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It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. The concert should have ended on Sunday night, but rain and technical delays had pushed the show into the hours around dawn on Monday, August 18, 1969. If the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair’s organizer Michael Lang had has his way, Roy Rogers of all people would have strolled out on stage and ended the immediately historic event with his even-then-nostalgic “Happy Trails.” Instead, the Cowboy of the crowd’s youth had (wisely) declined, and Jimi Hendrix opted to close the show rather than stay in his original Sunday night timeslot.
His early life was a variation on a depressingly common theme. He fled from the poverty and de-facto segregation of the Rainier Vista Housing Project in Seattle to the open arms of the US Army, a step ahead of the law and in search of a freedom that was equally elusive and ephemeral. A year and an honorable discharge later in 1962, he became a backup musician on the Chitlin’ Circuit, an unofficial group of clubs throughout the eastern, southern, and midwest U.S. in which it was safe for African-American artists to perform in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He played behind the likes of Little Richard (from whom he undoubtedly borrowed some of his more outrageous stage behavior), Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, The Isley Brothers, and Curtis Mayfield. He felt trapped playing other people’s music, so he went off on his own, playing at, among other spots, the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village (a few short years after Dylan played his first NYC shows there). The first Jimi Hendrix Experience album was released in 1967. Woodstock and “The Star-Spangled Banner” was ‘69. He’d be dead in September of 1970.
The fisheye lens perspective used for the cover photograph Are You Experienced (1967) was somewhat redundant. The afroed trio wearing electric-school-bus yellow frock coats and boas amid infrared-photographed flowers and — are those eyes on Jimi’s jacket!? It all screamed psychedelia and mind-expanding drugs, and it just might have led you to overlook the racial makeup of the band, but a keen eye might have noticed that there was essentially only one other interracial pop group at the time (Arthur Lee’s Love). Sure, Sly and the Family Stone would take this notion higher, but they wouldn’t start bubbling to the surface of the American consciousness until 1969. And at this point in time, there were still huge chunks of the population who would have been deeply uncomfortable by everything this photo seems to represent.
When Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock, he had left the Experience behind and was in the process of forming a jazz-rock fusion band with African-American musicians Buddy Miles and Billy Cox that would, along with Sly Stone’s band, build the foundation for funk music. You might see this as the wanderings of an itinerant guitar-playing genius; you might see it as a movement towards a more politicized point-of-view in the wake of the riots of 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Either way, he was moving on — not content with the status quo, striving to capture the elusive promise of the music he could only hear in his head, searching for something more. You can hear the unrest (both civic and personal) dripping off his performance of the National Anthem that morning.
Wailing feedback is not the sound of a soul at rest, and noise on top of noise here builds a force of disaffection and antagonism with which the Anthem seemed to struggle. It is the sound of a youth movement forced to the realization that it may not have affected any meaningful change and grinding to a halt. It is the anguished howl of a people who have suffered enough and demand a change. It is the sinister promise of violence and the seductive beauty of the sublime. It is the promise of the New. It is the obliteration of the Known.
It is the end of an era.
The Global 1960s 