A look back at the influential 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. Pictured: Jimi Hendrix.
Festival featuring little-known acts was a novel notion
Jimi Hendrix didn’t set out to be a pyromaniac. But after he lost a coin toss to Pete Townshend, meaning he would go onstage after the Who at the Monterey International Pop Festival, he had no choice but to top his rival’s guitar-smashing antics. That’s when the lighter fluid came out. The original three-day outdoor concert held June 16-18, 1967, at the fairgrounds in Monterey, preceded Woodstock by two years and featured some of the biggest rock acts of the day, including the Mamas & the Papas, the Byrds and the Association.
It was a watershed moment for rock music, when maverick artists such as Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Otis Redding, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin — all relative unknowns at the time — triumphed over the polished chart acts on the bill.
“The reason we had acts like Simon & Garfunkel was to have a draw and then be able to expose a lot of the acts no one had seen or heard,” says Lou Adler, the sprightly 83year-old Los Angeles music industry mogul who produced the event with the late John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas. “The acts out of San Francisco were well known in that area, but not on an international scale.”
Exactly 50 years later, the festival will return with the same name, at the same location, over the same weekend, Friday-Sunday, June 16-18.
The performers — a carefully considered balance of major names and rising stars on just one stage include Norah Jones, Jack Johnson, Father John Misty, Kurt Vile and the Violators, the Head and the Heart, Gary Clark Jr. and Leon Bridges, among others — will honor Monterey Pop in their own way.
“Hendrix was doing his hands with the flames like it was some kind of spiritual strange Creole thing, and it was just amazing to watch. Putting your guitar down and setting it on fire, we were like, ‘Whoa!’ ” Grace Slick, above, singer with the Jefferson Airplane
Gregg Perloff, the chief executive of Another Planet Entertainment, the independent Berkeley promoter putting on the show with Goldenvoice, the company behind the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival and Desert Trip, emphasizes that this year’s Monterey Pop isn’t about re-creating what happened during the Summer of Love, “but we did want to find little parallels.”
Adler and Phillips conceived the idea back in the ’60s, on the same site as the Monterey Jazz Festival, in a bid to get rock ’n’ roll taken seriously.
“There was a discussion a few weeks before the festival that included Cass Elliot, Paul McCartney, myself, and John and Michelle Phillips, where we asked why wasn’t rock ’n’ roll considered an art form in the same way as jazz?” Adler recalls.
Then they decided to make the festival a charity event, knowing they probably wouldn’t be able to pay the artists. Adler put together a board of governors that included Mick Jagger, Brian Wilson, Paul Simon, Donovan, Smokey Robinson and McCartney. The group never officially met, but their names were strong enough to persuade the artists on the bill to perform for free.
“The overall feel of the festival was that it was really happening,” Adler says. “It was not only the performance, but the reaction from the crowd. There was a give and take between the audience and the performers.”
For Hendrix and the Who, the festival provided a critical introduction to a larger audience. Director D.A. Pennebaker’s film crew was on board to shoot the “Monterey Pop” documentary, and there was talk of ABC broadcasting highlights from the concert on television as its prime-time movie of the week.
“It was a phenomenal gathering of musicians,” says Steve Miller. “It was one act after another that you really wanted to see: Laura Nyro, Simon & Garfunkel, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Who and Jimi Hendrix. It was three days of amazing music.”
Hendrix and Townshend almost came to blows backstage because neither wanted to follow the other, according to Adler. After Hendrix lost the coin toss to Townshend, he jumped up on a chair and vowed to pull out all the stops during his set.
“Hendrix and Townshend were familiar with each other’s act because they had both played in England,” Adler says. “They were trying to top each other or be more explosive
than the other before the other came on.”
Following an introduction by Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, who introduced him as “the most exciting guitarist I’ve ever heard,” Hendrix followed the Who’s instrument-destroying set by deftly blazing through his early singles “Hey Joe” and “Purple Haze,” as well as covers of Howlin’ Wolf ’s “Killing Floor” and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”
About 40 minutes later, he closed his set with a showstopping cover of “Wild Thing,” during which he played his guitar behind his back, set it aflame, smashed it to pieces and tossed the fragments into the stunned crowd.
“We were all on the side of the stage behind the black curtain, and we were just as excited as the audience,” Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone three years ago. “Hendrix was doing his hands with the flames like it was some kind of spiritual strange Creole thing, and it was just amazing to watch. Putting your guitar down and setting it on fire, we were like, ‘Whoa!’ ”
But Hendrix’s performance was just one of the moments that defined Monterey Pop, the event that best captured the spirit of the Summer of Love.
There was also Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, who delivered that jaw-dropping rendition of “Ball and Chain” that propelled the singer to solo fame.
Redding crossed over to an entirely new audience with his explosive soul and blues — just six months before he tragically died in a plane crash.
“The Beach Boys had confirmed but then decided not to play, which put Otis Redding in the Saturday-night headlining spot,” Adler says.
And the Who was hardly overshadowed by Hendrix. The British rock quartet closed its 30-minute set with a flurry of smoke bombs, wrecking the stage and its instruments in the process.
“The guitar players in our group were cringing, since we didn’t have that kind of money,” Slick said in that 2014 interview. “But I thought it was wonderful.”
Yet, despite its status in rock ’n’ roll history, the actual event was relatively low-key.
“Everybody assumes it was like Woodstock, but there were probably 10,000 people, total,” says Pennebaker, who had also shot “Don’t Look Back,” the groundbreaking documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 British tour.
It was a place where outsiders from all over the country congregated, leaving their small tribe of friends back home behind to find thousands
of like-minded souls swathed in tie-dye, covered in face paint, greeting each other with flowers and peace signs. Each festivalgoer received an orchid specially flown in from Hawaii while passing the giant Buddha sculpture at the festival’s entrance gates.
The revived Monterey Pop also will host just 10,000 people per day, the maximum capacity for the venue.
“It’s not like some big festival,” says Perloff. “It’s tiny. People will come together as one unit. The socialization is totally different than being at Outside Lands.”
Phil Lesh, who performed at the 1967 Monterey Pop with the Grateful Dead, will return with his band Terrapin Station. Booker T., whose band the M.G.’s played their own set and backed Redding at the original festival, also will return with his Stax Revue. As will Eric Burdon and the Animals.
“Fifty years on, Monterey Pop remains the original from which all subsequent festivals grew, and it is truly an honor to be able to revisit that spirit with the fine young musicians in this band,” Lesh said in a statement.
Many performers on this year’s bill, meanwhile, plan to pay tribute to the acts who performed the original festival with special covers: Jack Johnson covering the Steve Miller Band; Leon Bridges performing Redding hits; Gary Clark Jr. channeling Hendrix, and more.
A second Monterey Pop festival, originally planned for 1968, was quashed by the residents and city officials of the then-conservative coastal town, who claimed that the concert resulted in the sale of pornographic literature, trafficking in narcotics and an invasion of “undesirables,” according to an article in Rolling Stone magazine at the time.
The current residents of Monterey, many of whom attended the original festival, have changed their tune, says John McCleary, board member of the Monterey History and Art Association, who is spearheading the city’s anniversary celebrations.
Other notable Summer of Lovetheme events in Monterey include a “Feeling Groovy” art exhibition at the Monterey Regional Airport, hosted through the end of the year; and a Monterey Pop photography show at the Monterey Museum of Art that runs through Sept. 18.
Additionally, the newly restored Pennebaker film “Monterey Pop” will get a theatrical release in June.
At the original festival, ticket prices ranged from $3 to $6.50 per day. For the 50th anniversary concert, tickets run $105 to $695 for a VIP reserved seat for the weekend.
“Back then, to do a concert was an extreme thing to do — a festival was unheard of,” says Perloff. “It was all sports. Corporate America wouldn’t even consider being involved with music. It’s neat to watch what we do become so much more accepted. My hat’s off to Lou Adler. We had no desire to do this without him.”