Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock Setup

His Guitar, Effects, and Amps

Astute collectors proclaim it the most valuable celebrity-owned guitar in history. Mitch Mitchell remembered it as “the guitar Jimi used to take back to the hotel with him.” For his historic Woodstock performance, Jimi Hendrix used a 1968 Fender Stratocaster, serial no. 240981. Among collectors, this right-handed guitar is commonly known as “the White One,” due to its Olympic White finish. With Jimi’s death, this guitar became the possession of Mitch Mitchell, who kept it out of sight for 20 years.

In 1990, Mitchell brought the guitar to the Fender Artist Centre in London, explaining that he wanted it prepared for auction. He opened the case to reveal that the guitar’s frets had tarnished and the strings had rusted. Neville Marten, the lucky repairman who serviced the guitar, detailed its condition for a 1990 write-up in England’s Guitarist magazine: “The nut had been switched around in its slot to accommodate Jimi’s upside-down stringing method. It had a separate maple fingerboard, something Fender did for a short time in the late ’60s. Cigarette burns were evident on the headstock, as Jimi would secure his cigarette under the sixth string, and when he went off on an extended solo it would burn down to the stub. And there was staining from his shirt on the creamy-white finish. The strings were indeed rusty and the frets had gone a bit green.

“Taking the guitar to my workbench, I checked the neck for straightness and it needed a slight tweak of the truss rod. That done, I cut off the strings and threw them in the bin. Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing? Today they alone would probably be worth £50,000 (with Jimi's DNA all over them)! It was weird to realize that the last person to restring this Strat might well have been Hendrix himself.” Martin also noted that the guitar had F-stamped Kluson tuners.

“In a final twist,” he continued, “I wrote up the guitar’s story for Guitarist magazine and postulated that it might make £100,000 at auction. Having been asked to submit the article to Fender for their perusal prior to publication, it was suggested I reduce my estimate to £10,000, as the original figure was unthinkable to Fender. In any event, it sold at Sotheby’s for £198,000–a record in 1990, when celebrity guitars were a new phenomena.”