Jimi Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock

NOTE: This post was originally published midday July 4, 2009. 
—C. 7/4/17

Apart from the context, Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangle Banner" is completely straightforward, a cinch to interpret. The context alone is what gives it its emotional and social complexity. That complexity also gives the piece more power than it already has, and it has quite a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwIymq0iTsw



Although his is an instrumental version, Hendrix's interpretation remains tied directly to the lyrics. The music divides into large sections, the first being a virtuosic but faithful rendition of the melody for the opening four lines:

Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light
what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight
o'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming

Each pair of lines forms a complete musical phrase in the anthem. In these first two phrases, not much happens in Hendrix's playing in a pictorial sense. The occasional feedback and shifts of timbre, together with Mitch Mitchell's free-form drumming far in the background, feed into the creation of a "perilous" atmosphere, a sense of danger permeates the moment, offering a hint of what's to come.

I need to point out here that the constantly shifting timbre of the guitar is a hallmark of Hendrix's style. In addition to coaxing feedback--particularly as a kind of punctuation at the ends of musical phrases--he also makes near-constant use of the wah-wah pedal and the tone switch and level controls on the face of the Stratocaster guitar, any of which can instantly or slowly change the sound from a spitting bright sound to a half-swallowed dark sound and everything in between. The so-called "whammy bar", which allows him to loosen or tighten all of the strings at once with a single hand motion, adds to this effect by allowing him a wild vibrato, pitch bends and other effects.

Hendrix's virtuosic style is also marked by his ability to be anywhere on the neck of the guitar instantaneously. This is a technique that originates with the old Delta blues players, who would have a bass line going on the low frets alternating with a melody on the high frets, leaping back and forth fast enough to make both sound continuous. Hendrix uses this to give his playing a wild character, a sense both of fullness in the arrangement and a sense that you never know where the next sound is going to come from.

From the perspective of those style characteristics, it's remarkable how plain these two quatrains are. The first is merely the melody, without any decoration other than feedback and the pulsing of what sounds like a stereo vibrato effect. In the second, Hendrix elaborates the melody by sustaining a few notes and by adding some others in a kind of mimicry of a classical music approach. The elaborations add a flamboyant, swelling grandeur that probably has to be interpreted as at least slightly mocking. I say that reluctantly because I don't think Hendrix's version is in any way a satirical rendition. Its heartfelt and of the moment. But the moment included poking a little fun at conventions of the "squares".

But now, in the second section: this is where the thing really begins to fly.

And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there

In the video, you can see Hendrix powering into this section. In the first verse, he's fussing with the tuning keys and the knobs of his guitar, idly watching his fingers or looking out over the audience. Clearly, this kind of playing he doesn't have to think too much about. As he gets close to this verse however, his whole posture changes: suddenly he races up to his pedals, his neck and spine bend forward slightly and he begins to radiate a raw physicality. From this point on, his hands barely leave the guitar, his facial expressions vary from meditative to intensely expressive. The guitar itself now travels up and down, elegantly changing position relative to the player as if partners in a pas de deux.

Using all the stylistic traits I mentioned above – the whammy bar, feedback, the effects pedals and covering the full expanse of the neck of the guitar – he creates bursts of sound after each half of the first line of this couplet. Repeatedly, he slides up from the bottom of the neck on the low strings, to get a swooping sound, and the open strings of the guitar, to get a smashing dissonant chord. After the second line in particularly he gets momentarily caught up in tightening the whammy bar and letting it out slowly, ending the fall with a crash of open strings.

These aren't the simple elaborations of the first verse but instead form a full-blown, well-balanced collage, divided in half by the playing of the melody for "the bombs bursting in air." The sounds here describe the text with imitations of the sounds of war: Bombs dropping, searing explosions of various types. Scraps of the earlier melody appear as well, altered but recognizable, as if not to let us forget that where we are is a violent nightmare version of where we came from.

For the fourth line of this quatrain, Hendrix simply reasserts the melody, immediately resuming his slightly distracted, almost bored physical poster. But before moving on, he pauses to salute the flag with an excerpt from the military bugle call, Taps. Hendrix served in the army and understood that Taps signals the close of day and, as such, is played at funerals to honor the service of the deceased, now at rest. The inserted melody serves as a stark transition into the final couplet.

Oh say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

In the first of these two lines, he uses a mandolin style plucking as a kind of drum roll version of the melody, echoed by an actual drum roll from Mitchell. He also uses this section to reflect back a little on the feedback and collage of the middle section. With a dramatic pause, he launches into the last line, given an appropriate grandeur with some elaboration reminiscent of the earlier section, including a final bomb-drop whammy bar and crash. Three chords then form a dramatic final cadence, a grand ceremonial gesture.

The complexity of the context is easily apparent to anyone who lived through the era. Hendrix could be both proud and critical of his country at the same time. Many of us were. He could also be using protest as a marketing gimmick, playing to his young hippie audience. All of that at once is probably true. For those who don't get it, I'll try to explain a little in a later post.

--C.

UPDATE 2 ON VIDEO CLIP: I updated the link in the body copy so that it works right now. This clip too, could go away, and if it does, see the instruction in last year's update, below.
--C. 7/4/17

UPDATE 1 ON VIDEO CLIP: The video I had originally embedded involved one of the camera angles used in the opening composite of shots shown in the final version of the film "Woodstock," by Martin Scorcese. It was a YouTube video which was, unfortunately, subsequently removed, probably for copyright concerns. The link above is the same clip on Vimeo. If you want, you can still find this alternate camera angle through various sources, including the DVD of Hendrix at Woodstock: it offers a view of the performance from in front of the performer and from his right side, clearly showing the body language I described below. 
--C. 7/4/16

Asbury Park's Fourth of July Fireworks

Great fireworks display at Asbury Park Beach. The fireworks themselves were really good, very exciting, wild colors and no gaping holes in the action. Very professional.

No music! I'm not a fan of music accompaniment for fireworks in general and loud amplified music in particular. Asbury tried the amplified music one year. No good. This year, no music and a much more satisfying experience.

My family and I walked the boardwalk, stopped and shopped at a funky T-shirt and jewelry place and bought some ice cream.

There was a fairly heavy police presence, probably a good idea with the crowd gathered on the boardwalk. The officers were polite and actually shooing skateboarders and dog-walkers off the boards.

Most of the beach was off-limits except for Fifth Avenue beach, which is traditionally roped off for the blanket-and-chair crowd. My daughter and I sat there, close to the water. With most of the crowd content to watch from the boardwalk, the beach had a healthy crowd but never became mobbed or uncomfortable.

A blood-red near-full moon rose over the waves just before the fireworks. A stunning view. And then a great fireworks display and comfortable, orderly exit.

Nicely done, Asbury Park! Makes me proud to live here. A great evening.


--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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'Sandy'

This Fourth, I'm thinking a lot about the farewell of Bruce Springsteen's song "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" from The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle.

Funny, the line "the aurora is rising behind us" -- I had always figured "Aurora" was the name of a ferris wheel or roller coaster or something. It just fit. I'm guessing now that he was using it in the generic sense, synonymous with "aura" but implying a solar source -- a bright, bright star radiating light. The star, of course, is the boardwalk itself and the fireworks of the Fourth of July.

Bruce is leaving in this song, and the boardwalk itself is leaving. This is the early 1970s. Asbury was already headed down the steep incline from its peak in the 1950s and '60s, to bottom out in the late 1990s with the boardwalk especially looking like a shuttered ghost town. Disillusioned and lamenting "our carnival life on the boardwalk," bored with "hanging in the dusty arcades, slamming those pleasure machines," he pleads with "Sandy" to love him tonight "for I may neee-ver see you again."

"Sandy" is the perfect name for his beloved: the beach, the resort, the magical unreality of the boardwalk's "Palace Amusements" and Madame Marie's mysticism.

Photo by Russ Meseroll

His next stop would be the grittier reality of Born to Run's "Meeting Across the River," themes of harsh, wounded souls, flayed, struggling and doomed, that he would develop more fully in "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and his later poetic masterpiece, "Nebraska."

The line of themes of childhood loss of innocence, desperate struggle, a growing maturity and sense of community that pace Springsteen's long discography are naturally reflected in the man himself. In his philanthropic gifts to Asbury Park, the emphasis has never been heavy on rebuilding the amusements, the carnival life. Instead, his focus was, and is, on schools, community projects, helping the underserved who struggled during the long years of the city's economic stagnation.

Along those lines it interesting to me that, here in Asbury Park -- and in New Jersey -- we take such pride in "Sandy" and "Born to Run". All those who know these (and that may be just about everybody in the world by now) recognize the sadness, the critical love, even condemnation, and longing after escape in both songs.

Judging by Springsteen's evolution as an artist and as a human being, it is easy to believe that nostalgia for Asbury Park's amusements is misplaced. It is easy for me to see a resonance with my belief that the town's emphasis on money over community has always been one of its greatest flaws.

But maybe we're not so wrong to be proud. We represent the community and the culture that produced him, after all and we can take some small credit for having nurtured him toward his great achievements, his massive success.

If in the final estimate, we as New Jerseyans are just "a town full of losers," then at least one of us got free and we can cheer him on his heroic journey. If he is the best we can do, that's ain't half bad.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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American Tune as Hymn

Worth mentioning for America's Independence Day is Paul Simon's American Tune. This one has always been a favorite of mine, but lately I've been thinking about it more. Written over three decades ago, there probably isn't a better anthem for the state of U.S. society at present.

A lot has been written about it, including an interesting post by culture blogger ChimesFreedom.com. The author there notes that the melody used by Simon is a reworked version of a chorale tune used by J.S. Bach in the St. Matthew Passion, the same tune that became the basis for the hymn, "O Sacred Head Now Wounded." That author adds a bit more detail about the melody's origins. I discovered the connection completely by accident while playing through some of the Bach chorales at the piano. And that started me thinking more deeply about "American Tune."

Simon's use of the melody here lends the song the character of a hymn, reinforced by chord changes on every note--the style of a traditional four-part hymn setting. The lyrics at first sound almost conversational--personal, confessional and melancholy like many of Simon's songs. But the musical underpinning keeps our attention focused, waiting for the song's larger intentions to unfold. In the way that a hymn's lyrics serve at once as a simple testament and as a metaphor for an entire system of belief, the music from the outset leads us to expect this song to have a greater significance.

Where the first verse is strictly personal, the second verse extends the perception of hardship to his friends: "I don't know a soul who's not been battered, I don't have a friend who feels at ease … etc." The lyrics of the next section, the break, are ironic, both wistful and playful--the singer pictures himself dying, smiling at himself, moving on. But then, almost as an afterthought, he throws in that he sees "the Statue of Liberty, sailing away to sea."

In the final verse we see that that potent image is the very heart of the song's intent: We are a great society that is losing its focus, that has lost its way. "We come in the ship they call the Mayflower, we come in the ship that sailed the Moon, we come in the ages' most uncertain hour, and sing an American Tune, but its all right, its all right, you can't be forever blessed." The last lines put the song back again into personal territory and add a hint of fatalism, "tomorrow's going to be another working day, and I'm trying to get some rest."

While it doesn't bear out in all hymns, the extension from the personal to the general is itself a hallmark of hymnody. "Amazing Grace" for instance turns the experience of one sinner's conversion, the first-person singular, to a lesson for all of us, the first-personal plural, in the last verse.

"A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" speaks first of God as a protector against earthly enemies and mortal ills; the second verse invokes Jesus and posits him as a power beyond the force of time; a third verse sees God as a protector against Satan and demons; and the final verse envisions God as a power greater than any other in the spiritual realm. In the final lines of "A Mighty Fortress," "the body they may kill/ God's truth abideth still/ his glory is forever," we see the same trick that Simon uses: returning at the end to the personal imagery of the opening to anchor the now generalized message firmly within the experience of the individual.

Thus even if we ignore the longing for eternal rest implied by "I'm just trying to get some rest," the structure of "American Tune" is convincing as a hymn, a weary critique from the same Christian belief system that has always been used to support our flawed sense of nationhood.

None of this necessarily makes this a good song--many others have retooled classical melodies, for instance, with far less impact. What makes this a good song is the complex, intuitive geometry of language and musical elements--a puzzle consistently mastered by only the finest songwriters. However, details like this, when they work, make a good song even better.

While the ChimesFreedom.com writer chooses a video clip of Simon and Garfunkel live in Central Park in 1981, I prefer Simon's solo version from 1975, below.



--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Fourth of July and Hendrix

On this Fourth of July, I'm noting that my posts about Jimi Hendrix's 1969 "Star-Spangled Banner" performance at Woodstock remain some of the most popular on this blog. The main blog entry in the series is the analysis of the peformance, as filmed by Martin Scorcese in his documentary, Woodstock. Unfortunately, the clip I had snagged from YouTube has been taken down for copyright infringement. Plenty of YouTubers have posted this same clip elsewhere, so rather than replace it, I'll just let the readers look it up for themselves. (A Google search of Jimi Hendrix National Anthem Woodstock usually produces the item.)

While you're at it, you might want to check out this brief clip of Hendrix talking to Dick Cavett about the "Star Spangled Banner" performance.


--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Garden State Phil.'s July 4th Party

The Garden State Philharmonic will be performing a free Fourth of July celebration concert, Celebrate America!, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 2, at the Ocean County Library, 101 Washington St., Toms River. Expect light classics and patriotic music.

The concert is outdoors, so bring a lawn chair or blanket. The group will have simple snacks and beverages for sale and the proceeds go to support the orchestra, but it's perfectly OK to bring your own picnic baskets. Many people do.

For more information contact the ensemble at (732) 255-0460 or email info@gardenstatephilharmonic.org.

--C.
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National Anthem Hoopla

Jimi Hendrix's performance of the National Anthem was and is one of the more significant and more scandalous arrangements. But it was by no means the first, or the last. Like the flag, the National Anthem is thought of as a kind of sacred relic. Attempts to try to spruce it up, or draw it into an artist's personal style, have been met with hysterical outcry.

The words for "The Star Spangled Banner" have been around since the War of 1812. Francis Scott Key wrote them in 1814, inspired by the huge American flag flying in the morning over Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, a sign that the fort had not fallen to the British during the night of battle. The poem, including two additional verses that nobody sings, was later set to a pre-existing tune by English composer John Stafford Smith, a song he had titled "Death and Victory (The Anacreontic Song)". That song was a popular tavern ballad honoring the fall of Admiral Nelson in battle.

"The Star Spangled Banner" was a hit and remained popular for decades. At the first World Series of Baseball, in 1917, it was used to honor the soldiers in World War I, boosting its popularity. On March 3, 1931 Congress made it the official national anthem.



In 1944, the Boston Symphony Orchestra did NOT perform an arrangement by Igor Stravinsky that featured some light touches of the composer's modern harmonies. Legend has it that he was arrested for the performance, but this is apparently not true. There was a law on the books in Massachusetts that prohibited reharmonizations of the National Anthem and for that reason, he was advised not to have it performed. Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger tell the story that Stravinsky was arrested in Boston for an earlier performance. The mug shot at left accompanies the article in their book. The arrangement is lovely, but hardly offensive in any way. Stravinsky no doubt thought of it as a way to show his loyalty to his new country. He was awarded citizenship in 1945.

In 1968, a year before Hendrix's performance, Jose Feliciano shocked a crowd at a ball game and on national TV with a rendition in his own, Latin-inflected blues style. His career suffered from the angry censorship of "patriotic" disc jockeys and radio stations.



But Hendrix's version was different. It was deliberately provocative, where the others were accidentally so. It understood as a protest. To be more precise, it was aimed at an audience who were generally opposed to the ongoing war in Vietnam. Beyond his target audience, many reacted as they did to Feliciano, assuming that this music meant Hendrix was "un-American." But that's a ludicrous charge that was labeled at every hippie who ever disagreed with The Establishment, as the government and corporate powers were then known.

Importantly, Hendrix's rendition is an extremely powerful musical expression all on its own, music that allows for a multifaceted interpretation. Feliciano and Stravinsky created beautiful interpretations of the National Anthem. But Hendrix's was searing, provocative, raw and virtuosic. As a consequence, it will likely be discussed for decades to come, if not centuries.

More about the performance itself in an upcoming post.

--C.