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Jimi Hendrix Week: "I played Jimi's Woodstock Strat"
An encounter with the world's most valuable guitar
Neville Marten, Tue 21 Oct 2008, 2:17 pm UTC
Having cleaned the whole guitar and polished the frets the next step was to restring it and set the action. It was weird to realise that the last person to do this might well have been Hendrix himself, as there are well-known photos of him doing it backstage before a gig.
I threaded each string through the guitar's tremolo block, over the individual saddles, up over the reversed nut and onto the 'F'-stamped Kluson tuners. It didn't need a lot more doing to it, but I tweaked the saddle heights, made minor intonation and pickup adjustments and that was it.
I did plug it in to an amp, but as I am right-handed and it was strung upside-down, a quick Little Wing was out of the question so I simply played a few notes to check that the electrics worked.
A world record auction
In a final twist, I wrote up the guitar's story for Guitarist magazine and postulated that it might make £100,000 at auction. Having been asked to submit the article to Fender for their perusal prior to publication, it was suggested I reduce my estimate to £10,000, as the original figure was unthinkable to Fender.
In the event it sold at Sotheby's for £198,000 – a record in 1990, when 'celebrity' guitars were a new phenomena.
Since then the Woodstock Strat has changed hands again. Today it sits in the EMP museum in Seattle, Hendrix's birthplace.
It's never been confirmed, but many reports suggest Microsoft's Paul Allen (the software company's right-hand man to Bill Gates) paid more than $2m for this guitar a decade ago...
So I shudder to think what Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock Stratocaster is now worth. But I'm proud to say that in my own small way I might have contributed something to rock guitar history…
Neville Marten is an ex-Editor of Guitarist, and current Editor of Guitar Techniques.
