Play It Loud by Brad Tolinski

Author:Brad Tolinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

The 1968 Fender Stratocaster that Hendrix played at Woodstock sold for $2 million in 1998.

chapter 8

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE AMPLIFIED

Facing the largest audience he’d ever played to in his life, Jimi Hendrix flashed the peace sign with his left hand as his right began fingering a melody on the maple fretboard of his white 1968 Stratocaster. The tune was a familiar one, although not one of Hendrix’s many hits. Recognition rippled like an electric current through the rain-soaked, mud-sodden, drug-hungover but still largely jubilant crowd that had made it through to the final performance at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on the morning of August 18, 1969.

Hendrix was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

It was an unusual song choice for a rock show. But even more striking was what the guitarist did with it. His interpretation of the well-known composition’s first few phrases was faithful to the original, if decidedly nonchalant. While playing, he reached across to adjust the tuning on his guitar, something that had been giving him trouble throughout his set at Woodstock. But at the conclusion of the melodic phrase that accompanies the line “through the perilous fight,” Hendrix began to embellish the melody with improvised trills and melismas, claiming the age-old patriotic tune as his own—and on behalf of the newly fledged Woodstock Nation.

But mayhem didn’t truly break out until the part about “the rockets’ red glare.” That’s when Hendrix stepped on one of the effects pedals at his feet, unleashing an explosion of wild, atonal, freeform guitar feedback. This in itself was nothing new. Hendrix and other guitarists had been exploring the disruptive musical potential of guitar feedback for several years prior to this. But here he was putting the sound to thematic use—taking a well-known hymn to an American battle victory as an occasion to plunge his listeners into the chaotic and disquieting sonic reality of battle itself. And he was doing so at a time when resistance to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War had reached a fever pitch among youth culture. The message was not lost on his audience. Although the performance was strictly instrumental—everyone knew the words anyway—Hendrix was employing his electric guitar to make an eloquent and impassioned political statement.

The ominous duotone wail of a European police siren blasted from Hendrix’s Marshall amps to accompany—and offer mutely ironic comment on—the line “the bombs bursting in air.” Hendrix was yanking vigorously on the Stratocaster’s vibrato arm, eliciting descending shrieks in a playing technique that would come to be known as “divebombing.” But perhaps the most poignant moment followed the melodic passage for the line “that our flag was still there.” Here Hendrix played taps, the mournful bugle melody performed at military funerals. At that point, some 30,000 American lives had been lost in President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War.

By the time the piece’s concluding chords rang out, it was clear that Jimi Hendrix had done something truly radical with the electric guitar. Something that outshone even his prior stellar accomplishments on the instrument.

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