The primary actual American rock pageant was held at Mount Tamalpais in California on the weekend of June 10-11, 1967. Billed because the Fantasy Faire And Magic Mountain Music Pageant, it had an eclectic mixture of performers starting from Jefferson Airplane, The Doorways, Nation Joe & The Fish and The Byrds to Dionne Warwick and Smokey Robinson. 15,000 folks confirmed up for what was a non-profit occasion that price simply $2 to get in, with all earnings going to a close-by little one care heart.
However whereas the Fantasy Faire was first, the Monterey Pop Pageant is the one everybody remembers, with a line-up that learn like a who’s who in pop music. Otis Redding received his first publicity to a rock viewers and others on the invoice included The Mamas & The Papas, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, and Ravi Shankar. D. A. Pennebaker captured all of it on movie, which an unlimited quantity to boost its repute (and fable). This was the very epicenter of the Summer season of Love.
Held on the Monterey County Fairgrounds, from June 16-18, 1967, the Monterey Pop Pageant attracted round 200,000 folks. It was the primary main rock pageant in America. The occasion was organized by Lou Adler, John Phillips of The Mamas and The Papas, and Derek Taylor, the previous Beatles publicist. Their ambition was to create an occasion that was multi-cultural, multi-national, and multi-genre. It was actually a “first” and it may be thought-about the premier occasion of the “Summer of Love”; one at which every thing appeared to work and about which little dangerous has ever been written.
Specifically, Monterey helped launch the careers of many performers, catapulting them from native, or relative obscurity, into the forefront of American and worldwide consciousness. As we speak it’s simple to neglect that earlier than the Monterey Pop Pageant, Jimi Hendrix didn’t have a success file in America. It was the identical for The Who. By the point of the pageant, the group had solely managed to get a file into the Billboard High 20 and solely one among their 4 minor hits had received increased than No.51. Equally, Otis Redding was not very well-known amongst white audiences. All that appeared to vary within the wake of the pageant. Equally making a stir was The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, who based on reviews, was carrying “a mind-shattering gold lame coat festooned with beads, crystal swastika & lace, looked like a kind of unofficial King of the Festival.” Jones, for his half, had this to say: “This is really a great scene here. All the kids are so nice. The people are so polite and just come up and talk to me and say they like the way I’m dressed.”
Others who performed at Monterey included Jefferson Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel, Canned Warmth, Al Kooper, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Hugh Masekela, The Byrds, Booker T & the MGs, The Blues Undertaking, Grateful Useless, Buffalo Springfield, The Electrical Flag, and The Affiliation.
Press consideration from all over the world, and notably the music press, alerted followers to what was occurring, but it surely wasn’t till the top of 1968 that individuals had been in a position to see the documentary made by D.A Pennebaker. For most individuals, this was the primary time that they really noticed Jimi Hendrix set fireplace to his Stratocaster. The movie was an enormous deal, but it surely didn’t have the identical impact because the Woodstock film. Massive enterprise had not but cottoned onto the money-making potential of a “bunch of hippies.” A couple of years later, nearly every thing could be completely different.
Comply with our Summer season Of Love playlist, that includes all of the songs that outlined an period.
