The Monterey International Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16–18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who, and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin, and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience.
The festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and generally is regarded as one of the beginnings of the "Summer of Love" in 1967 and the public debut of the hippie, flower power, and flower children movements and era. Because Monterey was widely promoted and heavily attended, featured historic performances, and was the subject of a popular theatrical documentary film, it became an inspiration and a template for future music festivals, including the Woodstock Festival two years later. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner said "Monterey was the nexus: It sprang from what the Beatles began, and from it sprang what followed."Hoskyns, Barney, Waiting for the Sun, St. Martin's Press, 1996, pg. 146
Background
In early 1967, Michael Bowen produced the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where many attendees dropped acid the first time and listened to Timothy Leary tell the crowd that people living in cities should reorganize as tribes and villages. This was one of the important precursors to the Summer of Love five months later. The Human Be-In directly inspired the Monterey International Pop Festival.
The first American hippie-style rock festival was held June 10–11 at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, produced by radio station KFRC as the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival. Star performers included the Doors, the Sons of Champlin, the Steve Miller Blues Band, Jefferson Airplane, Hugh Masekela, Country Joe and the Fish, Canned Heat, and the Byrds; the latter six acts also played Monterey Pop one week later.Santelli. Aquarius Rising – The Rock Festival Years. Pg. 16.Lang, Michael (June 30, 2009). The Road to Woodstock (p. 58). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.Browne, David. (June 5, 2014). "The Birth of the Rock Fest". Rolling Stone.Kubernik, Harvey and Kubernik, Kenneth. A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival. 2011. Santa Monica Press LLC. Pg. 54.
Planning
The festival was planned in seven weeks by John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, record producer Lou Adler, event producer Alan Pariser and publicist Derek Taylor. Monterey had been known as the site for the long-running Monterey Jazz Festival; the promoters saw a notional Monterey Pop festival as a way to validate rock music as an art form in the way in which jazz and folk were regarded. Taylor announced the festival on March 25, 1967, in his regular column for Disc and Music Echo magazine. The festival's board of governors included some such as Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy who displayed initial enthusiasm but did little to organize the event. Paul McCartney, of the Beatles, who had recently joined the board of governors, strongly advocated for the inclusion of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, reportedly telling organizers that the event would be "incomplete" without him—and reportedly agreeing to serve on the board only if Hendrix were booked. Originally written in 1967 for Newsweek magazine, whose editors reduced it from 43 to 10 paragraphs. Printed in full in the 2003 book Flashbacks . The Monterey Jazz stage manager, Paul Vieregee, was brought in to supervise the stage for the pop festival, and the same sound company was hired: McCune Sound. Local sound company Meagher Electronics contributed loudspeakers and electronics, combining their gear with McCune's.
The artists performed for free, with all revenue donated to charity, except for Ravi Shankar, who was paid $3,000 for his afternoon-long performance on the sitar. Country Joe and the Fish were paid $5,000, not by the festival, but from revenue generated from the D. A. Pennebaker documentary, Monterey Pop. The artists did, however, have their flights and accommodation paid for. Apart from Shankar, each act was given up to 40 minutes for their performance. Several ended their sets earlier, including the Who, who played for only 26 minutes.
Monterey's bill boasted a lineup that put established stars like the Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds alongside groundbreaking new acts from the UK and the U.S.
Crowd estimates for the festival have ranged from 25,000 to 90,000 people, which congregated in and around the festival grounds.Santelli, Robert. Aquarius Rising – The Rock Festival Years. 1980. Dell Publishing Co., Inc. Pg. 264.Lang, Michael (June 30, 2009). The Road to Woodstock (p. 53). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. The county fairgrounds' largest performance venue, an outdoor livestock arena with a stage at one end, had an approved festival capacity of 7,000, but it was estimated that 8,500 jammed into it for Saturday night's show, with many extra attendees standing around the sides of the arena.Santelli. Aquarius Rising – The Rock Festival Years. Pp. 22, 44. Festival-goers who wanted to see the musical performances were required to have either an 'all-festival' ticket or a separate ticket for each of the five scheduled concert events they wanted to attend in the arena: Friday night, Saturday afternoon and night, and Sunday afternoon and night. Ticket prices varied by seating area, and ranged from $3 to $6.50 ($– in , adjusted for inflation).Santelli. Aquarius Rising – The Rock Festival Years. Pp. 25–26, 32, 41.
The song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" was written by Phillips and sung by Scott McKenzie, released in May 1967, to promote the event.
Performances Friday night The Los Angeles–based band the Association with hits such as "Along Comes Mary" and "Never My Love" was the first act to perform at the festival. Newsweek magazine's reporter Michael Lydon reviewed their performance as having a "professional style and entertaining manner," especially on their latest hit single "Windy", which was rising steadily on the Billboard Hot 100.
The Association was followed by the Paupers, a rock band from Toronto, who delivered with "screaming volume and a racy quality," according to Lydon. The Paupers were proud to be judged on their music alone, not relying on "gimmicks" or lighting effects.
The next act was blues singer Lou Rawls fronting a big band, the song arrangements conveying a "rock 'n' soul" style. Rawls also spoke to the crowd about the gritty experiences of African American life. After his set, he said to reporters that he was confident that "the blues is the way of the future. The fads come and go, but the blues remain. The blues is the music that makes a universal language." He described how rock artists were increasingly drawing from the blues to give their music more substance.
Beverley Martyn sang a short set followed by Johnny Rivers. After Rivers was Eric Burdon leading his new incarnation of the Animals, introduced as the New Animals, re-interpreting the Stones song "Paint It Black", adding electric violin. With this appearance, Burdon signaled a change to more of a politically charged hard rock style mixed with psychedelia. He later wrote the song "Monterey" about his experience at the concert.
The headliner of Friday night was Simon & Garfunkel, who started after midnight, and performed minimally with just two voices and one guitar. They finished at 1:30 am on Saturday morning. Lydon reviewed their set as sweetly retrospective, but "they seemed sadly left behind" by the shifting of rock music away from the duo's established folk rock style.
Saturday afternoon
Canned Heat started the Saturday afternoon show; their set was deemed "uninspired" by Lydon. In a thrilling display of raw emotion, Janis Joplin sang next, backed by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Joplin's wildly elemental interpretation of the blues standard "Ball and Chain" was described by Lydon as "the blues big mama style, tough, raw, and gutsy, and with an aching that few black singers reach." For the first time at Monterey Pop, the audience rose to their feet. This Saturday set was not recorded by filmmaker Pennebaker, so the group was asked to play again on Sunday night. San Francisco Examiner music critic Phil Elwood wrote that Joplin proved to be "the real queen of the festival".Phil Elwood, “Dreams Come True in Monterey,” San Francisco Examiner, June 19, 1967 This ended up being Joplin's breakout appearance, bringing her fame far beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. Columbia Records signed Big Brother and the Holding Company on the basis of their performance at Monterey.
Country Joe and the Fish came next, delivering a funny performance with an anti-war message. Guitarist and songwriter Barry Melton said afterward that he put political messages in the band's music because "we feel that in this society, you have to make your stance clear. Others don't want to speak up in songs, be right up front." Melton said that taking LSD was part of his "liberation", allowing him to draw from many different musical genres. "When I hear a sound that is groovy I use it. I try to find music all over the place. Listening to anything can give you musical ideas. That's freedom, and maybe that's psychedelic."
Organist Al Kooper sang and played two extended songs for a half hour, followed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band who were appraised by Lydon as reinvigorating the crowd with "precisely" interpreted blues without being "uptight". One of Paul Butterfield's standout harmonica solos was described as an exercise in serialism, breaking a "few notes into tiny bits and experiment[ing] with their regroupings." The next two bands were dismissed by Lydon as forgettable sets: Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Steve Miller Band.
The final set of Saturday afternoon was the Electric Flag, a band led by guitarist Mike Bloomfield, containing Buddy Miles on drums, Barry Goldberg on organ, and Nick Gravenites singing in front. Their act was hailed as a "smash success" by Lydon. David Crosby announced later that night that if anyone in the audience had failed to see Electric Flag play, "man, you are out of it, so far out of it."
Saturday night Moby Grape kicked off Saturday evening's concert with an unmemorable performance, according to Lydon. Due to legal and managerial disputes, the group was not included in the Pennebaker-produced film. Some of the Moby Grape footage was shown in 2007 as part of the 40th anniversary celebration of the film. An outtake of Moby Grape's performance of "Hey Grandma" appears on the bonus disc of the Criterion release of the film. Regarding the decision for Moby Grape to open the evening, guitarist Jerry Miller recalled that "everybody was arguing. Nobody wanted to play first and I said that would be fine for me."
Moby Grape was followed by a "terrible" showing by South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, helped only by a spirited display by Danny "Big Black" Rey on the congas. The Byrds sang some hits and some new songs, but did not energize the crowd. The band ended with a new single, "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star", featuring Masekela on trumpet, reprising his participation in the studio recording.