A performer was about to go on and the performer’s guitar had a broken string. Not cracked, not buzzing, broken. Clean through with no replacement immediately available and the performance scheduled to begin in minutes. The roadie spotted Gilmore. He did not know who Gilmore was. He knew only that the young man was near enough to be useful and appeared to know what he was looking at when he looked at the stage.
He asked if Gilmore had any spare strings. Gilmore did. He had the habit, which he would maintain throughout his career, though for different reasons as the career developed, of carrying spare strings as a matter of course. He handed them over. The roadie disappeared back toward the stage. The performance happened.
The festival continued. That, on its surface, is the story. A musician at a concert helped a roadie solve a minor equipment problem. It happened in less than a minute. Neither person said anything particularly memorable about it. The musician went back to watching the performances. The festival ended. The decade turned. The years accumulated.
And the story went into the category of things that happened without being recorded. Private, minor, unremarkable to everyone who was aware of it at the time. What makes it something other than a minor unremarkable story is who the broken string belonged to. And this is the part that remained unasked and therefore unanswered for 38 years.
Because the question assumed a connection that nobody had thought to draw between two names that existed in different parts of the cultural record. In 2007, at an event celebrating the anniversary of Woodstock, a journalist interviewing Gilmore about the festival asked, almost in passing, as a closing question rather than a central one, whether he had any personal memories of being there.
Gilmore, who is not given to dramatic storytelling about his own history, mentioned the strings. He mentioned it the way you mention something that was unremarkable at the time, casually, without emphasis, as a detail rather than as a revelation. He had given some spare strings to a roadie. He thought they might have been for Hendrix, though he wasn’t certain.
He had never found out for sure. He hadn’t thought about it particularly. The journalist found out for sure. It took several weeks of cross-referencing accounts from backstage crew members and production staff who had worked the Woodstock festival and were still reachable in 2007. The confirmation, when it came, was unambiguous.
The broken string was Hendrix’s. The spare strings that David Gilmore had been carrying in his pocket on the afternoon of August 17th, 1969, were the strings that allowed Jimi Hendrix to play one of the most famous guitar performances in the history of popular music. Let that sit for a moment. Because what it means is not simply that a young David Gilmore happened to help out at Woodstock.
It means that the performance of the Star-Spangled Banner, the performance that is, by most accounts, the most significant single guitar performance ever committed to film, the performance that redefined what a guitar could say and what it could mean and what it was capable of communicating in the hands of someone who had completely reinvented the relationship between a human being and an instrument, almost did not happen.
And the reason it almost did not happen was a broken string. And the reason it did happen was a 23-year-old from Cambridge who happened to be standing in the right place and happened to have the right thing in his pocket and handed it over without knowing what he was handing it toward. The Hendrix performance at Woodstock is one of those events in music history that functions as a kind of before and after line.
Before that morning, Hendrix closed the festival, playing not on Sunday night as scheduled, but on Monday morning after delays had reshuffled the entire lineup, performing for a crowd that had shrunk significantly from its peak as exhausted attendees began to make their way home through the mud. The guitar was understood in a certain way.
The instrument had been extended and distorted and pushed into new territory by a generation of players who had inherited it from the blues and rock and roll of the 1950s and had been testing its limits ever since, but it was still understood primarily as an instrument of music, of melody and rhythm, and the expression of feeling that music has always been capable of expressing.
After that morning, the understanding was different. The Star-Spangled Banner as Hendrix played it was not a guitar arrangement of a familiar melody. It was not a stylistic interpretation or a technical display. It was a statement made in the language of the instrument itself in the feedback and the distortion and the controlled chaos that Hendrix had spent years developing into a precise vocabulary about what had happened to the country the melody was supposed to celebrate.
The sounds he produced were not incidental. They were the argument. The wailing that referenced sirens and bombs and the sounds of violence. The moments of beauty that kept returning to the melody before being wrenched away again. The ending that did not resolve so much as exhaust itself, the way actual conflicts exhaust themselves, leaving the air thick with the residue of what has been spent.
People who were at Woodstock that morning and who have spoken about it in the decades since consistently describe a quality of stunned recognition. The sense of watching something happen that they did not fully understand in the moment, but that they understood with the immediate physical certainty that great art sometimes produces was important.
That it was saying something that needed to be said in a form that could not be argued with or translated into something more comfortable than it was. A man was playing the national anthem on an electric guitar and making it sound like the country itself was coming apart at the seams and also, somehow, still capable of something like beauty if you listened closely enough and were willing to hear what was actually there.
None of that happens without the string. This is not to say that David Gilmour caused the performance. He did not cause it. He was not its author or its architect or even a significant part of its preparation. He was a young man who had the right thing at the right moment and handed it over in less than 60 seconds and then went back to watching the festival.
The performance was Hendrix’s. The genius was Hendrix’s. The specific combination of technical mastery and emotional urgency and historical awareness and the particular fearlessness of someone who had learned to treat the guitar as an instrument of truth rather than an instrument of entertainment, all of that was Hendrix’s and would have been Hendrix’s regardless of what string he played it on or how the string got there or who handed it over in the dust of a festival afternoon in upstate New York.
But the string had to be there. The performance could not happen on a guitar missing a string. Not the performance Hendrix intended, not the complete and fully realized statement that has become part of the permanent record of what a guitar can say. He could have played something. He could have improvised around the absence.
But the specific performance that exists, the one preserved in footage that has been watched by millions of people across more than five decades, the one that music critics and historians and musicians themselves consistently cite as among the most significant single guitar performances ever captured, required the complete instrument.
