Hendrix created banner moment at Woodstock

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, a celebration of peace and music, was staged amid the tumult in the United States created by the Vietnam War. But when Henry Diltz gazed out at Max Yasgur’s alfalfa field on Monday morning, August 18, 1969, a different conflict came to mind.

“It was just a soggy, muddy field, with piles of wet, soggy sleeping bags,” said Diltz, who was the festival’s official still photographer. “It kind of reminded me of one of those Matthew Brady Civil War photos, a battlefield filled with dead horses and dead soldiers. The wet sleeping bags on this barren landscape looked like they had dead blobs of humanity on them.”

Diltz had this perspective from the side of the stage, as he watched Jimi Hendrix perform the final set of the weekend. Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffery, had negotiated to have his client close the entire festival, since he was arguably the premier act in rock music at the time, and Hendrix was scheduled to do so on Sunday night. But the elements of peace, love, drugs, music and inclement weather weren’t compatible with the concept of tight scheduling, and Hendrix didn’t come on until roughly 8 a.m. on Monday.

By the time he took the stage, the festival’s herd had thinned considerably. Estimates put attendance at the event’s peak at over a half-million, but there were only about 30,000 to 40,000 stalwarts remaining on Monday morning when Hendrix performed. Less than two months before, at the Denver Pop Festival, Hendrix played his final gig with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which also consisted of Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass. At Woodstock, Hendrix had a new band called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, featuring Mitchell, bass player Billy Cox (an old Army buddy), rhythm guitarist Larry Lee and percussionists Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez.

Diltz said he slept inside a station wagon parked near the stage and woke up to the sound of Hendrix and his band. “These guys were onstage with colorful scarves on their heads,” he recalled. “They certainly looked like a band of gypsies.”

Hendrix and his new group tore off many favorites, including “Hear My Train A Comin’,” “Red House” and “Foxy Lady.” After performing “Voodoo Child,” Hendrix and the band launched into a brief bit of improvisation.

“You can leave if you want to. We’re just jammin’, that’s all,” he told the crowd. After another minute or so of free-form musical expression, it happened: Hendrix launched into his own interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“It was the most riveting moment,” Diltz remembered. “Just that single guitar, so piercing and so pure. At the time, there was just a knot of people on the hill. Those huge speakers bouncing sound off the hillsides, and an eerie, silent, pre-dawn, misty kind of silence. The notes reflected back again.”

‘It was shocking to everybody’
Michael Lang was one of four promoters who staged Woodstock. He and his business partner Artie Kornfeld had an idea for “An Aquarian Exposition” unlike anything that had occurred before in popular culture. They enlisted investors John Roberts and Joel Rosenman to provide the financial backing.

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But it was Lang, who had staged a large outdoor music festival in Miami the year before that also featured Hendrix, who was the spiritual leader of the Woodstock project as well as its primary hands-on producer and trouble-shooter. He remembered that he tried unsuccessfully on Sunday around noon to convince Hendrix to close the festival that night at midnight. Instead, Hendrix opted to hang out and listen to all the other acts.

“When he got on the stage, he didn’t seem all that fazed that he was looking out at such a small portion of the crowd,” said Lang, whose memoir about his experiences, “The Road to Woodstock,” is out this month. “Everybody was tuned in.

“When he played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ it was shocking to everybody.”

The jarring, uplifting, haunting, energizing anthem was done at times in straight single notes, but the entire song is spiced with trademark Hendrix innovations, especially the use of amplifier feedback, sometimes to convey the sounds of war — bombs falling, jets overhead, perhaps even the cries of human anguish. At one point, Hendrix interrupts the anthem to play “Taps,” then resumes.

‘I remember people literally tearing their hair out’
When he began shooting what would eventually become “Woodstock,” the Academy Award-winning documentary of the festival, director and cameraman Michael Wadleigh said he started out with 17 or 18 cameras.

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“But surges in electricity by the big storm took out a lot of our cameras,” he remembered, “and there were other malfunctions. By the time Hendrix began to perform, we were down to two cameras.”

And Wadleigh was operating one of them. “I certainly remember feeling tremendous pressure and responsibility when he started ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” he explained. “If you look at the footage closely, he looked right over at me as if to say, ‘Listen to this. You’re gonna love it.’ It was an amazing version.”

Wadleigh was just relieved that Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock was preserved. He recalled that his camera motor was becoming red hot and he was worried it could quit at any time. He also said that because Hendrix’s Marshall amps were so loud, he couldn’t hear if the camera motor was working or not while he was filming.

“If it weren’t as powerfully photographed, it may not be as famous as it is today,” he said. “I remember people literally tearing their hair out. I looked out with one eye and I saw people grabbing their heads, so ecstatic, so stunned and moved, a lot of people holding their breath, including me.

“No one had ever heard that. It caught all of us by surprise.”

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