Star Spangled Banner, Jimi Hendrix (1969)

For baby boomers, no rendition of our national anthem is more potent than the one performed in the final set of Woodstock by Jimi Hendrix. I don't know what people encountering his Star Spangled Banner for the first time might think about it now, but then, it was the very personification of the socio-political conflicts of the era from whence it came.

I have already written about how Hendrix's cover of All Along the Watchtower represented the chaos of that time period in a way that Bob Dylan never anticipated - and himself applauded. That was the thing about Hendrix - he channeled mayhem in a way no one else could, or dared to.

One can hardly imagine what Francis Scott Key might have thought about this particular cover. Hendrix had been performing it in live shows throughout the year before Woodstock, and not always to appreciative reception. There were concerns about whether he should perform it at all in a venue that was supposed to be all about peace, love and understanding. But he did - albeit 10 hours behind schedule from all of the technical difficulties the event had contended with.

In fact, the sun was rising on the new day as, with the instrument that gave him voice, Hendrix contorts and bends the anthem into submission, with and without a wah wah pedal, screaming feedback alternating with melodic interludes that had the audience utterly rapt for four minutes - then he transitioned without a break directly into Purple Haze. There's even a few seconds of the bugle call from Taps thrown in for good measure, a requiem if there ever was one.

All of this played out against the backdrop of an ever-escalating undeclared war in Vietnam. In just a few more months, President Nixon, by executive order, reinstituted the draft, and young men I knew personally began to quake in their boots as the "lottery" that was devised to handle this put them squarely in the crosshairs.

Was the Star Spangled Banner, Woodstock edition, an act of pure contempt or a clarion call for everyone to face up to what was happening in the world? On this 235th American Independence Day, I only know that we are allowed to decide the answer to that for ourselves.

Like A Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan (1965)

... the songs on this specific record are not so much songs but rather exercises in tonal breath control ... the subject matter - tho meaningless as it is - has something to do with the beautiful strangers ... the beautiful strangers, Vivaldi's green jacket and the holy slow train

Whatever you say, Bob. Liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited notwithstanding, this song meant everything to an entire generation, and still today - when that snare drum is struck and the opening strains pour out - the power of Like A Rolling Stone over Dylan fans is inescapable. It's one of an elite group of songs from that time period that broke the mold, to the extent that there was one - a song that got so real, with its contempt of the phony, the clueless and the self-important, that it seemed more a palpable organism than a song. Never clear who exactly it was directed toward - some claiming the flagellation was an expression of his own self-loathing at a difficult time in his life rather than any specific individual - it's not at all necessary to know the answer.

In terms of his use of the language, Dylan to me is very Shakespearean. In Macbeth, where Shakespeare writes, "Tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," I'm struck dumb by the power of the particular words, weapons of artistry slashing illusions all to bits. Like A Rolling Stone, a work of art from a different century, does the same.

But it's not just the enormous impact of the words on the page. It's the delivery. It's the instrument - the electrifying Dylan voice, bending words into syllables you never knew existed, snarling his verse to his heart's - and our - delight. No one can tell me he has a terrible voice. It is the precise opposite - beautiful, the more so if you can watch him when he sings.

In his 1988 speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen, remembering when he first heard Like A Rolling Stone on the radio riding in the car with his mother, described Dylan's voice as one that "reached down and touched what little worldliness a fifteen-year-old high school kid in New Jersey had in him at the time.

"Dylan was a revolutionary. Bob freed the mind the way Elvis freed the body. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual. He had the vision and the talent to make a pop song that contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and changed the face of rock and roll forever."

Was Dylan just a vessel from which the poetry flowed? As with Hendrix, it can seem as though he doesn't have a lot to do with what's happening in front of us, like he was hand-picked to be our generation's oracle and is just bringing us what we're supposed to hear, in that time, in that place.

In 2004, Rolling Stone named Like A Rolling Stone #1 on the list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, saying, "No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time." That's debatable, of course, but I have no problem with them making the claim. It's a masterpiece.

All Along the Watchtower, Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968)

There must be some kinda way outa here, said the joker to the thief ...

In a week where a major presidential candidate got real about race, and the 5th "anniversary" of the Iraq war was remarked upon more times than I care to count, I don't think there can be a more appropriate song to examine than Jimi Hendrix' incendiary cover of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower.

I've been reading pages online of the book A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America by Craig Werner, and in it a chapter explores how much Hendrix' music resonated with the integrated troops in Vietnam. Excerpting now from another source referenced in the book, Nine Meditations on Jimi and Nam, Roger Steffens says, "He represented a way to listen to the sound of your own outer limits. Being there and listening to him, no matter what the kids back home thought his music meant, they could never connect at the level we did. We were in the right zone to tune in. More intensity, more extremism ... "

Hendrix was a game-changer, there can be no doubt about that. I have been wrestling with what song best exemplifies his essence, zig-zagging between one original song of his and another, but in the end, the All Along the Watchtower cover is the powerhouse to me - the one that best showcases Jimi in all his glory in relation to the times in which he lived.

That it was an entirely different kind of song in Dylan's hands perhaps makes it even more fascinating; Dylan himself was blown away by its transformation and said in a 1995 interview, "It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day."

Maybe this version of the song has been part of the soundtrack of too many China Beaches and A Bronx Tales, but if so, it's only because it evokes exactly what you'd want it to, with the first 18 seconds of the intro screaming out War Zone! whether it's on our soil or someone else's. I can't think of another intro that comes across as ominously as this one ... and it's probably a good thing, because it is so harrowing.

The world was too much for Jimi Hendrix; what he was able to tap into to produce the music he did, the way he did it, would probably have killed a lot of us even sooner than it did him. In some of the footage of him in performance, it almost looks like he's just a vessel through which the intensity and extremity of that time was pre-ordained to flow. He would be 65 now ... it's difficult to imagine what else he might have given us had he lived.

Nature's Way, Spirit (1970)

One month before Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, teens were hearing from the world-conscious L.A. band Spirit about life's fragility and the importance of caring for the environment.

A beautiful song sung by the late Randy California, who formed the group as a teenager with his stepfather Ed Cassidy, Nature's Way was a very harmonic convergence of jazz, folk and rock. As one of the founders of my high school's first Earth Day earlier that year, the song resonated, to put it mildly.

A chance meeting with Jimi Hendrix in New York City led the precocious guitarist California, at the tender age of 15, to a regular gig for 3 months with Hendrix' precursor band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. (This interview with Randy has some nifty background on those days in Hendrix' orbit.) Randy just missed becoming part of the Jimi Hendrix Experience when his parents nixed the idea of him accompanying Jimi on tour to England in 1966.

The much-older Cassidy had played drums with the legendary Art Pepper and Thelonius Monk. These and other influences pervaded Spirit's eclectic and genre-defying repertoire.

Journey to the Center of the Mind, The Amboy Dukes (1968)

Among the various genres of 60s music, acid rock was never overly enthralling to me, but there are exceptions to everything, and Journey to the Center of the Mind is one of them.

Arguably in a class by itself, Journey to the Center of the Mind had something these other songs didn't - drumming by Dave Palmer that rocked harder than almost anything I'd ever heard, John Drake's commanding vocals, and the blistering guitar licks of the Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent. The outrageous 45-second intro still stops me in my tracks.

To be fair, I don't think this song counts as pure psychedelia; perhaps it's on the psychedelic end of the proto-metal spectrum. Which is curious considering that metal music was never huge with me, either. But as I say, there are exceptions to everything.

Funnily enough, to this day, Nugent - a major opponent of drugs - claims he didn't know the song was about drug use. I don't see how that could possibly be the case given the times, but who am I to contradict The Nuge?

Interestingly, Dave Palmer went on to become an award-winning recording engineer, and in fact worked at the famed Electric Lady Studios in New York City after his Dukes stint, where he had the distinction of playing drums for Jimi Hendrix' first formal recording session. In a day when all studios were owned and operated by the record labels, Hendrix bucked the trend with this state-of-the-art facility, which had its opening party just 13 days before he died.