The year 1967 was … magi-… no, color- … true but not quite capturing the spirit of the time … wild, not really … weird, a bit. Looking back at that year through a 50-year-old music festival documentary, the summer of ’67 was whimsical. The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—an album so profound and extraordinary, referred to in the annals of pop music as the band’s masterpiece—which was played full length repeatedly on radio all over the country. Then they released All You Need is Love, and those words set the tone for the Summer of Love. But a musical moment in California captured, presented and preserved the times as they were lived by those who would (as opposed to those who wouldn’t). Monterrey International Pop Festival captures a moment in time: when music and culture united in peace, harmony and love.
The festival was one weekend in June near San Francisco. The movie opens with a young girl gushing on camera about a ‘love in,’ expecting to experience the highest high with all the great bands performing on one stage. Countering her naïve enthusiasm, a police chief expresses dire concern with the possibility of the ‘Hell’s Angels,’ then he corrects himself to say ‘the hippies,’ coming in droves to camp out in this idyllic community. The logistics were dubious. The town would run out of food in one day. A lot could go wrong with a gathering of so many people—and by people he meant ‘freaks.’ Yet everything, as far as the camera lens shows, went beautifully.
It was a groovy summer for all those hippies wearing flowers in their hair out in San Francisco. A lot of America’s young people were heading West for sun and fun and endless summer or so they envisioned. Frisco is cold at night, no place to be walking around in bare feet. Ah, but the Monterrey Festival was spread out on an endless green lawn. The film by D.A. Pennebaker, featuring several songs by The Mamas and The Papas, is a perfect time capsule for everyone who missed the concert—and the dawn of a new era.
A heavy happening
The film records the throngs of hippies coming together to set up the festival. Spotted on the sidelines are major performing artists like Janis Joplin, the girl singer for Big Brother & the Holding Company. At the time American radio had not heard of her or her unique gravelly power-tooled Texas drawl. She killed at Monterrey with a Big Mama Thornton blues song called Ball ‘n’ Chain. The band matches Joplin’s vocal audacity with an electric guitar lead that pierces the ears and the heart. During the performance, Pennebaker holds the camera on Mama Cass, sitting front row and obviously blown away by the new vocal talent.
Simon and Garfunkel perform songs from their hit movie of 1967, The Graduate. Also performing were: Otis Redding, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, The Association, The Animals, Canned Heat, The Who, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience—another first-time performer before a huge live American audience. While Hendrix concludes his version of Wild Thing—featuring a one-handed tribute to Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night—he lights his guitar on fire and throws it against the amps until it’s torn apart then tosses the pieces to the audience. The camera catches some audience reaction of confusion and disgust with the antics … soon to be standard at hard rock concerts.
The multicultural performance comes from Ravi Shankar, the famous Indian sitar player who performs a morning raga. As the strange twangs are heard mid morning, the camera pans slowly across the audience, all sitting attentive and well behaved in a sea of metal chairs. Hey, is that Ann-Margret? Look, it’s Jimi Hendrix seriously digging the sitar. There’s Micky Dolenz! Some in the audience meditate; some study the music, listening to every note of the performing ensemble classically featuring the drone of the tambura and the quick rhythmic accents from the tabla. A few along the outskirts gyrate to the sexy Eastern beat. One man stands alone in the congregation violently shaking his body as if casting out a demon. Shankar looks his most virile, handsome, full of health and vitality, sitting on the stage with one leg crossed over his lap, his bare foot moving to the musical ebullience on which he is elaborating. For twenty minutes, the energetic music builds slowly but surely, ending with a dizzying visual of Shankar’s incredible multi-strumming, impossible to the naked eye. Yet there it is, captured on film.
Other showstoppers are Country Joe and Fish improvising on psychedelic rock, with a very young Peter Frampton playing his signature licks on guitar, and jazz fusionist Hugh Masekela performing a piece with a title translating to mean Healing Song. Opening with African conga beats, the jazz begins as Masekela screams in what seems to be gibberish, shouting out to connect with Mother Africa or Mother God. Who knows? The complex percussion and congas beat fiercely while the brass clash loudly. Then the music changes mood for serenity and calm, a young white guy in the audience smiles and nods, really digging it.
Mayberry USA
In contrast to the counterculture or the hippie movement, America was still very Squaresville. This can be best determined by thumbing through the pages of many a high school yearbook, where guys’ hair is clean cut and above the ears and girls’ hairdos are bouffant and sprayed. Think My Three Sons because that was America in 1967. The pop festival makes it out like everyone was wearing long straight hair, little or no makeup, feathers, flowers, lace, granny glasses and thrift store clothes. Long hair on guys was a sign of protest against the Vietnam War and the draft.
Another way to determine America at that time would be by turning the TV channel dial. Number one was The Andy Griffith Show followed by The Lucy Show, both in or soon to be in color. Color was a BIG development in TV. The change to color film coincided with fashion combinations that a decade earlier would have turned stomachs: yellow and purple, red and orange, all colors swirled together.
Psychedelic was the word for the new fashions in swirled colors. It also was a drug reference. LSD—that drug that makes colors heard and sounds visible—was influential in the changing color schemes, tasteful or not. The drug had been legal for decades and seriously used in psychotherapy especially among creative people. Somehow it got into the public and was regularly consumed for recreation by a lot of youth in the late 1960s. LSD wasn’t made an illegal narcotic until 1966. But the genie was out of the bottle, so the effects were well known or going to be among America’s middle class.
Another way to fully understand 1967 would be to check the box office. The number one movie was the violent Bonnie & Clyde. Other top movies were not near as bloody yet reveal a growing unrest and dissatisfaction among young people with middle class mores and expectations: The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Cool Hand Luke, In the Heat of the Night. This in combination with the number one pop music hit of 1967, To Sir With Love, cast a calm if not ordinary perspective on the times. But another huge hit was the dark mesmerizing Ode to Billie Joe. Along with pop hits such as Windy, I’m a Believer, and Somethin’ Stupid, the year could be deemed as ‘suppressed contradictions’ to following generations.
Kind of a drag
The whole ’60s era in modern minds is 1967. But it wasn’t. In many respects, 1967 wasn’t 1967. Within the national population, a small but multiplying number of young people, mostly residing in major cities and college educated, were hip to the times and willing to experiment with drugs, follow Eastern religion, and participate in alternative lifestyles like communes or living together unmarried.
The theme of the year came, naturally, from a very important song by The Beatles: All you need is love. And for a time, a very brief time historically speaking, quite a few young Americans were able to love their way through life. And in so doing, they experienced total bliss, were unencumbered by responsibilities and obligations, happy just to do their own thing of which music was the major focus. Life should be total joy. But soon the drugs wore off, adulthood sunk in, duty called. American hippies grew up. Most can count their blessings they evaded addiction, overdose, arrest and prison.
Monterrey Pop indicates its own carefree moment will be brief as the camera strolls through festival booths and spots a sick, lonely and conspicuously overdressed Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones—his fate ominous. Modern audiences watch performers like Joplin, Hendrix and members of Canned Heat from the perspective of their fate: death by overdose, death at a young age, death from foolishness, totally accidental deaths. Whimsy, then, is best lived for a day or two, a fond experience on which to reminisce, like watching Monterrey Pop.