Monterey Pop (The Foundation, Leacock-Pennebaker Productions, John Phillips-Lou Adler Productions, 1968, filmed 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The remaining movie my husband Charles and I watched July 8 was Monterey Pop, directed by D. A. Pennebaker and filmed at the Monterey Pop Festival, held June 16-18, 1967 at the Monterey Fairgrounds. The Monterey Pop Festival was considered at the time the launching pad for the rock explosion, one of the key events that established rock music as the art form of the young and also made it a serious business. It’s inevitably compared to the Woodstock festival two years later, especially since some of the same performers (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, The Who) appeared at both and the slogans were similar: Monterey’s was “Music, Love and Flowers” and Woodstock’s was “Peace, Love and Music.” But there were also major differences; unlike Woodstock, Monterey was held at an established venue (the Monterey Pop Festival was patterned after the successful Monterey Jazz Festivals that had taken place for years at the same fairgrounds) and it was a California summer, meaning it didn’t rain. Also the promoters were experienced music people – John Phillips, leader of the band The Mamas and the Papas, and his manager, Lou Adler – who knew what they were doing, and they weren’t forced to set up a total infrastructure from scratch the way the Woodstock organizers (who didn’t even know for sure where their festival would be until days before it took place) were. I remember seeing Monterey Pop in its initial theatrical release, and again decades later when it was run (with commercial interruptions) in the mid-1980’s on the early incarnation of MTV, back when it was still “music television” and before it descended into the swamp of putrid “reality” shows that eventually took it over.

There are lots of stories behind the Monterey Pop Festival, including the sad tale of the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys had agreed to perform at Monterey, and Brian Wilson lent them the band’s sound system (there’s an ironic moment in the film in which one of the members of a band that did play there praised the quality of the sound system and said that at last audiences could hear them!), but as part of the fallout from the cancellation of the Beach Boys’ legendary unfinished album Smile, Wilson pulled them from the festival lineup. This helped earn the Beach Boys the reputation that plagued them for years as a terminally retro band whose songs about surfing, cars and puppy love were unhip and too lightweight to bother with. The organizers tried to and failed to get the very biggest names in rock – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan – to perform, but the acts they did get included the top names mentioned above as well as the white blues cover band Canned Heat, Simon and Garfunkel, South African pop-jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, Eric Burdon and The Animals (doing the Rolling Stones’ song “Paint It Black,” so the Stones got in there at least by proxy!), Otis Redding (just months before the plane crash that killed him and most of his band) and Ravi Shankar. In fact, director Pennebaker chose Shankar to close the film, playing a raga for over 20 minutes, though for most of the piece Pennebaker showed us visions of the audience and the merch tables and only towards the close does he cut to the stage. Ravi Shankar’s virtuosity is mind-boggling – he was the master of the sitar the way Vladimir Horowitz was of the piano and Jascha Heifetz the violin – and so are his accompanists, who I believe include Alla Rakha on tablas (Indian hand drums) and an unidentified woman playing tamboura (the Indian drone instrument that supplies a sonic underpinning to the sitarist’s improvisations).

The bands aren’t always featured in the songs you would expect; though Grace Slick and Janis Joplin get separate credits from their bands (Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, respectively), only Janis is featured, on her legendary cover of Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Ball and Chain.” The Airplane perform two songs, “High Flying Bird” and “Today,” but though Grace Slick is shown on screen front and center during “Today,” she’s actually just singing a second harmony vocal behind Paul Kantner’s lead and it’s jarring to see a woman but hear a man. As for Janis, her legendary insecurities and skepticism about her skills as a live performer nearly cost her the chance to be in this movie. The first time Big Brother played at the festival Janis ordered the camerapeople not to film their performance, and they didn’t. But they were so electrified by Janis’s singing that they pleaded with her to go on again, and after arranging with Adler and Phillips to have her play a second time, they got her permission to film her second show and that is what ended up in the movie. It was a star-making turn for her (though when the film came out I didn’t think it was as good a performance as the live “Ball and Chain” from Winterland in San Francisco on the Cheap Thrills album a year later) and bolstered her all-too-brief career. It’s ironic that Jimi Hendrix appears in the film right after Janis Joplin – their deaths in the summer of 1970 (Hendrix first, Joplin later) were the symbolic end of the 1960’s in music – though he’s shown performing only one song, “Wild Thing,” which was originally a pop-rock piece by the British band The Troggs.

The Troggs’ “Wild Thing” featured an ocarina solo in the middle; Hendrix took the song and changed it from pop-rock to proto-heavy metal. He also displayed his remarkable ability to turn the guitar from a staccato instrument to a legato one. It had begun with Charlie Christian and his all-too-brief career from 1939 to 1941; though he wasn’t the first electric guitarist, it was Christian who began the process of using not only the added volume of the electric guitar but also its sustaining capabilities to make the guitar sound more like a saxophone. While most of the jazz guitarists who followed Christian reverted to a more staccato style of picking (Wes Montgomery, who was essentially the missing link between Christian and Hendrix and, like both of them, died tragically young, was the exception), Hendrix took legato guitar playing to the max. Hendrix’s performance here also comes off as a sort of answer to The Who’s “My Generation,” their star-making song from 1965, which ends with Pete Townshend literally smashing his guitar to bits on stage and then throwing the neck into the audience like a stripper’s underwear. Hendrix went Townshend and The Who one better by not only smashing his guitar but literally setting it on fire with lighter fluid (there’s one shot in which he holds the container of fluid between his legs and it looks like he’s pissing on his guitar). Hendrix biographer Curtis Glebeek said in his book he wished there’d be a moratorium on the showing of this sequence because it’s given later audiences who never got to see Hendrix live a misleading and inaccurate portrayal of what his performances were like.

Monterey Pop holds up quite well as a slice of cultural history, and the music is quite good, too, though after Hendrix’s orgy of auto-destruction it’s a welcome relief when Pennebaker cuts to The Mamas and the Papas doing a song called “Got a Feeling” that’s an ode to conventional ideas about love and monogamy. It’s also lovely early on to hear Simon and Garfunkel without the big backing band that accompanied them on later tours; here they’re just two guys and a guitar doing a relatively innocent piece like “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” And Otis Redding is also wonderful, doing a bit of Sam Cooke’s “Shake” and then a complete performance (virtually all the songs are presented complete, a welcome change from the snippets we usually get in music documentaries) of his wrenching soul classic “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” There are a few things I could have done without, like Canned Heat’s O.K. cover of Muddy Waters’ hit “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” which like a lot of other white blues covers from the 1960’s I like a lot less now than I did then because I’ve heard the Black originals. Also Hugh Masekela’s “Bajabula Bonke (The Healing Song),” written by his then-wife Miriam Makeba (they broke up and she killed her career stone-dead by marrying radical “Black Power” activist Stokely Carmichael), gets a bit wearing after a while, and so does Country Joe and the Fish’s instrumental “Section 43” (Country Joe’s only contribution is playing a virtually inaudible harmonica part at the end). But overall Monterey Pop is a testament to the enduring power of this music and the coming-together of Black blues and white folk traditions that created it.