‘I’m American, so I played it’

Some of the acts that played Woodstock went on Dick Cavett’s television show afterward. One of them was Hendrix, who was a guest shortly after the festival and then again much later. When Cavett, who has collected his interviews on his “Rock Icons” DVD, asked him about the controversy surrounding his anthem, Hendrix replied:

“I don’t know, man. All I did was play it. I’m American, so I played it. I used to sing it in school. They made me sing it in school, so it was a flashback.” Cavett interrupted the interview to point out to the audience, “This man was in the 101st Airborne, so when you send your nasty letters in …” Cavett then explained to Hendrix that whenever someone plays an “unorthodox” version of the anthem, “You immediately get a guaranteed percentage of hate mail.”

Hendrix then respectfully disagreed with Cavett’s description. “I didn’t think it was unorthodox,” he said. “I thought it was beautiful.”

Asked recently to look back at that time and that interview, Cavett’s memory was hazy. But after looking at the clip again, Cavett said: “I suppose I could have added that since we somehow acquired the most dismal, virtually unsingable dirge of a national anthem of any known nation, we should decorate Hendrix for turning it into music.”

Lang, who today is involved in concert promotion and artist management, remembers Hendrix’s anthem in the context of the times. “Because he interpreted ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ it gave it a meaning that was closer to where we were all coming from,” Lang said. “There wasn’t anti-American sentiment. It was anti-war sentiment. He brought it home to us in a way nobody ever had.”

Diltz, the still photographer, remembers Hendrix playing in front of a relatively small throng gathered on a huge muddy hillside bereft of a single strand of alfalfa. He also recalls the smell of garbage that had sat there for three or four days. “It was an eerie, eerie moment,” he said.

But most of all, he remembers standing to the right of Jimi Hendrix, next to the wall of amps, “as close as you can get to Jimi without being right there on stage with him.”

“The moment when he played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” Diltz said, “kinda stopped everything.”

Micheal Ventre