Not a single festival
The title of this piece suggests one event called the 1967 Music Festival. There was no such single event. The year’s live music was spread across many gatherings, and the two that did the most to set the scene for Monterey took place in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Human Be-In on 14 January 1967 and the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival on Mount Tamalpais in June. Both were open-air, both mixed music with other activities, and both showed a community that was starting to see itself as a community.
The Human Be-In, 14 January 1967
The Human Be-In was held on Saturday, 14 January 1967, on the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. It was billed as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In”. The idea grew out of the neighbourhood around Haight-Ashbury and was promoted through the local underground press and by word of mouth, with a widely reproduced poster. Organisers drew people from several overlapping groups: Haight residents, student radicals from Berkeley, poets and artists, and musicians.
Estimates of the crowd vary. Figures in the tens of thousands are usual, and a range of roughly twenty to thirty thousand is often quoted, but no precise count exists. The programme combined speakers and bands. Among the speakers were the poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, and the psychologist Timothy Leary, who is remembered for the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” at the event. Music came from local groups, including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The Be-In was free, and it ran without elaborate staging.
Several details of the day, including how food was shared and how the crowd looked after the site, are reported by participants in ways that are hard to confirm, and some of the stories have probably grown with retelling. What is clear is that the Be-In was a major local event and received national coverage. It helped bring the idea of a hippie community to a wider audience, a few months before the Summer of Love became a media phenomenon.
What the Be-In showed
It is easy to read the Be-In as a rehearsal for Monterey, but it was a different kind of event. Nobody was selling tickets, and the music was one part of a broader gathering rather than the point of it. The mix of poetry, politics, psychedelic drug culture and rock groups was typical of the Bay Area scene in the months before large-scale commercial attention arrived.
It also showed how much that scene relied on informal networks. The poster, the notices in the underground press and the connections between Haight and Berkeley made it possible to organise a very large gathering quickly. Many of the same bands who played the Be-In were soon among the best-known names associated with the San Francisco Sound, and the psychedelic rock posters and light-show visuals of the local halls were part of the same culture.
The Fantasy Fair on Mount Tamalpais, June 1967
The second event was the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, held in Marin County on Mount Tamalpais over the weekend of 10 and 11 June 1967, a week before Monterey. It was held at the Mountain Theater, an outdoor amphitheatre on the mountain. The event paired a fair, with crafts, art and costume, with two days of music. Performers reported in connection with it include the Doors, Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds, although accounts of the exact bill differ, so it is best to treat any complete list with caution.
Where the Be-In had been free and spontaneous, the Fantasy Fair was more conventional. It was promoted by a local radio station, sold tickets and was run as a charity benefit, according to the usual accounts. Much of its significance comes from its timing. It was the first of the big June music weekends in California, and it showed that local promoters and radio stations already saw a market for outdoor events built around the new bands.
The community behind the music
Taken together, the two events point to a few things about the Bay Area scene in 1967.
- It had a shared geography. Haight-Ashbury, Berkeley and Marin County were all connected, and the same people turned up at all of them.
- It had its own media. Posters, handbills and the underground press were how word spread, rather than mainstream advertising.
- It was already attracting outside attention. By June the city was getting national news coverage, and the same press interest that made the Summer of Love famous also made festivals more commercially attractive.
Monterey, when it came, brought professional organisation and a large audience to a model that was already in place. The Be-In and the Mount Tamalpais event are a reminder that the San Francisco scene did not need Monterey to exist. Monterey needed it, and drew on it.
Limits to keep in mind
Memories of these gatherings are heavily shaped by later nostalgia. Claims about how many attended, who was on stage when, and what was said are often uncertain. A careful account describes the shape of the events and treats precise numbers and quotations with caution.