40 years post-Woodstock, Hendrix's anthem still reigns
By ANDREW DANSBY ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
Aug. 13, 2009, 5:16PM

Forty years later, it's easy to take Jimi Hendrix's interpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner for granted.

It was a performance many Woodstock attendees didn't hear since half, maybe more, had flown the farm. And unlike today, when the performance would be Flip-filmed, iPhone-photographed and digitally recorded — all of it uploaded instantly — Hendrix's performance on the morning of Aug. 18, 1969 was largely unheard until the Woodstock movie and soundtrack came out the next year.

“I'm grateful we're able to revisit it,” says ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, whose girlfriend at the time urged him to accompany her via Volks-wagen bus to Woodstock, N.Y. He regrets passing. “That performance is still meaningful and moving four decades later.”

It might be the greatest protest song ever, a cacophonous deconstruction of something sacred that those gathered felt had grown profane.

So much of Woodstock's legend is based on the shared experience. The honest account of the music is that it was spotty. Some bands were troubled by sound problems. Many acts, including Sly and the Family Stone, distinguished themselves. Others didn't. Crosby Stills & Nash, who could usually bank on gorgeous harmonies, sounded at times like fighting cats.

But Hendrix's take on the national anthem remains the enduring moment from the festival. All the stage patter about war, delivered with utmost conviction, failed to say what a guy and his guitar did.

Hendrix's Banner was an arty statement, yet the deconstructed/reconstructed song still sounds startling. Such wildly dissonant guitar playing wasn't new; jazz great Sonny Sharrock had already been making unholy sounds with his instrument. But for a pop artist to strangle a song this way on a guitar was bracing stylistically as well as politically.

“The delivery of the Star Spangled Banner — with the pyrotechnic guitar work that Hendrix provided — really opened the eyes of so many aspiring guitar players,” Gibbons says.

“If nothing else, the dive-bomb, whammy-bar effect he injected in the middle of that performance proved once and for all that he was a guy who was making a guitar do things that it was not necessarily designed to do.”

Vernon Reid, guitarist in Living Colour, suggests Hendrix “did it as a patriotic act.” He points out that Hendrix, unlike many of his Woodstock performer peers, was a veteran, having joined the Army in the early '60s. That said, accounts of the guitarist's enlistment and service suggest it was neither entirely voluntary nor dutifully served.

It seemed to come together like a tropical storm.

“Thank you ... you can leave if you want to, we're just jamming,” Hendrix told the crowd. He noodled his way through a blues jam, briefly quoting Voodoo Chile, before playing the anthem's first piercing notes. For a minute it's raw but borderline reverent, and then Hendrix takes it off the rails during the “rockets' red glare” bit, perhaps the hardest part of the song to sing. Around the two-minute mark he's wrenching out sounds that resemble air-raid sirens and falling bombs, with a snippet of Taps.

He streams the song into Purple Haze, but unlike that Hendrix staple, his Banner isn't about confusion and disorientation. It was as deliberate and direct as abstract art gets.

“It's no accident that happened near the end of the '60s,” Reid says. “If there's a single piece of music to survive the '60s, to represent it, that's it.”

andrew.dansby@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/features/6571655.html