The New Yorker-Rewinding Jimi Hendrix’s National Anthem

Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock anthem was both a protest of the violence of a wholly unnecessary war and an affirmation of aspects of the American experiment worth fighting for. Photograph by Larry C. Morris / NYT / Redux By Paul Grimstad The summer before seventh grade, I started wearing my dad’s Stetson hat and paisley bathrobe, which I believed approximated the bell-sleeved garment that Jimi Hendrix wore in the poster on my bedroom wall—a strange rendering in iridescent pastels, with Jimi looking like a dandified cowboy, playing a righty guitar lefty so that it was, fascinatingly, upside down. I wore the outfit for a class presentation that fall, brought in my own electric guitar and amp, and did the opening ten or twelve bars of “Purple Haze.” The amp was way too loud for the room, the window casings rattled, my classmates looked frightened. But I had put work into learning the song and was determined to share the entire solo. A vinyl copy of “Are You Experienced?,” found at the public library the year before, had led to hours spent hunched over a turntable, slowing down the r.p.m.s to make it easier to parse the solos on “Hey Joe,” “Third Stone from the Sun,” and “The Wind Cries Mary.” By going full Talmud on Hendrix, I’d taught myself to play the guitar, and had become an indefatigable Hendrix proselytizer. Kids had spray-painted “Clapton Is God” on the walls of the London Tube station, I explained to anyone who would listen, but the real God was Jimi. I knew that he had performed at Woodstock, that mythic experiment in living free from status-quo strictures held on a farm somewhere in New York (I tried to imagine the farms in the Wisconsin village where I lived holding such an event), and soon I was able to acquire a VHS cassette of Michael Wadleigh’s epic documentary of the festival. After all the footage of scaffold assembly, the interviews with stoned pilgrims, the endless P.A. announcements (watch out for that brown acid), the rain and mud, and the often great music, there came, near the end, footage of Jimi playing “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” a tune I knew well, which then segued into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There are lots of examples of song renditions whose power and uniqueness make them definitive versions: Miles Davis doing Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight”; John Lennon’s ecstatic run through Chuck Berry’s “Rock and...