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On this day in New York · August 18, 1969

Hendrix Closes Woodstock

Four days after half a million people flooded a dairy farm in Bethel, a few thousand mud-caked stragglers watched Jimi Hendrix turn the national anthem into a war zone.

Hendrix Closes Woodstock
Wikimedia Commons / Jimi Hendrix

The facts

Where
Max Yasgur's dairy farm, Bethel, New York
When
Monday morning, August 18, 1969, around 9 a.m.
Band
Hendrix led a new lineup he called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows
Crowd
Festival attendance topped 460,000 over four days; most had already left by Hendrix's closing set

By Monday morning the crowd that had swelled past 460,000 for Woodstock had thinned to a few thousand people still camped in the mud on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York. Jimi Hendrix took the stage around 9 a.m. on August 18, 1969, fronting a new lineup he called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, and played a two hour set that closed the festival for good. Deep into it he ran The Star-Spangled Banner through a squall of feedback and distortion, until the national anthem sounded like sirens and falling bombs. He wasn't making a grand political statement, or so he told television audiences weeks later: he was just an American who'd sung the song in school his whole life.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music

    Max Yasgur, addressing the Woodstock crowd, August 17, 1969

    Source: Wikipedia

  2. All I did was play it. I'm American, so I played it.

    Jimi Hendrix, on The Dick Cavett Show, September 9, 1969

    Source: PBS American Experience

Why it still matters

Hendrix's guitar-warped anthem became the single image people remember from Woodstock, a moment that turned a rock festival into an argument about Vietnam, patriotism, and what America actually sounded like in 1969.

Sources

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