by Ian Port
For those watching Jimi’s arrival on the London scene, his ability to conjure otherworldly sounds from the Stratocaster bordered on the mystical. While most players sought the old Gibsons they thought were essential, Jimi took a shiny new Fender off the rack and wrangled ridiculously entrancing sounds out of it—sounds that seemed all his own. But of course it wasn’t mysticism that made these sounds. It was technology.
Upon his arrival in England, Chas Chandler had outfitted Jimi Hendrix and his new bassist Noel Redding with small amplifiers suitable for rehearsals, amps that to most people would have seemed plenty loud. Jimi, however, quickly saw that the local rock vanguard preferred massive, hundred-watt Marshall stacks with high distortion, heavy bass, and overwhelming volume. He and Noel Redding wanted Marshalls desperately, but at that moment, no one had the money for new amps—Chandler was then selling off his personal bass guitars to fund the unsigned group. Heedless, Jimi and Noel began a campaign to destroy their original amps and have them replaced with Marshalls. “We tried everything to break them,” remembered Mitch Mitchell, drummer in the newly formed Jimi Hendrix Experience. “They got dropped down flights of stairs, we nearly threw them out of the windows. It took about three days, but in the end we managed it.” By the time the Experience headed off to play their very first gigs in France, Chandler had sold a few more basses, and Jimi and Noel had gotten matching hundred-watt Marshall stacks, each about the dimensions of a full-size refrigerator. Jimi turned his up to full, chest-pounding, ear-shattering volume—but even at those levels, his Stratocaster couldn’t attain the nuclear distortion a Les Paul could.
More circuitry was necessary. And in the fall of 1966, the very season that Jimi Hendrix arrived in London, the Arbiter company of London released a silvery metal disc called the Fuzz Face. Numerous other fuzz pedals had arrived on the market beforehand—both Keith Richards and Eric Clapton had used them—but the Fuzz Face was unique for two reasons. Its circuitry emitted a warm, natural tone distinct from the buzzing-bee artificiality of most stomp boxes. And the Fuzz Face could produce anything from cascades of thick distortion to absurdly inchoate noise, no matter what kind of guitar was run through it. It transformed the Stratocaster’s spanky thinness into a heaving rumble, and Jimi Hendrix adopted it immediately. He relied on this pedal all through that fall and winter, as he and the other members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience wrote and recorded their debut album. It was the Fuzz Face—wreaking havoc on Jimi’s Strat and Marshall—that painted the tones of his follow-up single to “Hey Joe,” the incomparable “Purple Haze.” It was the Fuzz Face that gave “Foxey Lady” the aspect of a steam kettle boiling over, about to burst. And when the pedal was turned off, the Strat’s single-coil pickups chimed with a clarity that Gibsons couldn’t match, producing the glassy tones heard on songs like “Hey Joe” and “The Wind Cries Mary.”
In Jimi’s hands, with his preferred tools, even the modest and old-fashioned Stratocaster could summon gobsmacking torrents of fuzz. This three-part wonder—the guitar, the amp, the pedals—was essentially a single instrument to Jimi, no part of it optional, and he would employ it consistently onstage and in the studio. The Stratocaster became a core feature of his presence, along with the tantalizing clothes, lethal sex appeal, and supernatural abilities, the totality of the package inspiring fans and critics to salute him as “the Black Bob Dylan,” “the Black Elvis,” or just “the best guitar-picker in the world.” The fact that Hendrix—slayer of gods, embodiment of black American blues genius, purported inspiration for the term “heavy metal”—chose a Stratocaster was something every future electric guitar player would have to reckon with. Initially, though, it seems Hendrix’s peers saw his choice of guitar as just another sign of his near-madness. “There was something about the way he played the Stratocaster that made it seem like it was off-limits,” Clapton recalled. “I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to get involved in all that. It’s just too crazy.’ ”
Though the Gibson Les Paul wasn’t strictly necessary anymore to produce heavy distortion, many players still felt it produced the thickest, most saturated sounds and handled them uniquely well. Even after Hendrix’s arrival, the preferred tool for rockers wasn’t a bright, sharp Fender razor blade, but a heavy, growling Gibson hammer. The Les Paul Model continued to see a tremendous surge in popularity—but, of course, the original guitars, always rare, grew only more expensive and harder to find. Even Eric Clapton, after his cherished 1960 Les Paul Model was stolen, switched to the more commonly available SG.
Around 1967, Les Paul, who by that point believed he was retired, found himself discussing this issue with Arnie Berlin, head of Gibson’s parent company in Chicago. “They’re showing up at my house and pounding on my door trying to buy them from me,” Les said of his old Gibson signature model. Arnie Berlin was the son of M. H. Berlin, who, with Ted McCarty, had pushed Gibson to build a solid-body electric almost a decade after its earlier leaders had laughed Les and his Log out the door.
“Well, maybe that’s just because they’re hard to get, maybe it’s just the status of having a rarity,” Arnie told Les.
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Les said. “They’re hard to get because we’ve quit making them, and the people who already have them are hanging on to them.”
Whether due to Les’s persuasion—or, more likely, Gibson execs discovering on their own the growing market for 1950s Les Pauls—the company soon realized that it couldn’t ignore the surging demand for this discontinued model. If players were dying to have that chunky old guitar, Gibson would have to give it to them.
So seven years after Les Paul had declined to renew his contract with the company, at the summer trade shows of 1968, Gibson displayed a line of Les Paul guitars based on the originals. There was the reissued Les Paul Standard—in gold, just like the original models—and the Les Paul Custom, in gloss black with gold hardware. There were minor differences in the new versions, and their arrival would not stop values for the old ones from eventually climbing into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. But starting in 1969, the Gibson single-cutaway solid-body would be available brand-new to any guitarist who could pay $395 for a Standard or $545 for a Custom. The Les Paul Model would from then on remain in continuous production, with Les himself getting a 5 percent royalty on the wholesale price of every single instrument.
And so the long-simmering rivalry between Leo Fender and Les Paul bubbled up again on stages and in recording studios and rehearsal rooms everywhere. Years earlier, neither man could have imagined the sounds these guitars now made. Eric Clapton had elevated the Gibson into the choice battering ram of hard rock, soon to be adopted by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. Meanwhile, Jimi Hendrix had transformed the Stratocaster into an incomparably eloquent voice for his soulful psychedelia. Fenders and Les Pauls were twins, opposites, companions—rivals that were remarkably complementary. Through the odd meanderings of time and fashion and technology, two musical instruments born largely in 1940s Hollywood had risen to become the cherished tools of an unfathomably louder age. The guitars of Leo and Les had far outlived the dreams of their makers—and yet, to the current generation of players, and to future ones, they were just being born.
42.
“YOU FINALLY HEARD WHAT THAT SONG WAS ABOUT”
BETHEL, NEW YORK, AUGUST 1969
On Monday morning, a stillness settled over the farm. The August sun murmured through overcast skies, illuminating a brown hillside, strewn with debris, where the crowd had been. Ankle-swallowing mud had overrun every blade of grass. Floating on the mud was a sea of wreckage: shoes, skirts, cushions, sandals, bottles, butts, entire vehicles empty of fuel, their occupants crouched on their roofs like marooned sailors. The epic freak show had come and mostly gone, and what it left behind could easily have been mistaken for a battlefield.
It was not yet over. Some thirty or forty thousand people still watched as, down on the stage, what seemed to be a random band of hippies—bell-bottoms, headbands, poufy ha
ir—jammed loosely in the wan light. He stood there on the left of that monstrous skeletal platform, leather fringes trailing his arms as they flew around the neck of a white Stratocaster—one held, as usual, upside down.
Jimi Hendrix, illuminated in haze: now the highest-paid player in rock music, the de facto headliner of this three-day gathering. The Woodstock festival was so far behind schedule that its biggest draw only appeared on a Monday morning, eight hours after the event was supposed to have ended. At the start of the set, Hendrix announced that he’d be trying something new.
“We got tired of ‘the Experience,’ and every once in a while we was blowing our minds too much,” he said into the mic, “so we decided to change the whole thing around and call it ‘Gypsy Sun and Rainbows.’ ” This was a larger group: five musicians, including a second guitar player. The Experience had crumbled after two years aboard the rocket of success, and Jimi himself was now miserable: fighting a proxy war with his managers, growing bored of the persona he’d built in his first years of stardom, melancholy as ever. So at Woodstock Jimi was starting over, performing with a mostly new band. They hadn’t had much time to rehearse or finish new songs, and that morning, the ensemble sounded loose and out of tune. Many of the festival’s remaining attendees were hiking out under the murky sky, exhausted, hunting for gas or food. Jimi watched them trudge away from the stage as his band roared through a thirteen-minute version of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return),” one of the set’s better numbers. He saw Woodstock ending before his eyes.
“You can leave if you want to,” he said. “We’re just jamming, that’s all. Okay? You can leave, or you can clap.”
And as the currents of feedback from “Voodoo Chile” wafted out into the dwindling audience, Jimi began to pluck out the first notes of another melody. A tune that nearly everyone—everyone down there in the mud, everyone behind him on that massive stage, every one of the millions who watched it on film years later—knew by heart.
The first notes were knifelike, deep, slashing. O say can you see, serrated by the cutting pickups of the Stratocaster and the blaring cabinets of the Marshall stacks. They arrived not as language but as pure, roiling sound, reverberating around the Woodstock mud bowl. Jimi Hendrix was recasting the patriotism and pride of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” that old barroom melody Francis Scott Key made into a national anthem, right onstage in the dull Monday glow. He was going to make the song his.
Out in the fields, all activity came to a halt as listeners realized what was happening. Eyes widened and jaws fell open at the exhilarating tumult of those first few notes, at the very notion of such an attempt. The morning stillness in a moment became a hard freeze. “Everything just stopped,” one Woodstock photographer remembered.
Initially it was almost reverent: the Strat gleamed through the tarnish of the Fuzz Face and some custom-built electronic effects that all seemed to be turned on. Jimi carved the song’s proud melody out of an enveloping mass of noise, the walls of whistling feedback and distortion raw marble for his sonic sculpture. Waves of howling fringed the dawn’s early light. The first vowel in proudly we hailed came as a long, anguished upward note. Yearning swirled around the twilight’s last gleaming and the perilous fight. Each phrase arrived slowly and deliberately, the original melody still amazingly legible in the din, though Jimi was sometimes not even plucking guitar strings. With everything in his rig turned up so loud, the sounds just shot off the fingers of his right hand like lightning bolts.
He stepped on his wah-wah pedal to give a nasal bite to the rockets’ red glare, and as soon as the phrase left his fingers, there came a soaring cry, then a fall—a single note pulled up and then cut down by the whammy bar—that signaled the song’s descent into total chaos. What came next wasn’t melody but a terrifying evocation of war: planes buzzing, bombs exploding, helicopter blades chopping, ambulance sirens wailing, mothers shrieking, men howling in pain, and amid it all the unanswerable scream of why, a childlike yowl against the very existence of such senselessness. Jimi up there seemed to lose himself, forget the crowd, the morning, the mud; his face became an elastic rictus of feeling, his fingers fluttering winglike across the maple fretboard, conjuring the military cacophony that he, a former paratrooper, knew well.
The chaos paused for a clear phrase: the bombs bursting in air. And then his guitar exploded again, the Stratocaster conjuring strafing and napalm, grenades and carpet bombs, the rumble of a jet just overhead. On the drum kit, Mitch Mitchell detonated his own explosions and crashes, but this was unmistakably Jimi’s show, a chance to display all of the theatrics and technique he’d acquired, and to push his electric guitar to produce sounds only he knew it could. He used every aspect of his Stratocaster: the tremolo arm, which he yanked and pounded, pulling the strings out of tune; the cutaway body, which allowed him to reach the very highest notes on the fretboard; the single-coil pickups that issued sharp, stinging bites. He depended on those gigantic Marshall amplifiers for obliterating volume, along with the Fuzz Face and a box called a Uni-Vibe that gave his guitar a whooshing, sloshing character. The guitar, that wooden box with strings, long too quiet for its own good, was in his hands an electric orchestra that could describe even the complexity and horror of war.
The crying and grinding from the Woodstock stage quieted into a familiar phrase, a few lonely high notes: Gave proof through the night . . . There, the onetime army boy snuck in a few bars of “Taps,” the mournful old bugle call, respect for the departed. Then he sped into a lope, racing along, his tone rounded off by the wah-wah: O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave. After that, a massive crest of feedback rose and then broke apart, dissipating into ever-smaller torrents that radiated outward.
Stop. He cut off the feedback and paused.
Then, Jimi Hendrix began to moan out the final line—slowly, confessionally, as if to someone he knew intimately rather than nameless thousands.
O’er the land of the free . . .
The song moved to its close with another moan of monstrous feedback, the void roaring in, freedom as beauty, but freedom denied to so many. And then, in a quick spasm, brightly, immaculately: and the home of the brave.
The last notes trilled and rang in golden, liquid glory, and before they could feed back into acid, Jimi underscored them with a few broad, shining chords, the pride and the anguish all shimmering there in the humid morning, his performance conjuring truths about the United States of America that so many previous renditions of the song had failed to express.
• • •
IT HAD LASTED three minutes and forty-three seconds. Jimi Hendrix didn’t stop to await applause for what he’d just done, to see if it was greeted with approbation or indifference. He rode the swell of feedback straight into “Purple Haze” and went on playing.
To the thousands standing agape on the mud fields of Woodstock, it was clear that something important had just occurred—the most unforgettable moment of the festival, perhaps of the era: “A quintessential piece of art,” as Woodstock organizer Tom Law remembered it, that “hooked us up with Vietnam, with the devastation and the sin and the brutality and the insanity.”
“Before that,” said witness Roz Payne, “if someone would have played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ we would have booed. After that, it became our song.”
“It was probably the single greatest moment of the Sixties,” said the music critic Al Aronowitz. “You finally heard what that song was about, that you can love your country, but hate the government.”
A patriotic melody, rendered in a distorted electronic voice, cleaved in half by a sonic evocation of the horrors of war: By playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” that day, Hendrix cemented his reputation as the most vital American performer in rock after Bob Dylan. He gave a generation of Americans a new connection with their national anthem, showing that even this most patriotic of songs could embody their painfully conflicted views.
Jimi also elevated the electric guitar into a fully mature and capable voice
, an instrument that could speak not only to young people but for them on the largest stages of the world.
A simple technology, radio equipment screwed into a wood-shop project, had become a tool for the most personal and most public yearnings. Nothing could be at once louder, more vivid, more chaotic, more human. When Jimi’s soul cried, when that Stratocaster transformed his voice into a piercing electric wail, the whole world had to listen.
EPILOGUE
EVERYWHERE, 1970–2009
Eric Clapton was browsing through guitar shops in London on September 17, 1970, when he ran across a white Stratocaster. Its curves and color matched those of the guitar Jimi Hendrix had brought with him to London from New York almost exactly four years earlier, as well as the instrument he’d played at Woodstock the previous summer. Clapton knew he’d be seeing Jimi that very night: Sly and the Family Stone was due to headline the Lyceum Theatre on Wellington Street, and Jimi would certainly catch the show. So Clapton bought the guitar as a gift—a symbol of friendship toward the man who’d once dethroned his lordliness with a plain, pale Fender.
Clapton brought the guitar to the Lyceum, intending to give it to Jimi after the show. But Hendrix never appeared. He’d been spending time with a new German girlfriend that week, and had been behaving rather strangely, as friends would recall: showing up to jams too zonked on wine or speed or heroin to play, and forgetting his guitar besides. That very night, Jimi was scheduled to meet Sly Stone and others for an after-hours jam at the Speakeasy Club—a rare treat he wouldn’t usually miss. But he never came to that, either.