Getting the calendar straight
Popular memory sometimes folds the festivals of the late 1960s into a single blur, so a few dates are worth fixing first. Woodstock took place in August 1969, and the Isle of Wight Festival began in 1968, so neither belongs to 1967. The year’s best-known rock festival was Monterey in June. But 1967 also had a full calendar of older, established festivals, and these are easier to overlook. Some had been running for years and followed their own traditions, quite apart from the new rock scene.
Newport Folk and Newport Jazz
The Newport Folk Festival, held in Newport, Rhode Island, was the leading American folk festival of the 1960s. Its jazz counterpart, the Newport Jazz Festival, had begun in 1954 under the producer George Wein, with the folk festival following later in the decade. Both ran in the summer, and the 1967 editions continued their regular pattern.
The Newport Folk Festival is best remembered for 1965, when Bob Dylan appeared with an electric band and part of the audience reacted with anger. That story has been retold so often that it can overshadow the festival’s regular purpose, which was to present traditional and contemporary folk music, blues and related forms to a large audience, often with workshops as well as evening concerts. By 1967 the folk revival was no longer the dominant youth music it had been in the early part of the decade, as many young listeners had moved toward electric rock. The festival nonetheless continued. Because full line-ups for the 1967 editions are easy to misremember, they are left out here; the festival’s own records are the place to check them.
The Monterey Jazz Festival
The Monterey Jazz Festival, founded in 1958, is a separate event from the pop festival. It was held at the same fairgrounds, usually in September, and it was one of the best-known jazz festivals in the United States. Its founders included Jimmy Lyons, and the writer Ralph Gleason was also closely involved in its early years.
The overlap of site and name is a frequent source of confusion. The jazz festival provided a precedent for how to run a multi-day event at the fairgrounds, and the pop festival’s organisers used the same location in June. The jazz festival continued as its own tradition and is not a part of the 1967 pop event. A reader looking for the pop festival should keep in mind that it was a one-off in 1967 and was not a continuation of the jazz series.
British events
Britain had its own festival culture, and it was developing separately from the American one. The National Jazz and Blues Festival, which began in the early 1960s, was held in the summer and gradually shifted toward rock. It is the ancestor of what is now called the Reading Festival, although the later name and location came after 1967.
The best-remembered British event of the year was probably the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, an all-night benefit held at Alexandra Palace in north London on 29 April 1967 and running into the following morning. It was organised around the underground scene of the time and the underground newspaper International Times, and featured groups associated with it. Pink Floyd are the best-known name in accounts of the night, and their appearance fits with the band’s rise in the same year, when they were recording their first album. The event mixed music with light shows, film, performance and a very large crowd, and it is regularly cited as a high point of the London underground scene.
Pirate radio and the BBC’s reorganisation of its pop output, which came in autumn 1967, formed the broadcast background to all of this, as the stations on which British teenagers heard new music were changing.
What the calendar shows
A few points stand out when the year’s events are set side by side.
- Rock was not yet the only form of festival music. Jazz and folk festivals were older, better-organised and, in many cases, more financially stable.
- The new festivals borrowed from them. Charitable framing, multi-day programmes and outdoor or fairground venues were all in use before the rock festivals existed.
- The audiences were changing. Young listeners who attended Monterey or the Technicolor Dream were often not the same people who attended Newport, though some overlap existed.
Why the later dates matter
Putting Woodstock in 1969 and the Isle of Wight in 1968 is more than a pedantic correction. The two later festivals were considerably bigger than anything in 1967 and, in the Isle of Wight’s case, were partly a response to the earlier success of American festivals. The 1967 calendar was smaller in scale and more varied in style than the later festival boom that followed it, which makes it a useful reminder that the arrival of the large rock festival came at the end of the decade, not at its midpoint.