Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock

Behind the Scenes of His Longest Performance

This is part 2 of a three-part series. Here’s a link to part 1: “Jimi Hendrix: The Road to Woodstock.”

Ready or not, Jimi Hendrix’s band was scheduled to climax the three-day Woodstock festival on Sunday night, August 17, 1969. By Friday afternoon, it became clear that Woodstock, held on a dairy farm, was no ordinary festival. From their mansion 12 miles away, the musicians watched television reports as events unfolded. More than 800,000 fans attempted to make the pilgrimage by car to rural upstate New York, causing a 20-mile traffic jam in all directions. Many concert-goers abandoned their cars on the freeway and hiked in. Another 200,000 were turned away.

By the time the concert opened on Friday evening with Richie Havens, fans had torn down the barriers and more than 400,000 people streamed in. Over the next two days, many musicians gave defining performances, notably Joe Cocker, Country Joe & The Fish, Jefferson Airplane, Mountain, Sly & The Family Stone, Alvin Lee with Ten Years After, and The Who.

By Sunday morning, heavy rain and garbage had turned the concert field into a swampy mess. While the Shokan mansion was close to Woodstock, traveling by car was difficult, so organizers arranged for Jimi and his band to take a helicopter from a local airport. When the musicians arrived, they were told that the rainstorm had made it impossible for anyone to fly out. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were also stranded. Hendrix’ roadie Gerry Stickells was finally able to “borrow” someone’s truck to drive the musicians to the venue. “Stealing a pickup truck with Hendrix is one of the high points of my life,” Neil Young would later claim.

Jimi Hendrix was scheduled to close the show at 11:00 PM, but when they arrived they were told everything was hours behind schedule. Festival organizers offered to let Hendrix go on at midnight, but Michael Jeffrey insisted that Hendrix, being the headliner, should close the show. Meanwhile, Jimi was becoming ill. He’d been awake for nearly three days, and people who saw him backstage speculated that he may have been “dosed” with some acid slipped into his water. Attendees reported seeing him laying on a stretcher in the medical tent. “In the end, they pointed out this cottage we could shelter in–it was about three muddy fields away,” Mitch recalled. “So we squelched over there and spent the rest of the night literally freezing in there. We’re not talking fun here.”

As dawn broke on Monday morning, the band still hadn’t played. “Having waited up all night,” Mitch wrote, “the audience seemed as groggy as we were–and it was horrible to see people packing up and leaving as we came on. Monday morning was back to the grind for a lot of people who’d come, and it couldn’t be helped.”

It’s estimated that only 40,000 people were on-hand to witness Jimi’s performance. Sha Na Na, a 1950s revival band, played immediately before Hendrix. Backstage, Jimi told the promoters he wanted to play a song or two on acoustic instruments, but the idea was nixed.

At 8:30 on Monday morning, the loudspeakers finally crackled “Ladies and gentlemen, the Jimi Hendrix Experience.” Hendrix, obviously tired but still looking like the resplendent hippie superstar with his white fringed jacket, red headband, bell-bottom pants, moccasins, and white Stratocaster, corrected the announcer: “I see we meet again. Dig, we’d like to get something straight. We got tired of ‘the Experience’ and every once in a while we was blowing our minds too much, so we decided to change the whole thing around and call it Gypsy Sun and Rainbows for short. It’s nothing but a band of gypsies.”

As the band struggled to tune their instruments, Jimi told the audience, “Okay, give us about a minute and a half to tune up. We only had about two rehearsals, so we’ll do nothing but primary rhythm things. But, I mean, it’s a first ray of the new rising sun anyway, so we might as well start from the earth, which is rhythm, right? Can you dig that?” Unfortunately, possibly due to the cold weather, Larry Lee was unable to get his guitar completely in tune, and percussionists Jerry Velez and Juma Lewis were under-miked.

After a flourish of blues licks, Jimi launched into his 140-minute set–the longest of his career–with “Message to Love,” with Lee ably doubling his lines and providing rhythmic support. Midway through, Hendrix began scatting in falsetto along with his solo, then depressed his whammy while soloing. The rhythm section, though, sounded hopelessly muddled near the end. Afterward, Hendrix called the song “Message to the Universe.”

Before beginning the next song, Jimi told the audience. “We’re sorry for the tune-ups between time. Well, hell, cowboys are the only ones that stay in tune anyway. We don’t want to play too loud for you, so therefore we just play quietly and very out of tune.” Jimi began the masterful blues that was called “Get My Heart Back Together Again” at the time but was later retitled “Hear My Train A Comin’.” Midway through, Lee took a clean-toned solo that, while competent, was swamped by Jimi’s volume.

Thunderous applause followed, but then the guitarists again struggled to get in tune and deal with microphone problems. “This is so embarrassing, man,” a flustered Jimi said. “I’m sitting up here, damn, you people are looking at me too–a half a million eyes…. We’re very sorry for the delays but, like, we’re trying to get things together in between time. Like I said before, we’ve only jammed together a couple of times.”

With that, Jimi counted off a fast, colorful version of an Experience favorite, “Spanish Castle Magic.” The song evolved into an extended jam, with Lee following Hendrix’s savage solo with an out-of-tune solo of his own. Then the percussionists took their turn.

Jimi next dug deep into his roots for his blues masterpiece, “Red House.” The tuning problems got worse. What followed was surely the most curious number of the set, “Mastermind,” an R&B song written and sung by Larry Lee. Jimi did his best Curtis Mayfield-style fills and a beautiful octave-laced solo, but the Lee’s performance was deemed so lackluster that it’s never been included on any of the official Woodstock releases.

Jimi raised the energy level with a sped-up “Lover Man,” with its squealing cascades of notes and feedback. He dedicated the next song, “Foxy Lady,” to “the girl with the yellow underpants” in the audience. Once again, the guitars went out of tune to the point where Jimi had to ask Larry to give him an “A” note.

“Like I said before, we only ran up a few numbers,” Hendrix told the audience, “so we’d like to do this one we was jammin’ at the house. We don’t have a name for it yet. It’s an instrumental.” Credited on various releases as “Jam Back at the House” or “Beginnings,” this ambitious tune, which Mitch Mitchell claimed he wrote, portends the jazz-rock fusion that would emerge in the mid 1970s.

Jimi dedicated his next song, the Univibe-laced “Izabella,” to soldiers and to men who have a hard time expressing their love to a women. “I think we got about two more songs that we know,” Jimi announced afterward, and said they’d do “a slow one.” With that, Larry Lee sang a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “Gypsy Woman.” Jimi’s subtle Uni-Vibed lines and octave passage were lovely support, but like “Master Mind,” the performance was deemed unworthy of release.

It was time to take it up a notch, so Jimi launched into a raging rendition of “Fire.” He introduced the next song, a 13-minute version of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)/Stepping Stone” as “a new American anthem.” Hendrix’s extended solo was one of his Woodstock set highlights, but Larry Lee’s solo was painfully out-of-tune.

What happened next was unprepared, unexpected, and utterly sublime. Jimi launched into an other-worldly version of America’s national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Everyone in the audience was familiar with the tune. After all, for decades it had been played at the start of major-league sporting events in the United States. But no one had ever heard a version like this. Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock “The Star Spangled Banner” is (in my opinion, at least) the single most transcendent recording of the 1960s. As brilliantly captured in the Woodstock film, Jimi pulled out all the stops, using feedback, distortion, and whammy to sonically conjure the familiar images in the song’s lyrics–rockets and bombs going off, sirens wailing. He inserted unexpected tri-tones, making the song entirely his own.

To many socially aware listeners, the magnificent “The Star Spangled Banner” performance captured the spirit of war-torn America and the us-versus-them mentality of the hippie culture that had claimed Jimi as one of its leaders. As Al Aronowitz wrote in the New York Post: “It was the most electrifying moment of Woodstock, and it was probably the single greatest moment of the Sixties. You finally heard what that song was about, that you can love your country but hate the government.” According to Mitch Mitchell, even the musicians onstage did not expect the song. “We hadn’t rehearsed or planned to do ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, but we often played it in America. It’s become associated with Woodstock, and that’s fine, but we did play it a lot. Sometimes I stuck in a few drums, sometimes not. But I did it at Woodstock to keep my hands warm.”

Jimi immediately segued into a ferocious reading of his most famous song, “Purple Haze,” followed by a five-minute solo guitar blitz called “Woodstock Improvisation” and the slow and moody “Villanova Junction,” invoking images of Wes Montgomery with his beautiful octaves. This track provided a fabulous ending to the Woodstock documentary, but Hendrix actually had one last song to play. Called back for an encore, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows played the song that had brought the Jimi Hendrix Experience its first acclaim in England just three years before, “Hey Joe.”

With the fading of Jimi’s final note, the Woodstock festival came to its official close. Mitch Mitchell, along with several reviewers, declared the Gypsy Sun and Rainbows performance a failure. Mitchell wrote, “It was so cold and damp at that time of the morning that none of our numbers really gelled–they just turned into long jams. There were a lot of stops and starts. It was a real anti-climax. If only we could have gone on at night. There was no camaraderie when we came off–most of the others had gone. We had a long drive ahead of us and we just wanted to go home. People go on about Woodstock almost religiously, but really it was mud, no food, no toilets, and exhaustion.”

Juma Lewis’s contract, signed two days after the concert.

Two days after the show, Jimi paid Billy Cox, Larry Velez, and Juma $500 apiece for playing Woodstock. After a few scattered sessions over the next few weeks, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows came to its end in mid September. Billy Cox and Jimi soon joined drummer Buddy Miles to form Band of Gypsys. Billy continued to accompany Jimi on his 1970 tours, including the performances at the Berkeley Community Theater, Rainbow Bridge, and Isle of Wight. In 1970, the Oscar-winning movie Woodstock, with its magnificent Hendrix footage mercifully edited for maximum impact, became a huge hit. Sadly Jimi did not live long enough to enjoy the accolades. He died on September 18, 1970.

Besides the Gypsy Sun and Rainbows performance, Jimi left us another Woodstock artifact. Not long after the festival, he notated the top of a page with the words “Unfinished rough sketch of Woodstock fest” and wrote this poem:

“500,000 Halos . . . .

outshined the mud and History.

We washed and drank

in God’s tears of Joy,

And for once . . . and for everyone

the truth was not a mystery–

Love called to all . . . Music is Magic.

As we passed over the walls of nay

Hand in Hand as we lived and

made real the dreams of peaceful men–

We came together . . . Dance with

the pearls of rainy weather

Riding the waves of music and

Space–Music is Magic . ..

Magic is life . . .

Love as never Loved Before . ..

Harmony to Son and Daughter . . . man and wife.

                                                 –Jimi Hendrix

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Part 3 is coming soon: “Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock Setup”

More Jimi on Talking Guitar:

Jimi Hendrix: The Road to Woodstock

Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House”: The Story of a Song

Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience at Monterey

How Jimi Hendrix Learned to Play Guitar

The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s First Performances

When Jimi Hendrix Upstaged Eric Clapton

Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”: The Story of a Song

For more about Jimi’s first nine months in London, check out my book Stone Free: Jimi Hendrix in London.

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