Some concerts are difficult to describe to those who weren’t there.
The impossibility of being able to fully convey the energy of a performance, the mood of the crowd, and the way those two things clashed together to make magic, is the job of a critic, but sometimes we fail.
Sometimes, the music is so good, so big, and the magic is so out of this world that human language isn’t vast enough to capture it all.
And yet, they both live on.
Long after the band has packed up their instruments and left town and the crowd has scattered around the world, all that music and magic is still in the air. It sinks into the venue floor, drips into the foundation, and hits the dirt. The magic from that night grows roots and lives on, forever watered by the next gig and the next gig and so on.
The best magic, like the best music, burrows under the skin and digs down deep. By the time the last chords reverberate through the air, everyone in attendance is carrying that magic with them.
That’s what the Monterey Pop Festival was like. It wasn’t so much each individual performance as the sum total of each band and every person in attendance.
The magic they made is in our marrow now.
I can’t wait to see what fruit that music will bear.
“The Monterey Pop Festival Was a Magical Weekend and Deserves to Be Remembered”
by Alonzo Reid
Staff Reporter
Village Voice, August 1967
“Ooh, this is my song,” Ada yelled again as if Otis could hear them from the lawn. She lifted her hands into the air and began swaying back and forth, a slow and steady seduction that made Alonzo’s knees weak now that he was standing and the joint was hitting. He felt like he was floating. As long as he didn’t drift away from Ada, though, he had no complaints.
Alonzo’s body was a riot of desire. His pulse was pounding on beat with her hips. And his tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth, desperate to recover that briefest taste of her. His fingers were itching to pull his notebook from his back pocket so he could scribble out a few more lines about her without pretense. He needed to discover the language that could adequately capture the beauty of the blue-black tinge of her skin now that the sun had set so he could explain the way she radiated from within. He didn’t need the sun in Ada’s presence, but he would find a less trite way to describe that in revisions. But he couldn’t stop to write because he didn’t want to take his eyes off of her.
She swayed in a circle, and her face lifted in delight when they made eye contact. “That weed taking you down?” she asked.
It took a few seconds for him to process her words, and he shook his head at the speed of a snail.
Her laughter wrapped around him like a blanket as she swayed back to face the stage.
Alonzo reached for her. He was never normally so bold, but he’d wanted to touch Ada all day, even when he was touching her, and especially now that he’d already felt her weight on top of him.
She smiled over her shoulder as his fingers dug into her waist.
There was probably a barb on the tip of her tongue, and a not-so-small masochistic part of him wanted to hear it. He wanted to open his chest and let her cut him to kindling if it made her laugh again. But whatever she’d been about to say, he never heard it.
Horns cut into the night. This was Alonzo’s song, but he didn’t need to tell Ada that. Not with words, at least. Ada let him pull her to him. He turned her until they were chest-to-chest. He wrapped an arm around her as she snuggled her face into the crook of his neck, her breath making goosebumps erupt all over his skin. He held her left hand close to his chest as the song unfolded.
If I could only make you understand.
Peaches and cocoa butter.
A deep rasp that made the hair on their arms stand up.
Fire and marijuana in the air.
Her heart beating an offbeat staccato against his chest.
His own pulse an even, crooning note.
The feel of her breath against his skin.
Her name on his lips, a careful whisper into her ear.
The slow vibration of a shudder running through her body.
Your one and only man.