Mark Paytress takes a trip back to the greatest pop festival of them all
Article published in Record Collector, April 1994
The Monterey International Pop Festival 1967 | In the months between now and its 25th anniversary in August, you’re going to hear an awful lot about Woodstock: three days of ‘Love and Peace’ which saw half-a-million kids fill Max Yasgur’s fields, build a make-shift city of mud, music and a little mind-blowing madness, and show the world counter-cultural idealism could work.
Immortalised on record and film, these people were harbingers of a new era. Who cares that they packed up their bags and headed back to the cities, some to make their fortunes, some to die and most to a life of inevitable anonymity? (All but a handful missed Jimi Hendrix’s Monday morning set, where he turned America’s national anthem on its head, thus giving social historians a convenient metaphor to illustrate the hippies’ resistance to the Vietnam War.)
The Monterey International Pop Festival 1967
Woodstock is the Sid Vicious of the Love Generation — a convenient symbol that seeks to condense an entire era into a single, potent image. The reality, of course, is a lot messier than Yasgur’s post-festival fields and Sid’s bathroom combined.
Monterey took place just as flower power was hitting the streets of every major capital city, just as the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” topped the album charts, and just prior to the moment when grannies and toddlers alike sang along to “All You Need Is Love”. But even Monterey is no great shakes at encapsulating a generation “in motion”. It’s better-placed, though, chronologically, idealistically, and musically too, than its bigger brother.
PATCHWORK
San Francisco’s beats and pranksters and druggies had commemorated the ‘Death Of The Hippie’ in a Bay Area festival as early as January 1967. The media picked up on its multi-coloured patchwork of esoteric philosophies, bizarre clothes, sprawling, seemingly formless music, wanton drug-taking and free love for all and used it for its own ends.
It was at once a warning that the baby-boomers were abusing their newly-granted freedoms and that a multi-media fashion style that could be sold all over the world. The history of the Monterey International Pop Festival, so often depicted as a compromise between San Francisco’s community politics (“the groups all live together”, joked Frank Zappa) and Los Angeles’ business-minded long-hairs, but at least the event wore some of the contradictions of the burgeoning counter-culture on its sleeve.
At Woodstock, two years later, everybody just got stoned — by that time, there was little worth fighting for anymore, apart from each other, which they did a few months later at Woodstock-in-the-West, Altamont.
The Monterey International Pop Festival 1967
“Monterey took place just as flower power was hitting the streets of every capital city . . . a multicoloured patchwork of esoteric philosophies, bizarre clothes, sprawling, seem-ingly formless music, wanton drug-taking and free love for all.”
This four-disc box (Castle Communications ROK CD 102), shaped like an outsized filofax and bulging with important numbers and at-a-glance sheaves of useful information, styles itself as “The Definitive Document Of The First Great Rock Festival!”. Well, not quite — those who unfurled their tents for the mammoth 20th anniversary radio show (aired in 1987) will be disappointed not to find anything from Simon & Garfunkel, or from the Grateful Dead.
Arguably, some of the three-day festival’s highlights — Eric Burdon and the Animals‘ “Paint It Black”, Country Joe & the Fish‘s “Section 43” and Jefferson Airplane‘s glorious, ten-minute “The Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil” — are all conspicuous in their absence. But if you notice these omissions, chances are that you have them on bootleg or tape anyway.
There are some nice surprises, nevertheless. The Who‘s “Substitute” and “A Quick One While He’s Away”, Canned Heat‘s “Dust My Broom”, two Association performances, four additional Byrds tracks (but not, sadly, “I Know My Rider”), plus extra helpings of the Blues Project and Johnny Rivers, fill gaps left by the bootleggers.
The Monterey International Pop Festival 1967
What you don’t get — and what will have critics of West Coast psychedelia screaming out for the names of Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Electric Prunes, etc. — is, well, much sense of psychedelia at full throttle.
Big Brother’s James Gurley may toss in a screeching solo during “Ball And Chain”, and the dynamic improvising skills of Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen, Spencer Dryden and Jack Casady may raise their pointed little heads during “The Other Side Of This Life”, but the acid-trippers among the seated Monterey audience would have found few illicit musical substances to elevate their collective highs on this evidence. (The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Ravi Shankar sets must have provided a more fulfilling sound safari, but these performances have been available officially for many years.) No, the overriding impression is one of (show)business as usual.
MYTHOLOGY
Not that this detracts from the pleasures of this box, but it does slightly undermine the psychedelic mythology that’s surrounded the festival for the past 25 or so years. The close involvement of L.A. bigwig Lou Adler, and his furry-hatted right-hand man Papa John Phillips, has ensured that, by carefully hand-picking the contributions of Country Joe & the Fish and Jefferson Airplane, and not representing Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape or the Grateful Dead (the latter, at their own request, it seems) at all, that Los Angeles won out over San Francisco after all.
It wasn’t merely a tale of two cities, though: the Festival’s ‘International’ aspect meant that some fine music from the U.K. (the Who, and the recently-imported Hendrix), black Memphis (Otis Redding and Booker T & the MGs), New York (Laura Nyro, Simon & Garfunkel, the Blues Project), Chicago (Butterfield and Bloomfield), Ravi Shankar (India) and Hugh Masekela (South Africa) was on display.
The Monterey International Pop Festival 1967
If the somewhat leaden contributions from Lou Rawls, the Butterfield Blues Band, the Electric Flag and the Blues Project blow the myth of non-stop psychedelic invention sky high, there’s no doubting that Monterey also witnessed some of the finest performances ever made by some of its stars.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience was arguably at its peak, all three members pulling out all the stops as if their lives depended on it; likewise the Who, fired up by the knowledge that everyone would be going to sleep that night with the sound and vision of Jimi’s burning guitar in their heads; Otis Redding sadly had little time left to top his biggest and best ever show; and the shocking sight and shrieks of Janis Joplin never again lived up to her two shows (the first had such a great reception that she was invited back to do it all again).
SECRETS
Some secrets are left intact, though: we’ve still yet to hear just why Laura Nyro‘s long-forgotten set was so poorly received. And why didn’t the Grateful Dead, no strangers to issuing concert recordings on disc, want their performance included? And just what were the Mamas and the Papas on that enabled them to hit those unwelcome notes with such regularly?
Those aside, the accompanying 100-page plus book tells you just about everything you need to know about the Festival, from its fraught beginnings to its enduring charitability (it continues to earn money for a variety of causes). Now let’s see if the Woodstock celebrations can come up with something to rival this.
Leave a Reply