ALT-JIMI

AUGUST 14, 1969 — BETHEL WOODS, NY — Another day dawns over the 300,000 who throng the muddy, magnificent festival of Woodstock.  At the bottom of the bowl in this human amphitheater, a lean man in fringe white leather steps onstage.  He greets the morning with searing guitar licks.  Groggy revelers think they must be hallucinating — still.  Is that “The Star Spangled Banner?”  Jimi Hendrix goes on, searing the heart and soul of the anthem, making it his.

An iconic moment in American counterculture. But what if???

What if Hendrix had played another American anthem that morning?  “America the Beautiful” would have sounded a little ugly.  “This Land is Your Land?”  A bit simple.  “Home on the Range?”  Woodstock was far from any range.  How about John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever?”

Since no one would have known any different, The Attic likes to imagine this classic marching tune as a spirited accompaniment to “breakfast in bed for 300,000.”  Imagine hundreds, no thousands of Woodstockers leaping to their feet.  Clapping first, then marching, marching through the mud at Bethel Woods.  Strutting.  Saluting.  Adding a good dose of Sixties irony to an American standard.

Okay, Hendrix’s Sousa would not have become the alt-anthem of the Woodstock Generation, but neither would it have outraged anyone like his Star Spangled Banner did.  And lest you think “Stars and Stripes Forever” couldn’t be played on a guitar, not even by Hendrix, watch. (Stay tuned for the piccolo part.)

It might have changed history.