Monterey Pop Festival

The Monterey International Pop Music Festival took place from June 16 to June 18, 1967.

The Festival

Held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. It was planned by producer Lou Adler, John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, producer Alan Pariser, and publicist Derek Taylor. The festival board included members of The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

The artists performed for free, with all revenue donated to charity, with the exception of Ravi Shankar, who was paid $3,000 for his performance on the Sitar. Over 200,000 people attended the festival, and it is generally regarded (along with the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released two weeks earlier) as the apex of the so-called "Summer of Love".

The festival became legendary for the first major American appearance by Jimi Hendrix (who was booked on the insistence of board member Paul McCartney) and The Who, and it was the first major public performance for Janis Joplin and Otis Redding (who died a few months later).

Many record company executives were in attendance, and many of the performers won recording contracts based on their appearance at the festival. Several acts were also notable for their non-appearance. Several reasons were given for The Beach Boys' cancellation, which was interpreted as admission that could not compete alongside hipper acts. British musician Donovan was refused a visa to enter the United States because of a 1966 drug bust; Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band was also invited to appear but according to the liner notes for the CD reissue of their album Safe AS Milk, the band reportedly turned the offer down at the insistence of guitarist Ry Cooder, who felt the group was not ready. While the Rolling Stones did not play, guitarist Brian Jones attended, introduced Hendrix's performance, and was hailed as the "king of the festival".

Influence

Monterey was the first major rock festival in the world and became the model for future festivals, notably Woodstock -- although unlike Woodstock it was not a profit-making venture and Montereys' various audio and visual products still earn income for the non-profit Monterey Festival foundation.

The festival was the subject of an acclaimed documentary movie entitled Monterey Pop by D. A. Pennebaker. It has been released on DVD by the Criterion Collection as The Complete Monterey Pop Festival. Also, many albums have been released of performances from the festival. Most notable are those featuring the sets by Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and Ravi Shankar. In 1997, a four CD box set was released featuring performances by most of the artists.

Although Monterey was the first major music festival to predominantly feature rock music, the idea of large-scale outdoor festivals held over several consecutive days was not new. In America, the famous three-day Newport Jazz Festival had begun in the 1950s and had provided some immortal moments, including fabled performances by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and Muddy Waters. Its sister event, the Newport Folk Festival, was an annual fixture for the folk movement during the early Sixites, until it was poleaxed by Dylan's watershed electric performance in 1965. Following the Newport model, there were also regular folk and jazz festivals on the west coast, held at Monterey in California.

But these events were relatively small audiences and they were also limited by the nature of the music they featured and by the way it was disseminated to the public at large. The most significant aspect of the Monterey Pop Festival was that it created an entirely new schema for the large outdoor music festivals.

Music writer Rusty DeSoto argues that pop music history tends to downplay the importance of Monterey in favour of the "bigger, higher-profile, more decadent " Woodstock Festival, held two years later. But, as he notes:

"... Monterey Pop was a seminal event: it was the first real rock festival ever held, featuring debut performances of bands that would shape the history of rock and affect popular culture from that day forward. The County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California ... had been home to folk, jazz and blues festivals for many years. But the weekend of June 16 - 18, 1967 was the first time it was used to showcase rock music."

With the Beatles' historic first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and Woodstock, Monterey was among the most important musical events of the Sixties. Monterey was a big event even by today's standards -- daily attendance peaked at 50,000 and over 200,000 people attended across the three days -- yet there were no deaths, no injuries, no overdoses, no violence and no arrests. The Monterey Deputy Chief of Police was quoted as saying "We've had more trouble at PTA conventions".

The festival was a triumph of organisation and cooperation, setting a standard that few subsequent festivals have ever matched, and was doubly remarkable given that nothing quite like it had ever been staged before.

Lou Adler: "I'd been in the music business since 1957, and had worked every kind of hall as a manager. I was all too familiar with how acts were treated -- the dressing rooms were toilets, there wasn't a restaurant open by the time the show was over, the accommodations were, 'Oh, I'm sorry, the guy forgot to make them,' and all the rest.

"So our idea for Monterey was to provide the best of everything -- sound equipment, sleeping and eating accommodations, transportation -- services that had never been provided for the artist before Monterey ...

"... We set up camp, brought in a construction crew, established a communications center, and assigned a crew armed with walkie-talkies to canvass the entire Fairgrounds.

"The transportation crew we organized included not only cars and drivers for all the acts, but scooters, motorcycles, bicycles, whatever else it took to get around. We had cleanup crews, and an arts committee to oversee the booths and displays.

"We set up an on-site first aid clinic, because we knew there would be a need for medical supervision and that we would encounter drug-related problems. We didn't want people who got themselves into trouble and needed medical attention to go untreated. Nor did we want their problems to ruin or in any way disturb other people or disrupt the music.

"If someone got in trouble they were taken care of as quickly as possible. Dr. Bowersocks of Monterey was in charge of the on-site medical treatment center. In an interview, he said the volunteer first-aid team there was years ahead of its time, citing the one-on-one rapport and communication techniques employed to cool out concert-goers who were freaking out due to ingested substances.

"We established our own security, supervised by David Wheeler. With Wheeler as the liaison, our security worked with the Monterey police. The local law enforcement authorities never expected to like the people they came in contact with as much as they did. They never expected the spirit of 'Music, Love and Flowers' to take over to the point where they'd allow themselves to be festooned with flowers."

Almost every aspect of The Monterey International Pop Festival was a "first". Although the audience was predominantly white, Monterey's bill was truly multi-cultural and crossed all musical boundaries, mixing folk, blues, jazz, soul, R&B, rock, psychedelia, pop and classical genres, boasting a line-up that put established stars like The Who, Simon & Garfunkel and The Byrds alongside groundbreaking new acts from the UK, the USA, South Africa and India.

The festival launched the careers of many who played there, making some of them into stars virtually overnight. They included Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix (already a sensation in the UK and Europe but virtually unknown in the USA), Laura Nyro, Canned Heat, Otis Redding, Steve Miller and Indian sitar maestro Ravi Shankar.

It was also highly significant, in those troubled times, that Monterey was a racially integrated bill that featured white and black performers side by side. Among many debuts, Monterey was the first time that soul star Otis Redding performed in front of a large and predominantly white audience and his appearance there was instrumental in breaking him to the general pop audience.

Monterey was also the first high-profile event to mix acts from major regional music centres in the U.S.A. -- San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis and New York City -- and it was the first time many of these bands had met each other in person. It was a particularly important meeting place for bands from the Bay Area and L.A., who had tended to regard each other with a degree of suspicion -- Frank Zappa for one made no secret of his low regard for some of the 'Frisco bands -- and until that point the two scenes been developing separately and along fairly distinct lines. Big Brother & The Holding Company, for instance, were barely known outside the Bay Area and Monterey was their first major "out-of-town" performance.

The festival's only major "no-show" was the last minute cancellation by The Beach Boys, who were also closely involved in arranging the festival. Although it is now a matter for speculation, it can be argued that an appearance at Monterey, performing their newer repertoire like "Good Vibrations", would have been a crucial step forward in their transition from surf-pop pinups to serious rock band. But tellingly, they were forced to cancel because of problems arising from Carl Wilson's draft resistance.

Monterey also marked a significant changing of the guard in British music. The Who and The Animals represented the UK, with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones conspicuous by their absence. The Beatles had by then retired from touring and The Stones were unable to tour America due the recent drug busts and trials of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Paul McCartney was on the Festival board (he insisted on having Jimi Hendrix added to the bill) and rumours abounded that "The Fabs" were there in disguise, a hope no doubt fuelled by the sight of the Brian Jones, who did attend. Despite his own pending drug charges, Jones appeared on his own, wafting through the crowd, resplendent in full psychedelic regalia, and appearing on stage briefly to introduce Jimi Hendrix. As it transpired, it was two more years before The Stones toured again, by which time the unfortunate Jones was dead; The Beatles never toured again. Meanwhile The Who leaped into the breach and became the top UK touring act of the period.

One extremely important aspect that is rarely acknowledged is that Monterey was also the first true rock benefit concert -- all the performers played for free, and thirty years on the Monterey films, photos, recordings and other materials still generate revenue for the non-profit MIPF Foundation.

In terms of the later directions in rock music, there were two other enormously significant aspects of the festival. Another of its major "firsts" was the festival's innovative sound system, designed and built by audio engineer Abe Jacobs, who started his career doing live sound for San Francisco bands, and went on to become a leading sound designer for the American theatre; among his many achievements were the innovative sound systems for the original New York stage productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar.

Although technical information is limited, Jacobs' groundbreaking Monterey sound system was the progenitor of all the large-scale PA's that followed. It was a key factor in the festival's success and it was greatly appreciated by the artists -- in the Monterey film, David Crosby can clearly be seen saying "Great sound system!" to band-mate Chris Hillman at the start of The Byrds' performance. Nothing like it had been attempted before, as festival organiser Lou Adler recalled: "... we started from scratch. When we moved into the Monterey Fairgrounds ten days before the festival, nothing was there, not even a proper stage to house the kind of amplification that was coming in. We had to build the speaker systems right on the site."

Another intruiging facet of the Festival was the fact that electronic music pioneers Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause set up a booth at Monterey to demonstrate the new electronic music synthesiser developed by Robert Moog. Beaver and Krause had bought one of Moog's first synthesizers in 1966 but they had spent a fruitless year trying to get someone in Hollywood interested in using it. They decided to set up a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and through their exposure there, they gained the interest of acts including The Doors, The Byrds, The Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel and others. This quickly built into a steady stream of business and the eccentric Beaver was soon one of the busiest session men in L.A. playing on Martin Denny's Exotic Moog album and the soundtrack for "Rosemary's Baby", and he and Krause earned a contract with Warner Brothers.

Although the Monterey Pop Festival was the scene of many pop "firsts" perhaps the most important fact about it was the organisers' far-sighted decision to film and record the entire festival. They hired Wally Heider's mobile studio to record all the performances on eight-track tape, and engaged noted filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker to film the proceedings. It was an enormously fortunate conjunction. Heider's mobile studio gave them access to the best remote recording equipment then available, thanks to which many albums' worth of material have since been released. In Pennebaker (who had recently made the legendary Dylan documentary Don't Look Back) they had perhaps the best documentary film-maker of his time, someone who had both a genuine interest in and understanding of popular music and access to newly-developed portable 16mm colour cameras equipped to record synchronised sound. By thus capturing the many magical moments for posterity, the Monterey Pop Festival's organisers ensured its immortality.

Performers

Friday, June 16

Saturday, June 17

Sunday, June 18

1967 in the United States | Concerts | United States music festivals

References

Short Summary of the Festival