Monterey Pop Festival

The Monterey International Pop Festival (June 16th to 18th 1967) took place one weekend in June 1967 in a town in California halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Three days of music, LSD and marijuana. It changed the face of rock music. So much so that it was the beginning of rock music as most Americans now understand it. It is why Elvis and the early Beatles now seem dated.

This was where Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Ravi Shankar, Otis Redding and The Who all made a name for themselves among white Americans. It kicked off the Summer of Love: hippies and flower children. Make love not war. Groovy, man. All that.

Over 200,000 came. It was not as big or famous as Woodstock two years later, but its effect on rock music ran much deeper. Woodstock merely confirmed the changes that Monterey had started.

The band the Mamas & the Papas and their producer Lou Adler put the festival together. They were able to persuade the top bands in San Francisco and others to play for free. Only Shankar played for money. And they were able to persuade Monterey that their town would be left standing after it was all over.

The money the festival made was to go to help the poor in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but in fact the bookkeeper disappeared with it!

Who played:

Friday Evening, June 16

• The Association
• The Paupers
• Lou Rawls
• Beverly
• Johnny Rivers
• Eric Burdon & The Animals
• Simon & Garfunkel

Saturday Afternoon, June 17

• Canned Heat
• Big Brother & The Holding Company (Janis Joplin)
• Country Joe & The Fish
• Al Kooper
• The Butterfield Blues Band
• Quicksilver Messenger Service
• The Steve Miller Band
• The Electric Flag

Saturday Night, June 17

• Moby Grape
• Hugh Masekela
• The Byrds
• The Butterfield Blues Band
• Laura Nyro
• Jefferson Airplane
• Booker T. & The M.G.’s with The Mar-Keys
• Otis Redding

Sunday Afternoon, June 18

• Ravi Shankar

Sunday Evening, June 18

• The Blues Project
• Big Brother & The Holding Company (Janis Joplin)
• The Group With No Name
• Buffalo Springfield
• The Who
• The Grateful Dead
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience
• Scott McKenzie
• The Mamas & The Papas

The three most striking acts:

• Janis Joplin, a white girl from Texas who sang the blues. The music possessed her, as if she had become the music.
• The Who sang “My Generation”, a song written about the London they knew, but somehow it worked. But then people were shocked when they saw Peter Townshend smash his guitar to bits.
• Jimi Hendrix played guitar better than anyone imagined possible. And he could play it with his teeth, behind his back – any way he felt like, it seemed. He made love to his guitar and then set it on fire!

You would not know it now, but at the time the Mamas & The Papas were the star act. They even wrote a song for it: “San Francisco (Put Flowers in Your Hair)”. But by the third day when they sang and closed the festival, they had become has-beens.

See also:

• California
• Woodstock
• Jimi Hendrix
• Clive Davis – who was there and immediately signed Janis Joplin for Columbia Records