Jimi at Woodstock

It’s been delightful seeing you.  May we wish you anything that the person next to you wishes for you.  Good wishes, good day, and goodnight.  Farewell.

-Chip Monck’s Benediction to the crowd at Woodstock

Jimi played with the whole festival at his back.

Dozens of the greatest musical artists in a generation crossed the stage before he did.  Hundreds of performers, the unhinged guitarists, the horn players, the sweaty conga-men.  The bright voiced and clear-stringed or the rasping, shuddering, Midwesterners singing out over distortion and snapping drums.  All of them taking on the mass of people, dashing at them with music, and receiving in turn the breaking waves of unamplified applause.  Half a million people, an invisible army drafted and assembled from almost every state in the country.  All of them contorting and spinning and singing in front of the stage like it was a modern altar, as if the singers and players were deities summoned by their praise then released back into the world emboldened and strengthened and proven immortal. 

But Jimi had watched them crawl back down the stairs, enervated, shaking, ecstatic yet in the motion of retreat.  They held onto the railing and pitched forward.  They embraced others around them quickly then walked off, seeking solitude after standing in the mouth of that naked crowd, the thousands and thousands that refused to be satisfied, that clambered over itself in a spilling mass.  The crowd could not be taught, could not be preached to, could not be tamed.  It could only hear and feel and dance and fall down when their bodies imploded, unable to tolerate anymore electric spirituality.  Jimi waited for his turn, his chance to face them.

He shook hands with people and joked and spoke with purpose in the days before his turn, but he never told them of his anticipation.  It itched in between his fingers, turned his knuckles into busy springs.  When he couldn’t shake it off, he disappeared, somehow, and walked in tight circles with his guitar hanging against his hip, playing.  Playing over and over, letting his hands move.  He started with one song, marched it up a key change, and folded it into another.  He closed his eyes and felt the bob and weave of the figure eights he trod over the grass, felt himself curve along with the music.  He imagined the distortion and echo and feedback, overlapped them in his mind.  His ring finger dropped down quickly between bars and flicked the tone lever of his Stratocaster even though he played without wires.  The strings twanged and rattled the weak way an electric guitar does without an amplifier.

Jimi watched during the delays, his eyes bouncing between roadies and technicians trying to track down the faulty cable or curse over a disassembled microphone.  His tongue moved in his mouth, afraid of a fight with the equipment, afraid of blowing something out.  It made him nervous to think that something could spark and die in the middle of his set, could ruin the rhythm of his show.  The waiting made it worse.  Each hour that went by would strain the wires more, bring a gust of wind that could knock the whole enterprise down, allow another thousand people to tread the cables deep into the mud.  He sent out delegates to talk to the crew and got unconvincing assurances in return.

Finally, just after dawn, they called him up.  He kept pacing the stage, bending over each player in his band, asking, “Ready? Ready? You ready?”  He tuned and retuned.  He looked out over the crowd, all their faces turning towards his, a mindless pulse of nature like leaves turning over for the sun.  All the people down front reaching out their hands, vocalizing their love, their admiration of his beauty.  They responded to him, his height, his color, his voice, his place on the pedestal as the one true hippie, the one who either by nature or nurture simply could not understand a way of life that contradicted his, that a man would choose to live without the dizziness of drugs, the confidence of music-making, the pulsating explosions ignited by love.  The man who could not be pinned down, could not be made to articulate anger in public, who could not be made to stop.  They attempted to describe him and assign formulas to the dueling aspects of his personality: the obsessive creator laying down take after take after take, exhausting those around him with perfection and the absent-minded babbler prone to losing his own tapes.  He waved his arm out over all of them.

The MC made his introduction and Jimi amended it, calling his reinvented group the Band of Gypsys.  He pointed and spoke their names, recited their hometowns as if to remind them of America’s power to unite over its mass, to uproot and replant amongst strangers.  Then he started to play, ripping into “Fire” at double speed, letting his riffs bounce higher off of Mitch’s drums, feeling comfortable there as soon as he realized his old friend was in this, up to the challenge and bricking it out like a storm.  He pushed his fingers hard, fast, kept them millimeters above the strings.  He didn’t play one solo, he played five in a row then tore it off like a piece of paper, thinking, Okay.  All right.  We’re doing this. 

He dedicated “Izabella” to recent draftees headed for Vietnam.  “Izabella, yeah, I fight this war for you.”  The guitar wailed and stutter-sang through that one, too, flying out above the heavy, bumping bass line.  He closed his eyes and sang the chorus, enjoying a vision of the crowd made two dimensional, the entirety of their area and volume pressed into a pane set six inches in front of his face and spreading for miles in each direction.  Fixed into an immense buzzing portrait that moved in tandem with his shaking head, faces blurred as if they were affixed by a thumbprint dipped in flesh colored paint.  He opened his eyes and they all stretched back into perspective, seeming smaller than before.  He smiled and began “Hear my Train A-Comin’,” drew it out long, rattled it off by heart, then dipped it down into quiet, ticking strokes that bloomed into “Red House.”  Lazy blues and frequent vocal vibrations.  The quiet before the storm.

The familiar opening notes of “Voodoo Child” streaked into the crowd, riling their anticipation.  Jimi caught fire early, started rocking forward and back at the waist.  He got lost in the thick rhythm, heard his own notes coming back at him like spirals of flame.  Scales erupted out of him, low to high up the neck of the guitar, then a split second release before his fingers flew down again, his thumb coming up over the neck to break off a droning note to prevent his guitar going silent even for a split hair of time.  He toed the line of mimicking the soundtrack of a war, throttling up the overdrive, the fuzz, and the distortion into dirty musical sirens.  The band stayed within range of his barrage, trying to hold it down, not striving to keep up, but straining to retain the predictability and formula a song needs to be a song.  Jimi rolled and jerked like a man on fire, one so overwhelmed with the sensation that he cannot think of rescue, only of the experience, of the way time has disappeared.  He knew he was ready and made a signal.

The first notes startled everyone—maybe even the band, who dropped their hands and stared—the first garbled, staticky “Oh, say can you see,” line sung by his vibrating machine.  He’d known he would work it in somewhere, had transcribed it and practiced it over and over, and now here it was coming out of him, this crazy hymn of an anthem taken apart and scattered into noise and squelches.  The lines cast in phasing pulses and tethered to the see-saw of his wah pedal—over-high, over-low, tinny then thick—drew the crowd into their final frenzy, their final sustained yell of the weekend, all of them thinking, We received our inheritance today, America is Ours, now.  The young, sunburned fringe of a generation raised their hands and sang along where they could, their voices punctuated by Jimi’s wild punches of noise and bent notes.  They cheered as if all the smoke and haze was blown away revealing that flag for the first time, still there, still flying, surviving the handover of power.

Jimi, oblivious to all symbolism, oblivious to the future, just a year away from a sudden death, drove onward with “Purple Haze,” blasting out his hit then got lost in it, too, overwhelmed by the morning, by the happiness, by the sweat that covered him, that he’d earned.  Another jam, strange for the stage but as familiar to him as breathing.  Playing like he did when he was alone, testing his limits, pushing for speed, breaking the hinges off one melody and thrusting into another, blues notes, Spanish notes, rock notes, classical notes, wondering with a smile, what if someone took the time to write this out, what a crazy wave of notations bound within measures and bars that would be, man, just like Mozart.  He played alone, the band just staring, just part of the crowd now, watching him strumming like an impatient teenager only interested in elaborating his own existence with physical sound.

Jimi wound it down. “Villanova Junction,” a slow-paced hot afternoon of a song that just sort of flutters by, dark in some spots, glaring in others.  An outro, really, a song to end a movie with.  The riff eased out of a long, black car, did its business, then disappeared around a corner.  The set ended.  The crowd cheered for more, but it was time to clean up and go home, time to disembark into the world after Woodstock.