Monterey Pop
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
The quote is famous: “If you remember the 1960s, you weren’t there.” No one knows who said it first. It’s been attributed to many. But if you want to see and hear a bit of what that long-ago decade was really like there’s a wonderful time capsule that takes you there; back to when the counterculture was fueled, in large part, by a glorious soundtrack of music.
One lightning bolt of a festival!
Filmed in 1967, during the Summer of Love, Monterey Pop is a colorful documentary of the three-day Monterey International Pop Music Festival that brought together many of the era’s greatest musicians. This was two years before Woodstock. So the electrifying performance footage captured by director D.A. Pennebaker and his team of camera operators gave audiences an up-close glimpse of the artists behind the music styles that were exploding at the time. Rock, jazz, folk, psychedelic, pop, rhythm and blues—Monterey Pop brought them all together in one lightning bolt of a festival!
Not all the artists who performed there are in the film, but the lineup that’s here is jaw-dropping: The Who, The Mamas and the Papas, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Simon and Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and more.
Monterey Pop is a terrific chance to experience the excitement that the Monterey audience experienced when it saw and heard many of these artists for the first time. Some legendary, career-defining performances are here.
At the time, Otis Redding was known primarily to black audiences. But his appearance before the mostly white audience at Monterey changed all that. Backed by Booker T. & the M.G.’s, his performance is electrifying. Tragically he died just six months later.
Janis Joplin’s performance of “Ball and Chain” is powerful, a blues-drenched ball of fire. Incredibly, she did the song earlier in the festival, but it wasn’t filmed, so the filmmakers wisely brought her back to do it again.
And both Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend of The Who deliver unforgettable finales by setting fire to their guitars and smashing them to pieces. The story goes that a coin flip decided which of them would play first because neither wanted to be overshadowed by the other. Hendrix lost, but it didn’t matter. His genius is here in all its glory.
I give Monterey Pop four out of four stars. For the record, you can find other performances online that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film, such as Otis Redding’s entire 20-minute set. It’s collected under the title Shake! Otis at Monterey.
