The Monterey Pop Festival of Nineteen Sixty Seven
Near Monterey, California
Every autumn the Monterey County Fairgrounds fill with jazz, but in the summer of nineteen sixty seven this ground hosted something that changed music forever. Over three days in the middle of June, the Monterey International Pop Festival became one of the first major rock festivals in America. The producers Lou Adler and John Phillips pulled it together in about seven weeks, and nearly every act played for free, with the proceeds going to charity.
Crowds estimated in the tens of thousands sprawled across the fairgrounds in the opening days of the Summer of Love. On the final night, the English band The Who and a young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix flipped a coin to see who would close. Hendrix went last, knelt over his guitar, doused it in lighter fluid, and set it ablaze.
A tearful Janis Joplin begged to play a second time with the cameras running, and the filmed performance made her a star. Otis Redding won over a huge new audience just months before his death. The filmmaker D.
A. Pennebaker captured it all in the documentary Monterey Pop, and the festival era was born.
