Here’s where it all began!
The Monterey International Pop Music Festival was a three-day concert event held June 16 to June 18, 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California.[1] The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience.
The Monterey Pop Festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and generally is regarded as one of the beginnings of the “Summer of Love” in 1967;[2] the first rock festival had been held just one week earlier at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival. Because Monterey was widely promoted and heavily attended, featured historic performances, and was the subject of a popular theatrical documentary film, it became an inspiration and a template for future music festivals, including the Woodstock Festival two years later. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner said “Monterey was the nexus – it sprang from what the Beatles began, and from it sprang what followed.”[11]
“Monterey was the nexus – it sprang from what the Beatles began, and from it sprang what followed.”
Jann Wenner
Rolling Stone publisher
The festival was planned in seven weeks by John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, record producer Lou Adler, Alan Pariser and publicist Derek Taylor. Monterey and Big Sur had been known as the site for the long-running Monterey Jazz Festival and Big Sur Folk Festival; the promoters saw the Monterey Pop festival as a way to validate rock music as an art form in the way in which jazz and folk were regarded.[12] The organizers succeeded beyond all expectations.
The artists performed for free, with all revenue donated to charity, except for Ravi Shankar, who was paid $3,000 for his afternoon-long performance on the sitar. Country Joe and the Fish were paid $5,000, not by the festival, but from revenue generated from the D.A. Pennebaker documentary.[13] The artists did, however, have their flights and accommodation paid for. Apart from Shankar, each act was given up to 40 minutes for their performance. Several ended their sets earlier, including the Who, who played for only 25 minutes.
Monterey Pop Festival June 16-18, 1967
Calamity Jane