How many people did Jimi Hendrix really play to at Woodstock?
“Jimi, a red scarf around his head and wearing a white fringed and beaded leather shirt, looked almost like a mystical holy man in meditation… He’d merged with his music…his magic wand,” Woodstock co-creator Michael Lang once said of the moment the iconic guitarist stepped on stage at the festival.
It’s true, Hendrix was indeed the perfect fit for the event. This was billed as the moment counterculture truly fought back, congregating in the muddy expanse of Lang’s chosen field in order to do away with the social constructs that the Western world was supposedly built on. Capitalism and all of its vices had no place in Woodstock, and so, of course, a bandana-clad Hendrix was the perfect person to step on stage.
A collection of hippie fans waited with bated breath, desperate for him to rip into a catalogue of classics that made him the icon of the time. ‘Voodoo Child’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Hey Joe’ were all on the menu, but none of them quite made a dent like the American national anthem.
The soundtrack of the society that this collection of liberals were fighting against featured in Hendrix’s set and became one of the standout moments of the weekend. They watched in awe as he played the melody with all the passion and fury one would hope from an American citizen, but almost turning it into a revolutionary song, allowing each note to bleed along with the country as it plunged further into the Vietnam War.
Lang continued, eulogising the moment by saying, “He interpreted ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and gave it a meaning that was closer to where we were all coming from… It was anti-war sentiment. He brought it home to us in a way nobody ever had.”
It was the moment Lang had hoped for, one that crystallised the attitude on the ground that existed all weekend and ultimately galvanised this troupe of liberals. So understandably, as time has moved on over the years, the anecdote has grown in colour. Some say Hendrix’s song went on for 15 minutes, others say it played it twice, while many remark on just how awe-inspiring the moment was because of how many people it was played to: nearly half a million, if some of the peak crowds of Woodstock were taken into account.
But did Jimi Hendrix play to 500,000 people at Woodstock?
No, we can firmly say that it is not in fact true, as much as we would like it to be. Despite the moment being uniquely special within music culture, let’s not ruin it completely with wild lies about the crowd size, because it simply isn’t factual.
The truth is, the festival’s lineup was riddled by endless dramatic delays because of the technical issues forced by the weather. It meant that Hendrix had to be pushed back to roughly nine in the morning on Monday and subsequently played to roughly 30 or 40,000 people.
