California Dreamin’
THE POET-NOVELIST ROBERT Penn Warren wrote, “I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge.” He liked to watch the far-reaching ripples of unpredictable cause and effect spread from that crystalline moment when the stone hits the still surface of the pond.
There are times and places where the flow of events becomes focused through an accidental lens—an experience, an event that becomes a turning point in many lives. Our generation is entranced by synchronicity, yet only those most attuned to the flow recognize these confluences for what they are at the time, even when they blunder into them head-on. The Monterey Pop Festival was such a moment for Janis and Big Brother. Their presence at the festival and the effect of their performance were the result of many decisions and turning points, any one of which might have yielded a different result.
For my part, if I hadn’t been at the Pop Festival, I wouldn’t have become the road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company. That’s as close to fact as you can get in the realm of “what if?”
What if Big Brother hadn’t played at Monterey? They might not have signed a management contract with Albert Grossman later that year, maybe never. They might still have achieved the wider renown that launched Janis to even greater fame as the first woman superstar in rock music, for she was a powerful force, probably uncontainable at that point in the evolution of American popular music.
But the alternatives were roads not taken.
We were there, the band and I, borne by ripples set in motion at points far separated in geography and time, and the effect for each of us was life-changing. As a result, I moved from Cambridge to California as the focus of the counterculture shifted from east to west, and I continued to be a participant—in a new capacity—in the music that was pied piper to a decade of innovation and upheaval. For Janis and Big Brother, the attention they gained at the Monterey Pop Festival launched them toward their destiny and summoned the forces that would eventually pull them apart.
At this remove in time, Monterey seems to me the jewel in the crown of the sixties. It was not the largest festival, but the brightest, the most finely formed, where all the benevolent potency that musicians and fans could generate together was made manifest, briefly, like a rainbow, or a ring around the sun, a vision impossible to fix in the physical world, but one whose glow endures in memory, freighted with emotion and meaning.
I’d like to claim that I understood the full significance of the Pop Festival while I was following D. A. Pennebaker around the Monterey County Fairgrounds with a Nagra tape recorder slung from my shoulder, but that would be an abuse of the storyteller’s power. Much later, when I traced how the Pop Festival came about, how Big Brother came to be included and how Pennebaker came to film it, I marveled at the winding paths we followed, each strewn with many “What if?” moments, where a different decision, a different opportunity at any step of the way could have changed everything.
The seeds of the landmark gathering were sown by a quartet of would-be rock entrepreneurs from Los Angeles whose names sounded like a promising law firm: Wheeler, Taylor, Pariser and Shapiro. The idea was simple and visionary—corral as many of the reigning pop stars of the moment as could be persuaded to work for a small fraction of their regular fees to play at a three-day festival that would unfold at the county fairgrounds in Monterey sometime in the summer of 1967. Enlist nobody but headliners. Shoot for the stars. Dazzle the music world and reap the harvest.
Things didn’t work out quite the way these visionaries planned. They needed one act to commit before the rest, as a bellwether, a stalking horse. Get the bandwagon rolling, they thought, and others will jump on board. They approached the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel, separately.
You want us to play for a small fraction of our regular fee? Who else have you got?
The would-be promoters named a bunch of names tinged with stardust, none of whom had yet pledged themselves to the festival. Forget it, said the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel, separately. The would-be promoters pleaded, and their enthusiasm kindled a spark of light in Papa John Phillips. The Taylor of the firm was Derek Taylor, formerly a tabloid journalist in his native England, more recently the publicist for and a good chum of the Beatles. Taylor was slight and fastidious, whereas Phillips was long and loose. They both had genuine smiles, honest charm, and a way with words. Phillips sensed in Taylor a kindred spirit. I’ll tell you what, Phillips said. I’ll talk to Paul (Simon) and Art (Garfunkel), and if they say yes we’ll say yes.
Already a crucial change had taken place. Instead of the would-be promoters trying to sign up musicians, one of the musicians was talking to other musicians to consider how a new kind of music festival might come to be.
A meeting took place at Jeanette MacDonald’s Bel Air mansion, which John and Michelle Phillips had recently purchased, thanks to John’s way with words and harmonies and chord progressions. (A new day had surely dawned when folk-rock stars could buy real estate only movie stars—and a few popular music stars of a very different style—could previously afford.) The main house, a mansion deserving of the name, encouraged everyone to believe that music could build castles in the air.
Attending the summit were John and Michelle and Paul and Art, the would-be promoters, and another quartet—Adler, Melcher, Turetsky and Somer—that in fact included two lawyers. This was, after all, L.A., the land of greed and profit. True, it had welcomed or given birth in recent years not only to the Mamas and the Papas but also to Buffalo Springfield and the Chambers Brothers and the Byrds and the Beach Boys. Hippie chicks with stars in their eyes and love in their hearts flocked to the Sunset Strip, where the promoters and the agents camouflaged themselves with bell-bottoms and hair newly permitted to grow past ears and collars, but the bottom line was still the bottom line.
There was magic in the air at Jeanette MacDonald’s castle, and magic carried the day. The musicians decided they absolutely definitely positively would not play for a fraction of their usual fees, but they would play for free, and from that moment the musicians ran the festival.
Within a few days, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Who, the Association, Dionne Warwick, and Buffalo Springfield had added their names to the list of performers, with the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel at the top. Within a week, the festival was christened the Monterey International Pop Festival and it boasted among its board of governors Paul McCartney of the Beatles, Jim McGuinn of the Byrds, Mick Jagger and Andrew Loog Oldham of the Rolling Stones, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, John Phillips, Lou Adler—formerly the record producer for Jan and Dean, now producing the Mamas and the Papas—Smokey Robinson, Paul Simon, and Johnny Rivers. An eclectic assortment of talents, heavily inclined toward the L.A. cosmology. The festival would be set up as a nonprofit, with the proceeds to go to causes that benefited popular music, applications to be reviewed by the board.
The momentum began to build, the bandwagon fired up a head of steam, and more talent, from far and near, lined up to climb aboard. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Eric Burdon and the Animals. Booker T. and the MGs, Canned Heat, Hugh Masakela, the Electric Flag, Laura Nyro, the Blues Project, the Paupers, Jimi Hendrix. Otis Redding! Ravi Shankar! Enough stars, well known and lesser known, to establish a new galaxy and open it up for business.
Okay, what’s missing?
The festival directors knew that a bunch of bands with funny names had sprung up in San Francisco in the past couple of years. They knew because Jefferson Airplane already had a hit—“White Rabbit”—whose references to drugs had put a generation of wary parents even more on their guard, and because one of the best-respected music critics of the day was championing the Northern California rockers.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Ralph J. Gleason would not have been out of place in a thirties spy movie by the brothers Warner. He was a between-the-wars character, trench-coated, armed with a sardonic manner, his cigarettes screwed into a short black holder. He looked with amusement on the excesses of the young, and at the same time reveled in the present moment. Gleason had written a jazz column since the day after the Creation. When he blessed a jazz album with liner notes, he bestowed the imprimatur of a recognized authority. He had alarmed his hepcat readers in the early sixties by writing the occasional column about folk music. Joan Baez caught his eye and ear. So did Bob Dylan. Gleason was that rarity among critics, a music lover who dared to applaud new music that he deemed worthy, even if the newcomers were displacing the cherished sounds of his own generation.
Gleason led the way, among the established critics, in recognizing and extolling the unique sound of the San Francisco rock bands. The scene in San Francisco had been percolating for a couple of years, mostly keeping to itself. Bright-eyed kids flocked to the Avalon and the Fillmore, Depression-era ballrooms now levitating to a new beat, where fans gyrated around the dance floors and the bands played the dancers like an instrument. When the energy of the dancers encouraged the songs to run long, the symbiosis offered flashes of enlightenment. There were light shows and acid tests, and the sexual revolution was enlisting eager recruits by the thousand.
The civic authorities, alarmed, resuscitated an archaic bit of municipal code that prohibited dancing at concerts of live music. Gleason lobbied in his column to overturn the code. At his urging, the Chronicle editorialized in support of Bill Graham, when the former waiter, actor, and San Francisco Mime Troupe manager applied for a permit to operate the Fillmore Auditorium as a rock-and-roll dance hall. (At the Avalon, a counterculture collective called the Family Dog orchestrated the entertainment.)
When whisperings of the Monterey Pop Festival reached Gleason’s ears, he expressed curiosity, then interest. In a twinkling he was invited to join the festival board. Say, fellows, he offered—after hearing what the Los Angelenos had in mind—you really ought to get some of the San Francisco bands. They already planned to invite the Airplane. Gleason suggested more names. Still smiling all around, the members of the board heeded his counsel. But getting the bands with the weird names and the far-out sounds to sign on for the festival was another matter.
The San Francisco bands were like families, and the Haight-Ashbury district of the city, where most of the bands lived, near Golden Gate Park, was their neighborhood. They were clannish, socially radical, wary of the mainstream music business in general and of L.A. in particular. A pilgrimage by John and Michelle Phillips and Lou Adler to the Haight did little to allay the musicians’ misgivings. Adler was a smooth type they had seen before and distrusted on sight. (The fact that he was more than he seemed and would be a guiding force that helped the Pop Festival to fulfill its potential would become apparent only later.) When Paul Simon, soft-spoken and sincere, visited the Haight, that was something else. Derek Taylor won some converts too, just as he had helped to win John Phillips to the idea in the first place.
It was clear to the San Francisco groups that while Adler and company didn’t know much about the individual bands, they were aware of the San Francisco scene and they wanted to tap into its energy. Which convinced some of the musicians that the festival would exploit the bands and rip them off. Still, they sensed a not-to-be-missed event in the making. They were as eager as everyone else to hear the Who and Otis Redding and Ravi Shankar. Hey, listen, it might be far out.
The tipping point for the San Francisco bands was that musicians were running the show, and everyone was playing for free.
“Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis were on the Pop Festival because I persuaded John Phillips and Lou Adler that they would be a knockout act. They had never heard of them. They wanted three bands from San Francisco, other than the Airplane, which they had heard of because the Airplane had recorded for Victor, and had a regional hit going on at that time. And I recommended Big Brother, and the Dead, and Quicksilver.”
Ralph J. Gleason
Five days before the festival began, Ralph Gleason reported in the Chronicle that the San Francisco Sound would be represented at Monterey not only by Jefferson Airplane, but also by the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Steve Miller Blues Band. And Big Brother and the Holding Company.
With the roster complete, the festival looked like a surefire winner. And just in case the founders’ wide-eyed visions came true, the proceedings, from start to finish, would be recorded on film for posterity.
D. A. Pennebaker’s role as the Pop Festival’s sight-and-sound archivist was even more of a fluke than the bloodless palace coup that put the musicians in charge. And, as it turned out, his presence was the key that unlocked the magic kingdom for Janis Joplin.
The waves of cause and effect that brought Pennebaker to Monterey in June 1967 had begun to spread years before, in the early sixties, when Penny and his partner, Ricky Leacock, made a film in Hungary about the cellist Pablo Casals. Flash-forward to 1965: Bob Dylan and his friend Bob Neuwirth were flipping the channel knob on a hotel TV and chanced to see the Casals film on what was then National Educational Television, not yet PBS. At the same time, a girl named Sara was working in the New York offices of Leacock Pennebaker, Inc. Sara had been impressed by “Daybreak Express,” Pennebaker’s first film, a five-minute marvel that employed Duke Ellington’s eponymous tune as the camera recorded the sunrise journey of a New York subway train from an outer borough to Manhattan. Sara knew Dylan. (She would in time become Sara Dylan.) She thought Bob would like the film. She arranged for him to see it.
When Pennebaker heard that Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, was interested in making a documentary film about Dylan, Penny presented himself for consideration. Thanks to Sara and “Daybreak Express” and the Casals film, Grossman and Dylan agreed to let Pennebaker film Dylan’s upcoming tour of England. Pennebaker asked Bob Altschuler, head of public relations at Columbia Records, Dylan’s label, for $5,000 to cover transportation, in exchange for which he offered to give Columbia a 50 percent interest in the movie. Altschuler said thanks but no thanks, demonstrating that 20/20 foresight is often in limited supply. Penny raised the money elsewhere, but he never let Altschuler forget the missed opportunity.
Pennebaker’s style of filmmaking is to launch himself into real life, point his camera, and keep shooting. Early on, he found that in a surprisingly short time his subjects stop playing to the camera, more or less, and resume their normal behavior, whatever that might be. There are no staged scenes, no scripted dialogue, no retakes. The films are documentaries, if you understand that they involve going out to document, as best as you can, what’s happening, rather than cobbling together a movie from stock footage and staged events and filmed interviews. The French call it cinéma vérité. In America, this approach is known as “direct cinema” or “living cinema” or “truth cinema.” Penny just goes out and does it. What he gets, he gets. What he misses—because he’s eating or sleeping or just because he’s tired, for the moment, of lugging the camera around on his shoulder—he misses. Do the subjects ever forget completely that the cameraman and soundman are there? Probably not. Is there truth in what the camera sees, even if the subjects are aware of the camera? You bet your life.
In the spring of 1965, Pennebaker accompanied Bob Dylan on a concert tour of England. He filmed Dylan being funny and cruel, brilliant and petty. He caught the power of one young man alone on a stage, playing his guitar and singing his extraordinary songs to rapt audiences. If Dylan was at any point putting on an act for the camera, he was playing himself as he wanted to be, as he imagined himself to be, which is another way of saying as he really was.
In the spring of 1967, the film, titled Dont Look Back (the lack of an apostrophe was intentional), opened in a smattering of art houses. The distribution was about one step higher than what was called a “road show” in the silent era, when a film’s producer would book the theaters himself and carry the reels from town to town in a Model T Ford. Limited initial distribution notwithstanding, the film did well and attracted favorable critical notice. Out of the blue, Penny got a call from Bob Rafelson, a TV writer-producer and would-be film director, who, with his partner, Bert Schneider, had created the pop group the Monkees. Rafelson had seen Dont Look Back. He wondered if Penny might be interested in filming a pop music festival. Penny was interested. Where’s the festival gonna be? In Monterey, California.
At the mention of California, Penny’s interest ratcheted up a notch. He had recently seen The Endless Summer, a documentary in which director Bruce Brown followed two surfers around the world as they sought the perfect wave. Most people thought of it as a surfing movie, but Penny didn’t see it that way at all. His filmmaker’s eye perceived the lyrical images as a paean to California—California as a state of mind, California as a new American Dream for the sixties.
Penny knew there had been a film about the Newport, Rhode Island, Jazz Festival, but he hadn’t seen it. He was certain no one had made a movie about a pop festival.
Penny flew to Los Angeles, where Rafelson took him to meet John Phillips and Lou Adler. Penny found something about John Phillips intriguing, and Phillips and Adler were intrigued by Dont Look Back. They proposed hiring Penny to direct the filming of the Pop Festival, but it was obvious to Penny that neither Phillips nor Adler had the first clue about how to produce a movie. “You need a producer,” Penny told them. They were astute enough to agree, and it became Penny’s movie.
Back at the offices of Leacock Pennebaker on West 45th Street, Penny began to organize the California expeditionary force. He was going to need a lot of film. He was going to need a lot of cameras. He was going to need a lot of money.
Phillips and Adler made a deal with ABC-TV to show the movie. Film arrived at Leacock Pennebaker by the case. Penny spent days and nights in the workshop to see how many cameras he could get up and running in time. The cameras were his design, a modification of a 16-millimeter Auricon, with the two-hundred-foot magazine canted at an angle to the rear so the camera balanced better on the shoulder, and a hand grip added at the front of the housing for stability. They were powered by rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery packs that strapped around the cameraman’s waist. Suited up with this outfit for a couple of hours, the effect was like wearing a Colt .45 Peacemaker—when you took it off, you felt naked.
—
IN THE SPRING of 1967, the siren call of “There’s something happening here” is beckoning me. To where, I don’t know, but a Harvard degree in Romance languages and literature doesn’t provide the road map. Nor, for the first time since I graduated from college, does bluegrass music. I have been playing with the Charles River Valley Boys for almost six years, but the invasion of British rockers that began in 1964 has changed everything, bringing electric music to the forefront. By ’67, even for a well-established bluegrass band, folk music gigs are fewer and farther between.
It’s my hangout partner and sometimes Cambridge lodger, Bob Neuwirth, who opens the doorway to what’s next and invites me in. During Dylan’s Dont Look Back tour of England, Bobby was along for the ride as Dylan’s road manager. The next year, following Dylan’s electrified set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Neuwirth worked with Pennebaker on a follow-up film of Dylan touring England again, this time with an amplified backup band that within a few years would become known simply as “The Band.” The second film is unreleased, but Bobby has kept in touch with Pennebaker. When the Leacock Pennebaker offices begin to hum with preparations for Monterey, Bobby’s hip-happening potentiometer goes off the scale. He introduces me to Penny, and Penny hires me onto the crew.
A few days before the Pop Festival, Bobby and I fly to San Francisco. Pennebaker has gone a day ahead of us with the advance guard, to scout the scene and find a cheap motel for the film platoon soon to follow. Bobby and I rent a car at the airport and bushwhack across the peninsula to Highway One, the coast road. As a recent California resident, I’m the designated pilot, and I’m too impatient for the sight of the Pacific Ocean to cruise down 101. We spin the dial of the radio, searching for Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” or some AM deejay playing any cut from the Beatles’ latest release, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The underground FM stations are playing the whole album in big chunks of uninterrupted awe, but rental cars don’t have FM.
In Monterey, Pennebaker is already shooting film. “Here,” he says. He hands me a Nagra tape recorder. I like machines and this one is simple. Watch the VU meter. Don’t let it pin in the red or we’ll get distortion. Try to keep the mike out of the shots. Penny doesn’t tell me the Nagra costs thousands of dollars.
Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock’s breakthrough technical contribution to documentary filmmaking is the light weight and portability of their cameras and tape recorders, so the cameraman doesn’t have to be anchored by a tripod, and the sync-pulse generators built into the Nagra tape recorders, which eliminates the need for a wire connecting the camera to the recorder. At the beginning or end of a shot, the cameraman focuses the camera on the soundman. The soundman pushes a button on the Nagra. A light attached to the Nagra’s shoulder strap flashes, and at the same time a beep goes on the tape. Et voilà! In the editing room, you sync the flash of light on the film to the beep on the tape and away you go. In the field, the cameraman and soundman are free to move independently, recording the scene from any angle, and to position the mike close to the sound source, untethered by wires.
Penny and I ramble the grounds. We film Tom Law putting up his tepee and smiling hippies erecting flimsy stalls for what will become a sideshow of psychedelia, a midway of far-out fashions and posters and sculpted aromatic candles and hippie gewgaws. We film in the festival office, where John and Michelle Phillips and Lou Adler and a host of assistants perform an intricate ballet from phone to phone. Dionne Warwick can’t make it. The Beach Boys? Yes, no, maybe, and in the end, no. Too bad.
The oval fairgrounds arena has roofed tiers of seats flanking the long sides, and the stage fills most of one end. The other end is closed off with a simple board fence to control admissions. The lawn within the arena, built to accommodate horse shows, is covered with orderly rows of folding chairs. For the Pop Festival, seating within the arena is seven thousand plus.
Our film crew badges give us unfettered access to the arena, backstage, everywhere. We film the construction of the stage. When the sound system is hooked up, David Crosby, of the Byrds, tests it by humming into a mike. He smiles. “Oh, groovy. A nice sound system at last.”
Elsewhere, the vibes are less jubilant. Monterey police chief Frank Marinello estimates the potential attendance at fifty thousand, and he worries that the Hells Angels may arrive in force. In his mental screening room he is running The Wild One, with leather boys Brando and Lee Marvin running amok among the daughters and granddaughters of the Monterey Peninsula’s flag-waving Republicans and military families. Nearby Fort Ord is a major training ground for Vietnam-bound troops.
The civic leaders wonder where they are going to get the foodstuffs to feed fifty thousand beatniks and hippies, where all these undesirables will sleep, and, ohmyGod, will they have to defecate while they’re here?
The night before the concerts get under way, Pennebaker wangles a dinner invitation from John and Michelle Phillips for himself and his trusty soundman. We arrive with camera and Nagra in hand. Penny is following his instincts, maybe hoping for some behind-the-scenes footage that will illuminate what is about to happen. John and Michelle have rented a house in Monterey to serve as an off-premises retreat during the festival. Outside the windows there are redwoods on a wooded slope that could be in Marin County or the Berkeley Hills. Michelle cooks steaks, makes a salad, sticks some French bread in the oven. The four of us eat, drink wine, and have a lovely time. Penny doesn’t shoot a foot of film and I learn one of the ancillary benefits of cinéma vérité: Sometimes you just live life with your subjects instead of filming them.
In the course of the evening, there is no hint of the turmoil that Michelle has recently caused within the Mamas and the Papas. Just sixteen when she met John, she is nineteen now. Not yet really mature enough to be a wife or a Mama, she has been testing her wings. Brief affairs with Papa Denny Doherty and the Byrds’ Gene Clark threatened her marriage to John and motivated John, Denny, and Mama Cass Elliott (who is carrying a torch for Denny herself) to eject Michelle from the group. They recently performed a four-city tour with Michelle’s parts sung by Lou Adler’s girlfriend, Jill Gibson, but the fans were loyal to Michelle and the tour went badly. On their return to L.A., John and Denny and Cass took Michelle back. She and John reconciled. Denny, still nursing his wounds, has not yet arrived in Monterey. The group may have to perform without him.
This evening John and Michelle drink their wine and entertain us in a subdued style. It is the calm before whatever the confluence of energies gathered in Monterey is about to release.
On Friday morning, the air throughout the Monterey County Fairgrounds quivers almost audibly with high expectations. The coastal clouds retreat at midday and the sunshine is warm. Everybody’s smiling. Ready or not, here we come.
“It’s a Mexican standoff, typical of the yawning gulf between L.A. and San Francisco. . . . Paul Simon is the spiritual leader of the festival and most of us get involved because of him. He rises above all the scaly maneuvering and makes us see it from the audience’s point of view. . . . The combination of Paul Simon’s vision and Derek Taylor’s acidic poise convinces us in the end. We do it for the fans and fuck the rest of it. . . . When you walk through the fairgrounds at twilight with the teepees painted with Sioux symbols, people playing guitars, and children and dogs running around the tents, it’s worth all the hassles in the world. We’ve infiltrated the enemy camp and turned it into our own event. . . . We have our peyote-ceremony tents set up just as you walk in the gate.”
Rock Scully, Grateful Dead management