This is the start of my short essay on Jimi Hendrix's version of Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock 1969, written originally in Italian for a special issue of Blow Up Magazine (leading rock magazine in Italy) about "Rock'n'Roll and War."
Summer of 1969 was a busy one.
Brian Jones had died in early July. On July 14, the film “Easy Rider” had opened in New York, with Jimi on the soundtrack and a blatant advertisement for LSD, while on July 20, the world stopped to watch Neil Armstrong bounce on the moon. But on August 8, the Beatles strolled down Abbey Road and, shortly after, the five Tate murders arrived in Los Angeles like an avalanche, completed by the two LaBiancas the following evening. Finally, under similar auspices, two weeks short the opening of the Isle of Wight Festival, Woodstock began.
Some will say… "Woodstock?! What does that have to do with the war?” The vanilla-flavored answer is that it a negative projection of the horror of Vietnam: a huge demonstration of popular consensus AGAINST the war; after all, the hippies used to say this: make love, not war. Right? Me-not.
Those who don’t like vanilla (the most synthetically imitated flavor in the world, but here perhaps I do digress) they will anyway remember how Pete Townsend (of The Who) immediately criticized Woodstock, while his buddy Roger Daltrey reported that “by the end of the Festival, we had brought out our worst.” Fine guys, considering they spat the pie out after eating of it. Townsend was the guy who at the Festival of Peace and Love… hit the Yippie Abbie Hoffmann with his guitar, as the Yippie was guilty of having jumped onstage shouting “I think this is a load of crap.”
Hoffmann, known for his tongue and his pen, later wrote in “Woodstock Nation” a poem/response to the historic clash: “Where does your money go Who?/And what about John Sinclair Who?” concluding with a hilarious “Following Who Who?” (Sinclair was the activist who had taken, as he said, “10 four 2” or ten years in prison for two weed joints. It was for Sinclair that Hoffman had decided to jump on stage and was strummed away by the evil Briton. Another Briton, John Ono Lennon, instead, dedicated a song to Sinlair. LOL.
In short, it is a fact that, right from the start, that “peace and love” publicity for such an event seemed out of place to some, if not fake. “The Myth Of The Machine” (© 1964-1970,) a book by the farsighted social critic Lewis Mumford, deciphered those “three magic days” [whose full name was: “Woodstock Aquarian Music & Arts Fair,” but the ‘arts fair’ was minimal] differently:
“The so-called Woodstock Festival was not a spontaneous demonstration of joyful young people, but strictly a money-making venture, cunningly calculated to exploit their rebellions, their flattery and their delusions. (…) With its mass mobilization of cars and buses, the traffic congestion along the route and the large-scale environmental pollution, the Woodstock Festival reflected and even greatly amplified the worst aspects of the system that many young rebels professed to reject. The only positive result (…) was the warm feeling of instant companionship produced by the close physical contact of hundreds of thousands of bodies floating in the fog and daze of marijuana. Our current massified, hyper-regimented, depersonalized culture has nothing to fear from this kind of reaction - equally regimented, equally depersonalized, equally under external control. What is this but the Negative Power Complex connected, through invisible electrodes, to the same pecuniary pleasure center? "
Mumford was right in a profound sense. The real exploitation did not come with the sandwiches or the tickets (shortly after the start, the gates were torn down and the organizers, with commercial cunning, declared the Festival a "Free Festival") but with the film. Which spread, better than anything else, the feeling it was intended to convey: peace, love and stars and stripes. All over the world. So the news tended to omit the attack on the “ice cream cart” (to use an image from Lucio Battisti, but they sold sandwiches there) and the “bum trips” (acid that resulted in serious psychotic episodes) and the messes with the local farmers and the rapes and the precarious shitters. “Selective memory” is what Geoffrey Storm called it for nysarchivestrust.org.
Woodstock was a war; one of the mental type. For some (Americans or Westerners) it was a dream, at the height of a very sad decade that had shattered the hopes for real reforms in the USA: it had started with the conspiracy against JFK (killed in ’63), then with the silencing of the most energetic leader of the black population Malcolm X (killed in ’65) and finally - a year before Woodstock - with the MLK/RFK double murder.
Other Americans needed to see the Festival portrayed by the media as “a nightmare in the Catskills” of northern New York. The NY Times indeed described it like in horror like a lawless pimple in the heart of the Nation: “It is hard to believe that grass, acid and other illegal drugs could have been exchanged and used in the quantities reported by reliable sources.” But both the NY Times and CBS, the two bastions of US media propaganda, found a way to please conservatives and liberals alike, without too many jolts.
They said, on Cronkite’s evening news on CBS: “the great majority of these monstrous-looking interlopers behaved surprisingly well” and that, yes, these longhairs had demonstrated… “not that hundreds of thousands of people can paralyze an entire area and break the law but that, in an emergency [?? -n.d.tr.] at the very least, people of all ages are capable of compassion.” The message to the rest of the world was instead: “everything is beautiful and can be done, if you are young and in the West, so… ” And the Vietnamese, poisoned by dioxin and burned by Western napalm? Well, they had to think about it on their own (or “with a little help from their friends”) to procure themselves some peace, which came six years later.
The Festival's manager, the oxymoronic hippie-entrepreneur Michael Lang, wanted to close Woodstock with Roy Rogers and his Happy Trails “because it reminded him of childhood” or so the narrative goes. Now, I don't know if you've seen it Roy, but it would have been the ultimate prank: putting a fake cowboy in a fake "counter-cultural festival" singing a substantially colonial song (could you imagine how would the American Indians in the audience feel to see this guy with a cowboy hat and boots, clip-clopping horse and all?) suggesting an evasive attitude ("Who cares about the clouds when we're together?") since - all in all - you're happy, and you're in the West - and you're white.
Hendrix was black.
And yet, in a curious reversal of roles, at the time he was the highest paid rock musician in the world for a live performance. So much so that he was the only one with the right to his own dressing room (a sort of shack in a nearby farm.) ALSO, manager Mike Jeffery demanded that Jimi be the "top of the bill" of the entire Festival. Great thing, weren't it for the fact that the "top of the bill" plays at the closing of the festival. And Woodstock had been scheduled for a midnight closing act. But midnight was delayed due to a technical issue. (The brokwen rotating circular stage, which had allowed the technicians to set up one band in the one semicircle facing backstage, while another band played on stage, on the other half.)
At Woodstock it had been normal to play all night: Friday night Baez had closed at two; Saturday the VIP lineup had started at 10:30 p.m., stretched for the next eleven hours by the Grateful Dead (great concert,) Creedence CR, Janis Joplin, Sly & The Family Stone, the Who and Jefferson Airplane who closed with a set between 8:00 and 9:40 on Sunday. But now it was almost Monday. In the interest of those who would leave early, the organization proposed that Jimi play at midnight on Sunday, but apparently Jeffery insisted that Jimi be last. So it was. Jimi and his musicians waited until nine in the morning. And they played, after the Sha-Na-Na (!), in front of a decimated audience: compared to the original three hundred thousand that the NY Times spoke of in the heat of the moment, for another 400/500,000, they were estimated at 35/40,000 people and looking at the few photos, I wonder if there were ten thousand, really.
But we know from the sacred Hindu texts that things always happen for a reason. Or rather, three:
Material energy consists of three modes - goodness [sattva], passion [rajas] and ignorance [tamas.] When the eternally living entity comes into contact with nature, it becomes conditioned by these modes.
Bhagavad Gita, 14.5
(...)
NB: published (in Italian) on the Jul/Aug 2024 issue of Blow Up magazine.
This is a partial, and half-assed, English auto translation, with no AI involved.
Quotes are re-translated from Italian, so some slight inaccuracy may apply.