Monterey Pop (USA, 1968). New restoration of D.A. Pennebaker documentary celebrating 50th anniversary of Monterey Pop Festival screening at The Cinematheque on July 7, 8, 9 and 12. For showtimes visit thecinematheque.ca/monterey-pop.
Article below originally appeared in 2007 on the 40th anniversary:
In 1967 the Monterey International Pop Festival launched the Summer of Love with a three-day party of almost mythical proportions.
No one knew what to expect from the first rock festival but from all reports there was nothing but good vibes on that historic weekend (June 15 to 18, 1967) and because its organizers set up the event as a non-profit event people in need have been benefiting from Monterey ever since.
To commemorate the anniversary a two-disc set of festival performances has just been released through Razor & Tie Records and Starbucks with all proceeds, as usual, going to the Monterey International Pop Festival Foundation. “I just wrote some cheques this morning,” says Lou Adler, one of the original organizers and a key figure in popular music over the past half century. “We are funded by the ancillaries -- the DVDs and the film and the new CD package. It made the charts this week at number 58 on the top 200 which is pretty good for something which was done 40 years ago.”
The original idea for a rock festival was hatched by Alan Pariser (heir to the Sweetheart Paper fortune) in 1966 and he approached people he knew in the music industry to get the ball rolling. It was initially going to be a one-day event with the Mamas and Papas as headliners but once the band became involved the concept changed radically. “They came to John Phillips and myself to hire the Mamas and Papas to headline the festival,” says Adler. “Somewhere along the way John and I thought it should be a three-day festival and we thought artists ought to play for free and it should be non-profit.”
The two men bought the dates back from Pariser for $50,000 with Adler putting up $10,000, John and Michelle Phillips contributing $10,000, and record producer Terry Melcher, Johnny Rivers and Paul Simon covering the rest of the fee with $10,000 each. “We started inviting the acts,” recalls Adler, “and telling them we were doing a pop festival. They said, ‘What’s that?’ because it was the first. And then we said, ‘It’s for charity,’ and they said ‘What’s that?’ After we got over all those barriers we ended up with 32 acts in a three-day festival.”
The organizers called Monterey a “pop” festival almost defiantly, rejecting “rock” or “blues” as too specific. They were looking for an all-inclusive event which covered the musical spectrum of pop radio, black and white -- a revolutionary concept in its day. And they also put together a board of directors that read like a who’s who of contemporary pop culture which included Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Smokey Robinson, Brian Wilson and Paul Simon among others.
“The minute people started hearing all these names it didn’t sound so much like a big ripoff,” says Michelle Phillips who was also heavily involved in putting the festival together with Adler and her husband John Phillips. “The board were told, ‘Look, just lend your name to this. We will never have a meeting. We just need your name. And that was very effective.”
“We had a few phone calls,” says Adler. “McCartney, if he did nothing else, he suggested Jimi Hendrix and The Who be invited. Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager was very active and was at the festival for the whole time.
Other than that it was just phone calls now and then to let them know what we were doing. The board was put together to validate what we were doing.”
The city of Monterey needed the most reassuring. “We started organizing the project in April,” says Michelle Phillips. “That gave us what was left of April, May and half of June to put it together. There was kind of an hysterical, giddy atmosphere at the offices (on Sunset Boulevard) and it was challenging. Can we get this done? And besides that we had to convince the board of supervisors in Monterey that this was going to be a good thing. They were very skeptical.
They were afraid that the town of Monterey was going to be overrun by 30,000 hippies when in fact it was overrun by about 200,000 hippies.”
The fact that a pop festival had never been put on before worked both for and against the organizers. Adler and John Phillips spent a lot of time selling their concept to a nervous city hall. “The police chief thought hippies and Hells Angels were the same thing,” says Adler. “He was due to retire in six months and didn’t want any bumps as he went out.”
Michelle Phillips’ main job in the weeks leading up to the festival was selling ads (it cost $1,500 to buy a page) for the festival’s glossy brochure. It was a tough sell considering the short time they had and the newness of the concept. Nothing was guaranteed. “I was very good at it,” she laughs. “I had to explain to stores and managers what a pop festival was and tell them who was going to be there when in fact I didn’t know who was going to be there. It was a lot of making stuff up. I was just generally running errands, answering phones -- Lou and John were the high priests and I was their nun.”
Forty years ago the music business was much more regionalized than it is today. San Francisco bands played in and around the Bay Area, L.A. bands targeted southern California, Otis Redding performed mainly for black audiences and nobody outside of the U.K. had heard of The Who or the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Even a few days before the festival started no one knew if anyone would show up. The biggest no-show was Brian Wilson’s band.
“We were disappointed that the Beach Boys didn’t come because they were supposed to close Saturday night,” says Michelle Phillips. “We still don’t know why they didn’t come. There is a lot of speculation that they didn’t come because they thought it was not their kind of crowd. This was before Pet Sounds. They were a beach, surf’s up kind of band but I think they would have been wildly accepted. There was so many different types of music at the festival it would have been great fun to have the Beach Boys there.”
Most of the performers who did show up brought their A game. Instead of the Beach Boys, R&B star Otis Redding was asked play the closing spot Saturday night. His intense set is legendary and Phillips was instrumental in getting him in the line-up. “Everyone had a special somebody that they wanted on,” she says. “And when they asked me I said, ‘Otis.’ I had just seen him perform at the Apollo and I said ‘You’ve just got to see this guy. He’s incredible.’”
Hendrix and Peter Townsend fought over who should follow who on the Sunday night bill. Both acts destroyed their instuments while performing and wanted to perform first. The Who leader won the argument but that just drove Hendrix to new heights of creative destructionand he let out all the stops during his incendiary set.
Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company were the only act to perform twice. “Not many people had heard of Janis Joplin,” says Michelle Phillips. “And her manager wouldn’t let her be filmed because he didn’t know how she was going to be compensated for it. They were all a bit suspicious of this L.A. contingent. She did not film the first set (on Saturday, June 17) and when she came off she cried to her manager ‘I should have been filmed.’ She was received so well. We let her go back on (Sunday, June 18) and we filmed the second set. She was so pleased and happy just jumping up and down like a little kid.”
It was a stroke of genius to hire documentary film director D.A. Pennebaker to film the festival. His images tell the story of the historical festival and capture Monterey in all its glory. “Pennebaker had just made a Bob Dylan documentary and so he was the obvious one to ask to do it,” says Michelle Phillips. “His way of shooting was very avant garde. It was actually paid for by ABC Television. There was a new kid at ABC named Barry Diller who thought that this would make a great movie of the week. But then Lou showed them a lot of footage of Hendrix and the ABC people said, ‘No this is a family-oriented network.’ But I think Lou knew exactly what he was doing because they just gave the film back to them and so it became part of the foundation. The money that the film has generated has been just great.”
Pennebaker’s film, Monterey Pop, has survived as an important artifact of rock’n’roll history entertaining generations and providing a major source of funding for the foundation. According to Adler Monterey’s legacy is now stronger than ever. “We continue to give money to those foundations and individuals in the names of the artists that appeared at Monterey and on behalf of them and hopefully in causes that fulfills the reasons that they came to Monterey. The dream of helping people by performing and giving something back. Bringing music and art to public schools that have been shut off by budgets, the L.A. Free Clinic, the San Francisco Free Clinic, Schools on Wheels, the Thelonious Monk Institute. We’re still giving money away.”
Playlist for Monterey Pop: http://bit.ly/2sWfaJ9
