It Happened in Monterey
THE THEME OF the festival is “Music, Love and Flowers.” The music is a sure thing. For three days an extraordinary succession of acts will step onto the stage and play for the joy of it. The flowers arrive from Hawaii—eighty thousand orchids, a literal planeload, pink orchids everywhere. The love is speculative. It is a hope. A prayer. You can’t ship it in or order it up. Can’t buy me love.
The evening performances are sold out before the first ticket holder enters the fairgrounds.
People arrive by the carful, the VW busful, the hand-painted school busful. They come hitchhiking and they come by motorcycle. They come from up and down the coast, from San Francisco and L.A., and from farther afield. One girl has hitchhiked from Champaign, Illinois. Wiping the morning dew off the folding metal chairs in the fairgrounds arena gets her into the show. “How’d you get this job?” Pennebaker asks her, filming all the while. “Do you know somebody?” “No,” she says, “I just happened to be lucky, I guess.”
The fans have dressed for the occasion pretty much as they dress every day in the Summer of Love. Colors run wild. The range of fashions is broad enough to confound anyone hoping to spot a trend and sell clothes to this crowd next year or next month. Antique clothes and work clothes and formal clothes. Tie-dyes and batiks. Curtains and bedspreads and odd-lot material made into free-flowing shirts and dresses. Hats are much in style. Derby hats and top hats and cowboy hats, berets and Arab fezzes and American Indian headbands and fur hats the Russians wear in winter. Boots too—tall boots and short boots and cowboy boots and hippie boots that zip up the side or the back, and lots of boots with really pointy toes like the English rockers wear. Winkle pickers, the Brits call them. What’s a winkle? Something you eat. A very small marine snail. You eat it with your boots?
For the concerts, the Pennebaker film crew will occupy prime vantage points. The festival carpenters have built catwalks at each side of the stage about three feet below its level. The stage has a rectangular thrust that extends out about fifteen feet downstage center. Our catwalks wrap around the front corners of the thrust platform, allowing the cameramen to shoot from several angles.
Thirty feet in front of the stage, in the front rows of seats, Pennebaker places one camera on a tripod. Two more are mounted in the near ends of the permanent, roofed seats on either side of the arena. The others will be shoulder-held, shooting from the catwalks or other vantage points. Pennebaker himself has no fixed position. He will roam, free to shoot from the wings or behind the amps onstage or wherever else the spirit takes him.
The list of cameramen who have come along to film this pop music extravaganza contains some distinguished names. Albert Maysles is on a busman’s holiday from cinéma vérité filmmaking with his brother David. The Maysleses made What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. a few years ago. Nick Proferes and Jim Desmond are Leacock Pennebaker protégés who have formed their own film company. Ricky Leacock, Penny’s partner, is in the front rank of those who pioneered the vérité documentary style. He worked with the legendary filmmaker Robert Flaherty on Louisiana Story. Before that, Ricky was a combat cameraman in World War II, experience he hopes will not be relevant to surviving the Monterey Pop Festival.
Neuwirth has no camera, no Nagra, no apparent function within the crew—until the music starts. In real life he is an artist, a painter who also plays the guitar and writes songs. His true calling seems to be keeping in tune with the times and being on hand wherever the most memorable events are taking place. At Monterey, Bobby is Pennebaker’s aesthetic consultant, the arbiter of hip, the guide for what to shoot and what to ignore. We can’t film everybody. We don’t have enough film. We have to shoot all the acts in which Lou Adler and John Phillips—the film’s co-producers—have a special interest. Beyond that, the choice is ours. Somebody has to make the decisions. Penny has instincts of his own, and when a musical act grabs him, he shoots it. Otherwise he leaves it up to Bob. Bob sometimes consults with me. We rig a red light on a short pole at stage right, on the handrail of our catwalk there, where it can be seen from all the fixed camera positions. When Bobby turns on the light, the cameramen will go into action.
Camping spaces on the fairgrounds and in local campgrounds are full before the Friday evening concert, and the San Francisco bands see a chance to put into practice their music-for-the-people philosophy. In San Francisco they play free concerts and benefits with a frequency that would alarm any profit-minded manager. The Grateful Dead family, spearheaded by co-manager Rock Scully, gets Monterey Peninsula College to open its football field as a temporary campground. More festival pilgrims sack out in the floral pavilion on the fairgrounds, by arrangement with the sponsoring florists. Over the course of the weekend, the Dead and Jefferson Airplane and several other performers play in the pavilion and at the football field for free, to the surprise and delight of the campers.
Everywhere, people are smiling, and we’re thinking, Look how many of us there are! As the music begins, a gossamer enchantment seems to settle over the fairgrounds.
“So much of Monterey had nothing to do with logistics or planning. The bird just landed there. No rules, no instructions. It also said a lot to me about Northern California. So much of it could never have happened anywhere else. . . . It’s always an amazing experience for me when I go to something that is not my production. I am like the maître d’ from the Catskills. . . . Why is it taking so long to move the equipment? You call this a hot dog? . . . But Monterey passed the test. In the sense that the majority of the people came there to enjoy themselves, and they did. What prevailed over everything was the meeting of unnamed tribes who didn’t even know they were tribes. . . . The looseness of Monterey, I always attributed to Lou Adler. After a while, there was no control. But they didn’t need control because of the audience. They were all already members of the same organization. Before they got to the grand meeting of Monterey.”
Bill Graham, rock promoter, Fillmore Auditorium
My perspective is more San Francisco than L.A. On Friday night, the acts that don’t arouse my interest—the Association, Johnny Rivers, Beverley—are the acts, not by coincidence, that Neuwirth and Pennebaker deem not worth filming. The Paupers, a group recently acquired by Albert Grossman, are spirited but unknown. Eric Burdon and the Animals raise the energy a couple of jumps. In performance, their hit version of the folk classic “The House of the Rising Sun” is impressive and moving.
The light show for the evening performances is by Head Lights, from the Fillmore in San Francisco, projected on huge screens behind the performers: bubbles of color pulsating, undulating, overlaid with photos and film clips, a visual supplement to the music that few but the San Francisco ballroom fans have seen before.
By Saturday morning, Chief Marinello is smiling. The feared invasion by the Hells Angels has not materialized and the vibe on the fairgrounds is peaceful, elevated, charged with anticipation of the music yet to come.
In memory, the festival plays like a movie put together by a cheerfully stoned editor. It’s a montage of vignettes, each one contributing something singular to the accumulating impression: Simon and Garfunkel singing better than ever . . . Otis Redding, taking obvious pleasure in singing for what he calls “the love crowd,” putting his soul into “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” . . . Hugh Masakela all but unknown in this gathering, the music jazz, and pretty good jazz at that, the vocals African tribal, the fusion of the two unfamiliar, but we dig it all the same, because it is here and now and part of this scene that is blowing our minds, and because in this context no one can do wrong.
During the concerts, I have no responsibilities. Pennebaker is recording the concert sound from the stage mikes, mixed through the main board. When the act onstage doesn’t hold my attention, I stroll the tent-alley bazaar outside the arena, where the incenses and oils give off Middle Eastern aromas. The kaleidoscopic array of tie-dye and batik and beads and face painters is dazzling.
The infectious spirit of the festival draws from one act after another performances that exceed their own expectations, and ours. In the midst of so many successes, the San Francisco bands succeed both individually and as a group. New to most of the crowd, they more than hold their own in this company, validating the recently christened San Francisco Sound. Country Joe MacDonald, on Saturday afternoon, with flower blossoms painted on his cheeks and an antique fireman’s hard hat perched on his head, plays an extended rendition of “Section 43,” a mesmerizing instrumental. The Fish are in the zone and they bring us with them. Close your eyes and it gets you high without chemical aids.
Jefferson Airplane work their vocal sorcery—Grace Slick, Marty Balin and Paul Kantner singing alternating leads on “High Flying Bird,” Grace and Marty magical in duet on “Today,” the band’s tonalities and inflections utterly distinctive. After this, we can identify an Airplane song from thirty thousand feet.
The Grateful Dead are down to earth, boogeying, raising some dancers from their seats to vibrate in the aisles, on the grass at the back of the arena, and as far beyond its gates as the sounds carry, but the Dead never fully get up to speed. They’re just back from New York and they played in L.A. the night before. Jerry Garcia’s guitar has been stolen, he’s bummed, the band is tired. But the Dead are the Dead, sui generis, and they add new recruits to the core of San Francisco devotees who are already called Deadheads.
The performance many of us will remember forever comes from Big Brother and the Holding Company. They take the stage on Saturday afternoon, four long-haired guys and Janis Joplin. Their outfits aren’t as flamboyant or coordinated as the styles of the L.A. acts. Sam and James are in black jeans and boots and loose-fitting shirts. Peter and David venture more color. Janis wears hippie street clothes, jeans and a top. In San Francisco she’s already something of a local legend. She has been singing with Big Brother for just a year, and she has won a reputation as a singer like no other. Beyond the Bay, she is all but unknown.
The short set culminates with Janis’s showstopper from the San Francisco ballrooms, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Ball and Chain,” which Big Brother has recast in a minor key, the better to evoke the emotion in the lyrics. Their arrangement begins with four ascending notes wrenched from James Gurley’s guitar, a momentary Handelian silence, and an intro that shatters all the rules. James plays riffs from an alternative reality, and chords that no one at the Gibson guitar factory ever dreamed. His overture is a wail from another point of view, an assault on the festival’s self-satisfied bliss, and it transfixes the audience. Up to now, Big Brother is just another variation on the San Francisco Sound. From this moment, they’re Something Else.
James’s introduction shrieks to a crescendo and spins off into the ether, leaving only the drums and Peter Albin’s bass, slow and low, thumping like a tired heart in labor, as Janis barely whispers the opening lines:
Just lookin’ out at the rain . . .
She doesn’t stay in the soft register for long. Her voice rises, pleads, screams. By the time she hits the first chorus, the audience is mesmerized. Can a white girl sing the blues? Janis’s answer is yes, in spades. She matches the intensity of James’s guitar while she explores the same outer realms, and . . . she can’t . . . but she does. . . . When she really pulls out all the stops she sings chords!
In the second row of the audience, in the fenced-off section reserved for performers and VIPs, Mama Cass Elliott gapes openmouthed. When the audience’s roar of approval erupts at the end of the song, Cass turns to the guy beside her and exclaims, “Wow. Wow! That’s really heavy!”
Backstage, Big Brother is jubilant—but there is trouble brewing, right here in Music City. Big Brother, along with some of the other San Francisco bands, refused permission to be filmed, and Pennebaker is beside himself. Big Brother has to be in the movie! Janis’s performance will make the movie!
The Grateful Dead have also declined to be filmed. So have Moby Grape, but the Bay Area ranks are disunited. Country Joe and the Fish gave permission. So did the Airplane. Julius Karpen, Big Brother’s manager, is adamantly against their appearing in the movie. Karpen is a balding, myopic, beatnik businessman who drives a hearse. He is called Green Julius within the San Francisco rock scene because he smokes prodigious amounts of weed. By the account of one insider, Julius refuses to discuss business with anyone who won’t first smoke grass with him. He is given to waxing philosophical, and at length, about the state of the world and the unique role of the San Francisco scene in the larger swirl of the cosmos. Like many another eccentric, Julius has found a home in the San Francisco counterculture. He is deeply suspicious of the music business. The movie is a rip-off, he says. Everybody’s playing for free, so why should Phillips and Adler and ABC-TV and whoever else profit from the performances, while the bands get nothing? Oh, right, proceeds to causes that benefit popular music, whatever that means.
Janis is sympathetic to the anticommercial ethic that pervades the San Francisco music scene. She is devoted to the communal spirit that the bands share, but nothing is more important to her than Big Brother’s career. Maybe the fact that the Airplane—the only other San Francisco band that features a chick singer—has agreed to be filmed has something to do with Janis’s determination that Big Brother should be in the movie too. She leads the fight against Julius, and a couple of the boys back her. At an impasse among themselves and at odds with their manager, the band casts about for an oracle to show them the auspicious pathway. They turn to Albert Grossman.
Grossman is at Monterey to shepherd two of his acts. The Paupers are Canadian, new talent from north of the border. The Electric Flag is a band recently formed by Mike Bloomfield, the blues guitar virtuoso, formerly of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Monterey is the Flag’s debut performance. Butterfield, of course, is here too, with Elvin Bishop now discharging by himself the lead guitar duties that he has shared with Bloomfield until recently. Grossman knows both Butterfield and Bloomfield from Chicago, where they all got their start in the music business. He was responsible for Butterfield’s acceptance in the folk clubs of the early sixties. The Butterfield band is one that other musicians go out of their way to hear. Grossman also manages Peter, Paul and Mary. Hell, he invented Peter, Paul and Mary. He noticed that all the folk-pop groups were guys—the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, the Limelighters, the Chad Mitchell Trio—and it occurred to him that a group with a girl might catch the public’s imagination. Grossman tried to interest his friends Bob Gibson and Bob (soon to be Hamilton) Camp, who performed as a duo and sang exceptional harmonies together, in taking on a girl singer to take the harmonies to the next level. Gibson and Camp didn’t share his vision, but Peter Yarrow and Noel (soon to be Paul) Stookey, were more open to suggestion, and, together with Mary Travers, they are reaping the rewards.
At the time of the Pop Festival, Grossman’s roster of clients also includes the James Cotton Blues Band, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, Odetta, Ian and Sylvia, and the Band.
The breadth of Grossman’s achievements is less important to Janis and Big Brother than the singular fact that he is Bob Dylan’s manager and that Dylan has thrived under his care. He encouraged Peter, Paul and Mary to record Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and by so doing accelerated the trio’s rise to fame and used their momentum to bring more notice to Dylan, whose name was then becoming known but whom relatively few in the folk music audience had seen or heard. It was not an accident of timing that Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was rising on the charts in the weeks before the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan scored his breakthrough triumph—with a significant boost from Joan Baez, who sang with him in his set and brought him onstage during her Sunday night closer.
Backstage at Monterey, Grossman is the only person who appears unperturbed amid the commotion swirling around Janis and Big Brother. His presence is imposing, in part because of his physical appearance, in part because of his manner. He is portly without being fat. He remains still for long periods of time, but when he moves he moves briskly, in the manner of a slender man. His hair turned gray before he was forty. Half a generation older than most of his clients, his aura can seem parental. When he wants to be overbearing, it’s as though your stern grandfather has taken umbrage. John L. Wasserman, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, said in his review of Dont Look Back that Grossman looked like a Soviet diplomat. Two years later, Grossman has let his hair grow longer. He wears round steel-rimmed glasses. They make him look wide-eyed, which is one of his favorite expressions. Who, me? He resembles no one so much as the man on the Quaker Oats carton.
Ron Polte, manager of Quicksilver Messenger Service, knows Grossman from Chicago. At Monterey, he has introduced Grossman to Big Brother. On Saturday afternoon, Janis approaches Grossman and asks him to consult with the band about Pennebaker’s movie.
By now, John Phillips and Lou Adler have made Big Brother a tempting offer: If you’ll agree to be filmed, we’ll put you on again, on Sunday evening.
Pennebaker has spoken with Albert about Janis’s performance, which blew him away. “Whatever you have to do,” Penny said to him, “I don’t care if you have to go in and break a leg. God, we have to film her! We just have to do it. This is the basis of the whole film.”
“Don’t worry,” Albert said. “I’ll fix it for you.” And he does.
When Big Brother asks Albert if they should accept the offer to perform again, if they’ll agree to be filmed, he says, Hey, I’d do it. He doesn’t say this just because Penny asked for his help. Albert has no stake in the movie, no investment yet, either financial or emotional, in Big Brother’s career. He tells them to go for it because he knows it’s the right thing for them to do. If you want wider recognition, he says, this is the way to get it.
Albert’s approval is all the holdouts in Big Brother need. They consent to be filmed. Janis is elated, and Julius Karpen storms off in a huff. Adler and Phillips juggle the schedule and make room for Big Brother on the Sunday evening program.
While this drama plays out in the background, we of the Pennebaker crew are focused on the performances at hand. On Saturday evening, Otis Redding is the highlight, but the Airplane, the Byrds, Hugh Masakela, and Booker T. and the MGs also work their magic.
On Sunday morning, Chief Marinello sends home half the officers he has mustered to police the festival.
Ravi Shankar is the sole performer on Sunday afternoon. In this gathering where the other performers are mining mother lode veins of rock and roll, R&B, folk, and jazz, the crowd—a scattering of blues and jazz and folk fans among the dominant mass of beatniks and hippies and flower children—accords Shankar the status of guru-for-the-day.
For this performance, I take control of the button that will turn on the red light and signal the cameras to roll. Our tripod cameras have twelve-hundred-foot magazines that run for half an hour without reloading, but the others—the free-roaming cameras on our catwalks alongside the stage—have four-hundred-foot rolls that last just ten minutes. Penny has decided to film Ravi’s final raga, which will surely run longer than that. My job is to guess when the tune is within ten minutes of its end, so the shoulder-held cameras can shoot without interruption until it’s over.
My qualifications for undertaking this responsibility are late nights in Cambridge that ended up stoned to the gills and zoning out to the recordings of this very same wizard of the sitar, or to Ali Akbar Khan, equally adept master of the sitar’s first cousin, the sarod, in the company of my roommate Fritz Richmond, washtub bassist for the Charles River Valley Boys and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band—whose mastery of the washtub approaches Ravi’s on the sitar, relatively speaking—and our frequent guest, Bob Neuwirth.
At Monterey, I stroll the arena during Shankar’s early pieces, absorbing the music on the move. Ravi feels connected to the audience. He introduces each piece at greater length than is his custom before a Western audience. The crowd is with him all the way. In the front rows of seats reserved for performers, a cluster of musicians—Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix, Al Wilson of Canned Heat, Michelle Phillips—listen raptly.
Today the coastal clouds have hung around, and colors glow more brightly in the diffuse light. A plan to have bagsful of the festival’s signature pink orchids tossed from a hot-air balloon above the arena has gone awry because of the fog bank, so instead the ushers have placed an orchid on every seat before the concert begins. During Ravi’s set, the flowers, threaded through buttonholes, tucked behind ears, held in hands, or woven into long hair, glow like radiant, oversized fireflies that have alighted throughout the audience.
As the final raga begins, I return to the catwalk at the edge of the stage, all my attention on Ravi and his accompanists. I shoot some photos. . . . I wait . . . and wait, through the languid, hypnotic exposition of the opening themes. Almost imperceptibly, the tempo of the music increases, the rhythms of the tabla—the small hand drums played incomparably by Alla Rakha—gaining speed, Ravi effortlessly keeping pace. The tempo becomes insistent . . . and still I wait . . . until I dare not wait any longer. I switch on the red light and the cameras roll, ten minutes of film spooling off at twenty-four frames a second.
The interplay between the sitar and the tabla grows steadily more complex as Ravi initiates the phase where the sitar calls to the tabla and the drums answer—short phrases, simple at first, then more complex, drawing smiles of delight from Alla Rakha, answering smiles from Shankar and from Kamala Chakravarty, who fills out the sound with the mesmeric monotone of the tamboura. Toward the end, the tabla and sitar join together, the players’ hands flying over the strings and drumheads in a blur, impossibly fast, until the elation that this music from halfway around the world brings to this arena, this audience, approaches rapture.
The ending brings the crowd to its feet as one with a joyous roar that must be audible in downtown Monterey.
The audience pelts the stage with flowers. Pink orchids pile up at the feet of the musicians. They bow time and again, palms together, beatific, deeply moved by the response. The trio leaves the stage. They are called back. The waves of applause wash the arena. The ovation promises to go on until it’s time for the evening concert. In the film, the applause will continue for almost two minutes, which seems like a very long time. Now, in real life, it lasts much longer.
Finally Shankar holds up his arms and the audience quiets. “I want you to know how much I love you all and how happy I am to be loved by you,” he says. He picks up a handful of orchids, throws them back into the crowd, bows for the last time, and the grateful people let him go.
It is a singular triumph among many on a triumphant weekend.
I cherish one image, a mental film clip, from Sunday afternoon after Ravi’s transcendent set. Strolling the fairgrounds, I see a Monterey motorcycle cop cruising along a roadway, greeted everywhere with smiles and smiling nonstop himself, the whip antenna on the back of the bike waving brightly, pinkly, adorned from bottom to top with skewered orchids.
—
SUNDAY EVENING IS Big Brother’s chance to prove they can repeat their Saturday sensation. For this performance, Janis decks herself out in a gold lamé pantsuit and she sings as if her future depends on it, which it does. This time around, many in the audience know what to expect, but “Ball and Chain” knocks them out all over again and once more they roar their admiration. As Janis leaves the stage, she raises her arms and skips with joy. She knows she nailed it for the cameras.
“The best time of all was Monterey. It was one of the highest points of my life. Those were real flower children. They really were beautiful and gentle and completely open, man. Ain’t nothing like that ever gonna happen again.”
Janis Joplin
And still, there is more to come. The Who are straight from two days at the Fillmore. Giddy in their first rush of California gooniness, they turn loose high-volume British rock and roll—“Substitute,” “Summertime Blues,” and a couple more—and destroy most of their equipment at the end of their last song, “My Generation,” shocking some and pissing off the sound crew, who dash onstage to save the microphones, but the band is so off-the-wall, out-of-control, to-hell-with-the-sensible-limits that we just watch, agog, and wait for the stage to be cleaned up before the next act. Being outrageous is part of the countercultural ethic, but our interest in this Götterdämmerung acting out will diminish when we learn it’s a regular part of their act. They trash the same amp at every show, and smash up cheap guitars.
And besides, they can’t top Jimi Hendrix, who carries outrageous to new heights. Pennebaker and I chanced to be on hand for Jimi’s sound check this morning, in the empty arena, and we took note that this is a guitar player of exceptional ability. On Sunday night the cameras are on Jimi from the start of his set, but we don’t expect another performance that will create a sensation to equal Janis and Big Brother.
Jimi plays the guitar behind his back, over his head, with his teeth. He plays the longest set of the night. He plays B. B. King’s “Rock Me Baby,” the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” He grabs songs from across the pop spectrum and makes each one his own. He sneaks “Strangers in the Night” into his guitar solo on “Wild Thing” . . . he turns a somersault on the stage without missing a note . . . he makes a little bow before he lays his guitar on the stage, squirts it with lighter fluid, sets it afire, urges the flames higher with his hands, and then, almost regretfully, smashes the guitar and throws the fragments into the audience magnanimously, as a peace offering . . . all of which is easier to understand if you know that Jimi took a bunch of Owsley acid before the performance, the micrograms measured in the thousands, but probably no more than everyone else in the arena ingested collectively.
“I saw Owsley give him two of his little purple tabs, and I watched Jimi swallow them about half an hour before he went onstage.”
Peter Pilafian, Mamas & Papas road manager
“I saw him take, literally, a handful of Owsley tabs. At least four, maybe six. I saw him take it. And then he crumpled up in the corner. And he was wearing—English garb, you know, stuff. Ruffled stuff, psychedelic ruffles. And he looked like a bag of laundry in the corner of the room, and people were taking bets if he could even stand, much less get onstage. . . . And he looked like laundry in the corner of the tent. And when his time came to play, they literally—guys came in and picked him up, and sort of walked him to the stage. And as soon as he got onstage, he transformed into Jimi Hendrix, from a crumpled bunch of laundry into the greatest rock-and-roll guitar player in history.”
Bob Seidemann, San Francisco photographer
In contrast to the Who’s calculated smashup, Jimi’s theatrics are spontaneous, fueled by equal doses of LSD and the love made manifest in his music. This is his first American performance since he gigged as an R&B sideman with the Isley Brothers and Little Richard years ago. A few fans might have seen him backing John Hammond, Jr., in a Greenwich Village gig back in the folk days, but here the show is all Jimi. He’s making it up as he goes along, and he ends his set in a literal blaze of glory.
To close the evening, and the festival, the Mamas and the Papas float about the stage in floor-length dresses and robes. Denny shows up at the eleventh hour and puts his heart fully into the songs, the group truly reunited and as happy to be on this stage as all the others who have preceded them.
“I thought that [Monterey] just cut the whole scene wide open. It connected it. It was like opening a gigantic door that suddenly made what was an embryonic West Coast music scene into something of national, cultural prominence. And I thought it sort of put the stamp on the era. I thought it was enormously powerful. Because it was innocence. It was a window on this land of innocence where sweetness and a certain kind of Tao-like love of poetry and music and friends that was suddenly—the spotlight turned on and it was all there for the country to see, and it made it visible. It didn’t last very long.”
Peter Pilafian
“My idea of a good festival, the best festival of all time, was Monterey.”
Grace Slick
—
ON MONDAY MORNING the stragglers melt away into the postpsychedelic mists, carrying fragments of the festival’s spirit out into the world, while county workers set about raking up the wilting orchids. The dreaded fifty thousand failed to materialize, but Chief Marinello figures the three-day crowd at thirty-five thousand, with more than ten thousand able to hear the music coming from the stage at any given moment, including those outside the arena on the fairgrounds.
Janis and Big Brother aren’t the only ones who achieve sudden renown at Monterey. Jimi Hendrix becomes an overnight sensation. A measure of how little known he was before Monterey is his third billing, below Jefferson Airplane and the jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo, on the poster—printed before Monterey—for his scheduled appearance at the Fillmore in San Francisco that follows the Pop Festival.
And Otis Redding has brought soul music a giant step closer to the mainstream by knocking the socks off a musical generation that is leavening the pop charts with songs about subjects far beyond teenage heartbreak.
In the immediate aftermath of the festival, it is Janis who gets the most notice, the biggest boost. The fact that Big Brother was the only act to perform twice gains them an extra measure of attention from the fans and the press. In many of the articles about the Pop Festival that bloom in newspapers and magazines across the land, there’s Janis, hair flying, singing her heart out with such conviction that even in a still photograph you can feel her power.
Less noticed, except by some of us who remain connected to Janis through the months and years that follow, is the fortuitous confluence of events that combined here to produce her sudden rise in the popular consciousness. It is not just the fact that a film was being made, but that the filmmaker was Pennebaker, that his reaction to Janis boosted the effort to offer them a second chance, that Penny knew Albert Grossman, and that the need to have Janis in the movie brought Albert and the members of Big Brother to each other’s attention in a way that probably contributes to Albert’s signing to manage Big Brother before the year is out. So many apparently random ripples flow together to create the perfect wave.
My own presence at the festival is in no way related to Janis’s rise to prominence, but if I hadn’t been at Monterey, if I hadn’t known Bob Neuwirth, who knew Pennebaker, if I hadn’t reacted to Janis as everyone who heard her reacted, I wouldn’t be able to tell the tale that follows.
In the elevating afterglow, the Monterey Pop Festival reveals itself as something more than the launching pad for new beginnings. It is the culmination of a movement that began when the first inspired soul of the post–World War II generation—inspired by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Burl Ives, and Josh White, among others—picked up a guitar and strummed out a folk song. In the fifties, teenagers supported the creation of a new kind of pop music. In the sixties, many of those same teens, now in their twenties, are making it. American popular music has become a do-it-yourself enterprise, and it has extended its appeal to a broader demographic. Assembled at Monterey, the leading lights of the new music, in company with their fans, have demonstrated the magnanimous force of music, love and flowers.
As the Pennebaker crew packs up to head for the airport, those who have found Monterey to their liking have got the Leavin’ California Blues. I sympathize as best I can, but my exploration of the Summer of Love is just beginning. My bluegrass band, the Charles River Valley Boys, is booked for a California tour.