seven Nation Army” guitar, speaking of ubiquitous licks) at Comerica Park on Opening Day. We’ve booed Roseanne Barr’s off-key screeching at Jack Murphy Stadium and howled at Maya Rudolph’s mordant rendition on SNL. Linda Ronstadt sang it prettily enough at Chavez Ravine before Game 3 of the ’77 World Series. Wynton Marsalis went a little flat in the Superdome, Mariah Carey forgot the words but still ripped sweetly through four or five octaves in the Madhouse on Madison, Marvin Gaye epically toned it up in The Forum … but nothing remotely like Hendrix at Woodstock.
“Hey, all I do is play it,” he says a week later on The Dick Cavett Show. “I’m American, so I played it. They made me sing it in school, so it’s sort of a flashback.” Meaning an LSD flashback or a regular memory? Probably both.
“This man was in the 101st Airborne,” says Cavett, waxing sarcastic, “so when you write your nasty letters in—”
Hendrix, sincerely baffled: “Nasty letters? How come?”
Cavett: “When you mention the national anthem played in any unorthodox way, you immediately get a guaranteed percentage of hate mail from people who say, ‘How dare he?’ ”
Hendrix, still baffled: “Unorthodox? It wasn’t unorthodox.”
Cavett: “It wasn’t unorthodox?”
“No no no” says Hendrix. “I thought it was beautiful, but there you go.” As the audience applauds, he shoots the camera a right-side-up, then an upside-down but not unbelligerent peace sign.
Despite his chiffon scarves, pink ruffled shirts, copious necklaces, and legions of peacenik fans, Jimi Hendrix wasn’t a pacifist. He wasn’t opposed to all wars, just dumb ones. At 19, he had trained with the 101st Airborne as a paratrooper. Why? Because he was arrested twice in four days for cruising around Seattle with his friends in stolen cars, and a judge made him choose: spend two years in prison or join the Army. He enlisted on May 31, 1961, leaving his precious red Silvertone Danelectro with his girlfriend, Betty Jean Morgan, before reporting for duty.
After finishing boot camp, he liked his new life as a soldier. “Here I am,” he wrote to his father, Al Hendrix, “exactly where I wanted to go. I’m in the 101st Airborne. … [it’s] pretty rough, but I can’t complain, and I don’t regret it … so far.” The problem was, he missed the Silvertone so terribly that he begged his father to retrieve it from Betty and ship it to him at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. The guitar became a kind of fifth limb for him. “I really need it now,” he wrote to his father, and he wasn’t exaggerating. His incessant strumming wasn’t much appreciated by the guys in his barracks, who just wanted a decent night’s sleep before 0500 reveille. Even when he’d put the instrument back in its case, he fretted about it incessantly. One unimpressed officer said his obsession was “one of his faults, because his mind apparently cannot function while performing duties and thinking about his guitar.”
The distracted young private failed to qualify as a marksman but successfully completed jump school, earning the famous Screaming Eagle patch for his uniform, bumping his rank up to Private First Class and boosting his $85 monthly pay by $55. Justifiably proud, he bought extra patches to send to his family. “The first jump was really outta sight,” he told a friend, admitting that, like most rookie paratroopers, he’d been scared his chute might fail to open.
But he soon began rubbing more and more brass the wrong way. He was caught missing bed checks, sleeping on duty, and masturbating in the latrine. An NCO who’d ordered him to sweep a floor later found the unswept floor freshly scattered with broken straw bristles. It turned out PFC Hendrix had power-chorded the broom as a fretless guitar before wandering off with it. Capt. Gilbert Batchman believed his chronic insubordination was untreatable, even by “hospitalization or counseling.” His sergeant agreed. Hendrix “has no interest whatsoever in the Army,” he reported. “It is my opinion that Private Hendrix will never come up to the standards required of a soldier. I feel that the military service will benefit if he is discharged as soon as possible.”
Hendrix wanted out of the Army, too, but he also feared the brig if he went AWOL and the judge in Seattle if he didn’t complete his three-year term of enlistment. Desperate, with limited options, he misled the Army to pry himself out of it. Capt. John Halbert, a doctor, gave Hendrix a medical exam and psychological interview. The young soldier told him he had “developed homosexual tendencies and had begun fantasizing about his bunkmates” and was “in love” with a member of his squad. Halbert had little choice but to recommend that Hendrix be discharged. Under the military code then in force, a gay serviceman was subject to separation because his presence was assumed to erode morale and discipline.
Was Hendrix gay or bisexual? It’s impossible to be certain, of course, but no other evidence from any stage of his life suggests that he was. He later told friends and journalists he was let go by the Screaming Eagles because he’d broken his ankle landing his 26th jump, though his military record contains no reference to any such injury.
On July 2, 1962, PFC Hendrix was discharged on the grounds of “unsuitability—under honorable conditions.” It was obvious to all concerned he would never amount to much of a warfighter, and the Army had mercy on him. At some point in its chain of command, it seems to have understood the world was a better place with a guitar instead of a rifle in the hands of James Marshall Hendrix.
Just before dawn on January 17, 1991, members of the 101st Airborne, deployed in Apache helicopters brandishing Hellfire missiles, launched Operation Desert Storm by taking out Iraqi radar sites in Kuwait. Three evenings later, there were at least four performances of “Purple Haze”: by the Kronos Quartet at Park West and, a short cab ride uptown, by Shrimp Boat at Metro; by violinist Nigel Kennedy with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, between the Autumn and Winter movements of The Four Seasons, or so I was told by a friend who was there; and by Sting, as the host and musical guest of SNL. Other ensembles, in concert halls, gymnasiums, garages, or stadiums may also have covered it that night. However many did, the invocations of Hendrix’s spirit were welcome gestures of pride and/or rebuke as the Cubist F-117s went about their grim business, even when we remembered it was the industrial war machine of Saddam Hussein they were obliterating, not Ho Chi Minh’s barefoot minions.
CNN showed us Tel Aviv bracing for Scud attacks, F-16s taking off from carriers, and President Bush speaking with cool determination, perfectly channeled in Dana Carvey’s impersonation on SNL—an uncanny blend of John Wayne and Mr. Rogers. “Weekend Update” featured a skit in which a Tomahawk missile made a direct hit on a reporter in Baghdad—an homage, perhaps, to the opening scene in Gravity’s Rainbow, in which “Pirate” Prentice, a British special ops officer in London during the Blitz, imagines himself being brained by the tip of a German V-2: “He won’t hear the thing come in. It travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you’re still around, you hear the sound of it coming in … for a split second you’d have to feel the very point, the terrible mass above, strike the top of the skull.”
Then again, perhaps not.
But why did Sting and Shrimp Boat and Kronos and Kennedy and others decide to play Hendrix that evening—and not Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, or Peter, Paul and Mary? Because the ferocious attack of the original “Purple Haze” lent support to the just liberation of Kuwait? Because this war with Iraq—never mind the next one—might be as catastrophically misguided as the fiasco in Vietnam? Did it have to be one or the other?
The song is a succinct acid blues with a marching groove, spacey but straightforward lyrics, and a jagged guitar line built around the famous E7#9 Hendrix Chord, described by musicologist John Perry as “the whole of the blues scale condensed into a single chord.” Many of Hendrix’s other signature guitar sounds evolved from his collaboration with electrical engineer Roger Mayer, whose day job was with the British Admiralty’s Research Laboratory in London. Mayer was part of the ARL’s Noise and Acoustics group, working to design quieter nuclear subs, the better to track their Soviet adversaries. During the evenings, though, he used his electrician skills to help his friends Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck build the fuzz boxes they deployed with The Yardbirds.
When Mayer and Hendrix met in January 1967, they found that they shared an interest in apocalyptic science fiction. Hendrix loved Philip José Farmer’s Night of Light, for example, in which sunspots visible from another planet have a “purplish haze.” When the relatively unknown American asked Mayer to help him make his guitar “sound like an alien invasion from space,” the tech wizard let him test-run his in-progress brainchild, the Octavia effects pedal. It worked by splitting a guitar signal into three distinct octaves, yielding otherworldly harmonics and noise that Hendrix exploited at the DeLane Lea Studios that February to generate the unheard-of assault of “Purple Haze” and “Fire.” Released a few weeks apart that spring, they blew the minds of, and also intimidated, almost every guitar ace in London and beyond.
Aw, move over, Rover, and let Jimi take over
Yeah, you know what I’m talkin’ about, yeah!
As Michael Mulvihill, an artist and researcher into nuclear deterrence at Newcastle University, recently wrote, “The nuclear and civilian worlds are not as distinct as we might think.” He went on to explain how Mayer’s insights into the electronic resonances of modern submarine warfare led directly to “the mind-altering spaces of the psychedelic counterculture of which ‘Purple Haze’ is not just an anthem but the sound of a new way of life.”
Yet no matter how mesmerizing and fresh an instrument is made to sound, a great song still needs the right words and voice. And this time, the serviceable couplets were Hendrix’s own, one of his earliest efforts as a lyricist after mostly covering blues standards and Dylan, whose anti-crooning, slightly nasal tenor made Hendrix more confident in his own midrange baritone.
Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don’t seem the same
Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why
’Scuse me while I kiss the sky
How high must we get to righteously dig this freaky new sonic experience? High enough to smooch the wild blue or starry black yonder. But the song ain’t just for stoners or acid heads. (I was 16 the first time I heard it, volume on 10, bass and treble all the way up, and stoned as you could get on that era’s ditch weed, and I thought for a second that I’d blown the speakers in my dad’s Chevy.) Its power as an antiwar anthem has more to do with its emergence during the summer of ’67, on tens of millions of stereos and radios from Selma to Da Nang, Port Huron to London, and Paris to Saigon, as one of the dirtiest, catchiest licks on the soundtrack to “Vietnam”—to the roiling matrix of dope, civil rights, rock ’n’ roll, psychedelics, long hair, loud clothes, the war in Southeast Asia and the protests of same all over the planet.
In the new millennium, we’ve come to see Hendrix as a braid-weaving common denominator: Western, African, Native American, urban and cosmic, outlaw and citizen, radical and patriot, combative and peace loving. He was also bluesy, metallic, pop, avant-garde. His music took startling risks that paid off. His verve and swagger onstage and in the studio amounted to a flagrant diss of not just the warmongers but also the music industry’s corporate mentality in its quest for blue-chip profitability. Hendrix paid for his attitude big-time, with humiliating royalty percentages and circumscribed airplay on Black and white radio stations—all this before his chronic insomnia led to his accidental overdose on alcohol and his latest girlfriend’s Vesparax pills at age 27. All he’d wanted was a decent night’s sleep.
On the front lines near Bakhmut, just before what was left of that city fell to Russian forces in 2023, Ukrainian volunteer infantryman Kirill Ulman found himself in a trench a few hundred yards from Russian artillery firing shells as both armies’ lethal drones zipped overhead. Jerome Starkey, a journalist embedded with Ulman’s unit, reported that “we had to dive for cover as shells exploded nearby. Kirill laughed, as I caught my breath, and cursed the ‘f***ing Russians’ with a smile.” To avoid the next incoming, both men climbed out of the trench, jumped into a 4×4 vehicle, and retreated across the boggy turf—not in silence, which would have been safer, but with “Purple Haze” jacked up to maximum volume.
In 2025, the people of Panama, Greenland, Nigeria, Venezuela, and half the United States had good cause to crank it.
Almost 60 years after he laid them down, even a bar or two of some Hendrix tracks can stand as a gesture of defiance: a hex, a spell, an upside-down peace sign, a raised middle finger. Because even with lyrics as bold as those of “Purple Haze” or “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Jimi let his fingers do most of the talking.
