McDonald at Woodstock, 1969 Jim Marshall Photography LLC
Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock anthem, Photograph by Larry C. Morris / NYT / Redux
Grunts with Guitars: Jimi Hendrix and Country Joe McDonald
by Philip Auslander
Marc Riboud, Jan Rose Kasmir Facing the Pentagon and Guns, Washington,1967, 13 15/16 x 20 7/8 inches,
Gift of Marc Riboud Copyright © 2018 Bureau de Marc Riboud / Les amis de Marc Riboud,
All rights reserved.https://collections.artsmia.org/
In “The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet” by the French photographer Marc Riboud (1923-2016), a young woman holding a chrysanthemum faces a row of fully armed soldiers. Riboud took the photograph in Washington, DC during the 1967 march on the Pentagon to end the Vietnam War. After versions of it were published in Paris Match in 1967, then in Look magazine in 1969, it became one of the visual symbols of the era, an iconic representation of Flower Power. The woman in the picture, Jan Rose Kasmir, was at the time a high school student with strong anti-war feelings who had dashed to the protest as soon as she heard about it. The photograph’s title suggests a stark juxtaposition of opposing forces. As Kasmir recounted many years later, she initially shared in that way of thinking, but her perspective was changed by the event captured in the image.
When I first saw the soldiers, all I saw were their uniforms and rhetoric — the war machine and the baby killers. I was only 17 years old, so things had presented themselves as sort of black and white to me. They were the bad guys. But I realized in that moment that they were just young boys. They were just as much victims of the war effort as anybody. When you look at my face in the photograph, I’m very sad. In that moment, I was one with the soldiers.
While there were ideologues among both the counter culturalists and the establishment whose interests were served by enforcing an “us against them” mentality, many others ultimately came to the same understanding as Kasmir—that hippies and soldiers were to a large extent the same young people whose lives had been upended, albeit in different ways, by a war perpetrated by their elders. Nowhere is this common ground more evident than in popular music which was the most important expression of youth culture in the 1960s. The American soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam, and their friends and family member stateside, listened to the same music, which became a way of maintaining bonds between them despite geographic separation. Outside of combat, soldiers had extensive access to music, whether through radio, portable cassette players, or the elaborate high-fidelity sound systems they constructed in their quarters. To boost morale, the Armed Forces Vietnam Network, with permanent studios in Saigon, broadcast 24 hours per day in a style identical to that of Top 40 stations at home, down to the jingles and high-energy disc jockeys, and playing the same music. There were also units that maintained their own radio stations, including some unsanctioned “pirate” stations.
Fortunate Son · Creedence Clearwater Revival Chronicle: 20 Greatest Hits ℗ 2021 Craft Recordings, Distributed by Concord. Released on: 1976-01-01 Composer Lyricist, Producer, Vocalist: John Fogerty Background Vocalist: Tom Fogerty Producer: Saul Zaentz
While young people stateside and young soldiers in Vietnam listened to the same songs, they did not carry the same meanings for both groups. Whereas Nancy Sinatra’s famous recording of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” (1966) was presumably heard back home as a jaunty proto-feminist break-up song, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner note in their superlative study We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War that it “took on special meaning for grunts whose comfort and sometimes survival depended . . . on the quality of their footwear.” Sinatra toured Vietnam in 1967, performing for the troops, an experience she describes as “having completely changed my life.” The song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” written by the American songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and recorded by the British group the Animals in 1965, was intended as a song about class struggle and urban poverty, a theme that resonated in the Animals’ working-class hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne. The song’s title alone made it one of the single most popular songs among GIs in Vietnam; Colin McGuire, of the Vietnam Veterans of America calls it “The (Unofficial) Vietnam War Veterans’ National Anthem.” Marc Leepson recalls going to a bar for enlisted soldiers in Long Binh: “They had a jukebox and ‘Gotta Get Out of This Place’ came on loud and everybody sang the words. I mean, everybody. Strangers. Nobody knew each other. But that song came on and everyone just screamed out the chorus at the top of their lungs. I can still hear it.”
That music was a common ground between the military and the counterculture is also implied by the rarely discussed fact that a significant number of musicians making the music, including some of the most prominent, had military experience. For example, at least eight of the musicians who performed at Woodstock in 1969 had served in various capacities, including Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead; both John Fogerty and Doug “Cosmo” Clifford of Creedence Clearwater Revival; Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish; Alex del Zoppo of Sweetwater, a lesser-known Los Angeles band originally slated to open the festival; and Jimi Hendrix and two of the musicians who played alongside him, bassist Billy Cox and guitarist Larry Lee. Playing at Woodstock was particularly disorienting for Lee who had just returned from a tour in Vietnam and was recovering from a bullet wound to the head: “Man, it was strange. I’d only been back a few weeks and I’m on stage, and there are helicopters overhead, naked muddy people and Jimi’s guitar sounding like a chopper or an explosion. I had to shake my head to make sure I wasn’t back in ‘Nam’.” Although the Doors did not perform at Woodstock, keyboardist Ray Manzarek had served in the Army in Japan and Thailand. Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson followed his father into the military, becoming an Army helicopter pilot in Germany.
Kris Kristofferson (1936-2024) was commissioned as a second lieutenant, attaining the rank of captain. He became a helicopter pilot after receiving flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. He also completed Ranger School. During the early 1960s, he was stationed in West Germany as a member of the 8th Infantry Division.
There was considerable pressure on these musicians to side unequivocally with the anti-war movement in the second half of the 1960s. In this context, identifying oneself as a veteran was “bad for business,” as McDonald put it. Regardless of the degree to which rock musicians embraced their identities as veterans, their service influenced their art in a range of ways. Fogerty, for example, enlisted in 1966 to avoid the draft and served on active duty for six months and as a reservist for two years. Despite seeking to be discharged after completing active duty, Fogerty ultimately saw value in his military experience: “There's a lot of insight that you learn about getting along with people and what is the mindset inside the military, and I'm not talking about people who make policy. I mean grunts like who I was who are cogs in the wheel.” Fogerty’s perception of the benefits of privilege is clearly reflected in the song “Fortunate Son,” where he sides with the grunts: “I ain’t no Senator’s son.” Fogerty has been active in veterans’ causes, speaking out against the mistreatment of returning Vietnam veterans, supporting Veterans Village (now SHARE Village), a Las Vegas organization dedicated to alleviating homelessness and poverty among veterans, and performing at a Vietnam Tribute Concert in 1987.
The ambivalence of this generation of musicians toward military service is vividly illustrated by the contrasting examples of Country Joe McDonald (1942-2026) and Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970). McDonald was a “red diaper baby,” born and raised in Southern California by parents who were members of the American Communist Party. Although he would become an activist dedicated to progressive causes, he did not subscribe to his parents’ ideology. However, he was deeply influenced by the folk music they listened to, alongside the gospel, R&B, and rock and roll he experienced from the artists who played at El Monte Legion Stadium. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, ostensibly influenced by a recruitment poster he saw at the stadium, he enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Japan, where he served for three years. While in the Navy, he learned to play the guitar (he had been a trombonist in high school) and gathered like-minded musicians for jam sessions. Upon returning to the US, he moved to Berkeley, where he continued to play music and founded an underground magazine called Rag Baby in 1965. In October of that year, Rag Baby published a “talking issue” titled Songs of Oppression that included three extended-play discs of music. One of the songs, “I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixin’-to-Die-Rag,” an anti-war protest song, became the song for which McDonald would be best known, especially for its memorable chorus:
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We’re all going to die.
Country Joe McDonald - Live Woodstock 1969 - I Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag
When McDonald performed this song at Woodstock in a combat jacket, the audience, who clearly already knew the lyrics, participated vigorously in the spirt of an anti-war rally. But GIs understood the song’s fatalism in a different way. Vietnam veteran Sam Adams recalls, “In 1970, during Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Jackson, us draftees were singing ‘1, 2, 3, What are we Fighting For’ in the back of a deuce-and-a-half. We had spent the day at the rifle range firing our M-16's. The training cadre and the Drill Sgts were all Vietnam vets, and we all knew where we were going.” McDonald attributed the song’s popularity with GIs to the way it reflects a soldier’s perspective.
It blames leaders and parents, not soldiers. It’s not a pacifist song; it’s a soldier’s song. . . It’s military humor that only a soldier could get away with it. It’s a soldier’s song from a soldier’s background and point of view. It comes out of a tradition of GI humor in which people can bitch in a way that will not get them in trouble, and that also keeps them from insanity that can be experienced during war.
McDonald’s self-description as both a hippie and a veteran is evident from his music. The musicians who recorded songs for Rag Baby became the legendary Bay Area psychedelic rock band Country Joe and the Fish. McDonald’s first solo album, Thinking of Woody Guthrie (1968), a collection of Guthrie’s songs, reflected his ongoing interest in folk music. For his third album, War, War, War (1971), he set poems by the Canadian poet Robert W. Service, who had been in the Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross during World War I, to music. Accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and singing in a clear, clarion voice, McDonald offers a vivid account of the horrors of war by way of Service’s verse.
Although McDonald spoke of war from a soldier’s perspective in his songs, he did not acknowledge his own identity as a veteran until 1981, when he became active in veterans’ causes and was persuaded by a Vietnam vet that he needed to come to terms with his own involvement in military actions in the early 1960s that had led to the war. From that point on, McDonald fully embraced his identity as a veteran and worked on behalf of veterans in ways that ranged from playing frequently at GI coffee houses, visiting soldiers in VA hospitals, and participating in demonstrations. Starting in 1987, McDonald spearheaded an effort to establish a Vietnam War Memorial in Berkeley to honor local people who had died in the war, an effort that bore fruit in 1995 with the dedication of the memorial on Veterans Day.
In 1985, McDonald issued an album titled The Vietnam Experience, an expansive work that addresses the war from many perspectives in a range of musical styles. It opens with “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag” and includes songs about issues confronting veterans such as “Agent Orange Song.” “Vietnam Veteran Still Alive” is from the point of view of a soldier who goes off eagerly to fight for his country, returning home to discover that he is considered the enemy. “The Girl Next Door (Combat Nurse)” is a tribute to the women who served in this capacity, while “Vietnam Requiem” is a long instrumental work that charts an emotional trajectory. The focus of the album is on the experiences of those who were there; it is McDonald’s ultimate musical expression of what being a veteran meant to him.
Jimi Hendrix performs with another soldier from the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Although Jimi Hendrix talked about his time in the military, he did not identify as a veteran to the degree that McDonald ultimately did. In 1961, after being arrested for riding in a stolen car, Hendrix accepted a plea bargain that entailed he enlist in the Army for three years. Hendrix liked the idea of being a paratrooper and served in 101st Airborne, the famous Screaming Eagles, at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. He enjoyed the experience of parachuting and was proud of his Screaming Eagle patch. However, he soured on military life as he came to feel that it was standing in the way of his career in music. He assembled a band that played out on the weekends but was itching to move on. His attitude deteriorated; he was described by superiors as an “habitual offender” when it came to curfews and so preoccupied with music that “his mind apparently cannot function while performing duties and thinking about his guitar." After about a year of service, he was granted an honorable discharge.
Even if Hendrix came to see military service as an impediment to has nascent career as a musician, his time in the Army served him well in some important respects. For one thing, it placed him in the South. While this was undoubtedly a mixed blessing for a young African American man from Seattle, it gave him the opportunity to serve an apprenticeship playing in R&B bands around Memphis and in the southern clubs that made up the so-called Chitlin Circuit. During this time, Hendrix substantially developed his guitar technique and became prominent enough to be recruited to play by long-established acts like Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. This brought him to New York City, ultimately his primary home, where Chas Chandler, bassist for the Animals, saw him and offered to take him to London and make him a star. The rest, as they say, is history.
It was also in the Army that Hendrix met bassist Billy Cox, with whom he jammed at Fort Campbell and who became one of his closest friends and an important musical collaborator in the last years of his life. Hendrix and Cox were both discharged in 1962 and formed a group in Memphis called the King Kasuals. Larry Lee, then a student at Tennessee State University and a budding songwriter at Stax Records, heard them at the Del Morroco club, became a close friend of Hendrix’s, and eventually joined the band. In 1969, at a time of great personal and professional turmoil, Hendrix called on his old friends to join him at Woodstock in the group he called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows. The group played a few shows around New York after the festival and recorded some tracks but did not last long. Lee returned to Memphis where he went to work at Stax and with Al Green; Cox stayed on and played bass in Hendrix’s next, equally short-lived Band of Gypsies. He also played with Hendrix on the Cry of Love Tour that would prove to be Hendrix’s last.
Jimi Hendrix - The Star Spangled Banner [ National Anthem ] ( Live at Woodstock 1969 )
Unlike Country Joe McDonald, who was born into political activism, Hendrix was always circumspect about politics and reluctant to express his views publicly, although he was frequently pressured to do so. Although Hendrix’s 1967 song “Purple Haze” was probably about hallucinogenic experience rather than the fog of war, it was anthemic to soldiers in Vietnam, possibly because they could connect its imagery with the thick purple smoke produced by the M-18 grenades used to indicate landing zones for helicopters and the use of the word “hazed” in the GI vernacular to describe the exhaustion attendant on patrolling in the jungle. More important than such connections, however, was the way “’Purple Haze’ echoed what the soldiers were seeing and feeling: confusion, anger, defiance, and a deep sadness over a situation that made less and less sense as the years dragged on” (Bradley and Werner).
Hendrix used his uncanny ability to wrench extraordinary sounds from his guitar to express those feelings of confusion, anger and defiance in the two of his songs that most directly address the Vietnam War. The most direct of these is “Machine Gun,” which Hendrix performed with the Band of Gypsies, recorded live at the Fillmore East in New York City. The lyrics describe the visceral experience of being shot. Like McDonald, Hendrix seems to place blame for the violence not on those perpetrating it but on figures of authority: “Evil man make me kill you/Even though we're only families apart.” Drummer Buddy Miles uses a “rat-a-tat” figure that evokes machine fire, a motif Hendrix takes up on the guitar. In the last quarter of the song, Hendrix’s guitar playing becomes increasingly distorted and anguished, but also seemingly resigned to the inevitable.
Hendrix’s other performance that is often taken to be an anti-war statement is his performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock (in fact, Hendrix had been performing the national anthem in his style for over a year, but Woodstock is the iconic performance). Hendrix begins with intense guitar cacophony from which emerges the recognizable melody, distorted and extended. Hendrix pulls extraordinary sounds from his guitar to evoke bombing and the attendant chaos. At one level, Hendrix provides sonic illustration of the depiction of warfare in the song’s lyrics. However, in the context of the spring of 1969, when the number of American troops in Vietnam peaked before being drawn down, and Hamburger Hill, a brutal battle fought by Hendrix’s old unit, the 101st Airborne at great human cost contributed to growing anti-war sentiment, it is not surprising that his performance was heard by many as a scathing indictment of the war, especially at a counter cultural music festival. When he appeared on Dick Cavett’s television talk show shortly after Woodstock, Hendrix addressed his own performance with typical reserve, observing that he had been made to sing the song as a school child and adding, “All I did was play it. I’m American, so I played it . . . it’s not unorthodox. I thought it was beautiful.”
McDonald once astutely observed, “my generation had not been allowed to grow up together. Some of my peers avoided military service because of the war, and others had never had the experience of going to rock shows and love-ins in the 1960s because of the war.” As musicians who straddled this experiential divide, both Hendrix and McDonald, in their different ways, created art that was deeply meaningful to people on both sides.
Philip Auslander
Atlanta, Georgia
October 2026
Philip Auslander writes frequently on performance, music, and art. His most recent books are In Concert: Performing Musical Persona, published in 2021, the third edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, and Women Rock! Portraits in Popular Music, both 2023. Dr. Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, and the Editor of The Art Section.
Philip Auslander
Photo: Marie Thomas
From Service to Self-Expression: Veterans in the Arts is a series of articles and "live" conversations on artists who have served, who are from military families, or whose work is about the military.