The basic facts
The Monterey International Pop Festival took place on 16, 17 and 18 June 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. It ran across a Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with the main concerts held in the evenings and additional afternoon shows on the Saturday and Sunday. It is often described as the first major rock festival in the United States, although that “first” is easy to argue about, since open-air gatherings and jazz and folk festivals had already established the idea of a multi-day music event. What Monterey did was bring an unusually wide range of performers together, in front of a large audience and a film crew, at a moment when the popular music business was changing quickly.
The festival’s name matters. “Pop” in 1967 was broad. It covered soul, folk, Indian classical music, psychedelic rock, jazz-tinged pop and the polished harmonies of Los Angeles groups, and the bill reflected that mix.
How it came together
The best-known organisers were John Phillips and Lou Adler. Phillips was a songwriter and a member of the Mamas and the Papas. Adler was a producer and record executive who worked with the group and ran the Dunhill label. Accounts of the festival’s very beginnings differ in detail, and some credit others, including promoter Alan Pariser, with an early version of the idea. By the spring of 1967 Phillips and Adler were the figures driving it, and they had only a few weeks to turn a concept into a working event.
Publicist Derek Taylor, who had earlier worked with the Beatles, helped draw attention to the festival. Phillips also wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, which Scott McKenzie recorded and released in the spring of 1967. The song worked as an informal advertisement for the scene the festival was celebrating, and McKenzie appeared on the Sunday night bill.
A nonprofit arrangement
One unusual feature was the way the festival was structured. It was set up as a nonprofit, with the stated aim of directing any proceeds to charitable and musical causes rather than to the organisers. The performers were not paid fees in the usual way. Most of them reportedly received help with travel and expenses and little more. Accounts differ on whether any individual artist received a fee, so it is safest to say that the arrangement was generally one of unpaid appearances.
A board of directors and advisers lent the project credibility, and it is often said to have included well-known musicians from both sides of the Atlantic, reportedly names such as Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Paul Simon. The exact roster and each person’s level of involvement are not something to state with confidence. What can be said is that the festival presented itself as a project of working musicians rather than a conventional commercial promotion.
The sound of the weekend
The programme mixed Californian and British acts, soul and folk with the louder new bands. Among the artists commonly associated with the festival were the Association, Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Mamas and the Papas, plus Ravi Shankar on the Sunday afternoon. A separate account of the day-by-day running order covers the bill in detail, so here it is enough to say that the schedule ended on Sunday night with the Mamas and the Papas.
The festival gave a national platform to what writers later called the San Francisco Sound, the loose, extended, amplified style associated with Bay Area bands. It also gave American audiences their first substantial look at Jimi Hendrix, who had become known in Britain before he was widely known at home. For Otis Redding, the weekend brought his soul music to a young crowd that had mostly come for rock, and his set is still remembered as one of the festival’s high points.
The setting and the crowd
The Monterey County Fairgrounds were already familiar to music audiences, since the Monterey Jazz Festival had been held there each autumn since 1958. The arena held a limited number of seated listeners, and many of the people who came to the town stayed on the grounds or nearby rather than inside the venue. Estimates of the total attendance across the three days are often put at around 50,000, though this is an approximation and not a counted figure. A good deal of the work of running the weekend was done by volunteers, and the practical side of the event is covered in a separate article.
The festival also reflected the music industry of the time. Los Angeles was the base of many of the people involved, including Phillips and Adler, while the San Francisco bands represented a scene that the record companies were only starting to take seriously. Monterey put the two together on one stage, which gave the weekend some of its character and some of its tension.
Its place in the Summer of Love
Monterey is usually placed at the start of what became known as the Summer of Love. In 1967 the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco was the best-known centre of a new youth culture, drawing visitors, journalists and young people from across the country. Press coverage of the hippies had grown through the spring, and the festival arrived just as the summer’s media attention was building.
The timing is worth keeping straight. The Sgt. Pepper album had been released in early June, just before the festival, and its influence was in the air. The Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park had taken place in January, and a smaller outdoor event on Mount Tamalpais had been held a week before Monterey. Monterey was therefore part of a run of gatherings, not an isolated event, but it was the one that was organised on a scale large enough to be recorded and widely remembered.
The film and the afterlife
D. A. Pennebaker’s cameras filmed the festival, and the resulting documentary, released in 1968, carried images of the weekend to people who had never been there. It helped fix some of the festival’s best-known moments in public memory, and it is one reason Monterey is often discussed more than other gatherings of the same year.
Later festivals borrowed from it, most famously Woodstock in 1969, though that event differed in scale, setting and organisation. Monterey’s influence is sometimes overstated in popular retellings, and the festival was not free of tension: some of the performers and organisers argued about money, filming and billing, and commercial interests were very much present behind the scenes. Even so, as a record of a particular moment in popular music, with a mixed bill, a charitable framing and a lot of optimism, it remains one of the most documented events of 1967.