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The Monterey International Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience. The festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and generally is regarded as one of the beginnings of the "Summer of Love" in 1967 and the public debut of the hippie, flower power and flower children movements and era. Because Monterey was widely promoted and heavily attended, featured historic performances, and was the subject of a popular theatrical documentary film, it became an inspiration and a template for future music festivals, including the Woodstock Festival two years later. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner said "Monterey was the nexus – it sprang from what the Beatles began, and from it sprang what followed." Background In early 1967, Michael Bowen produced the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where many attendees dropped acid for the first time (lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD) and listened to Timothy Leary tell the crowd that people living in cities should reorganize as tribes and villages. This was one of the important precursors to the Summer of Love five months later. The Human Be-In directly inspired the Monterey International Pop Festival. The first American hippie-style rock festival was held during June 10–11 at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, produced by radio station KFRC as the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival. Star performers included the Doors, the Sons of Champlin, Moby Grape, the Steve Miller Blues Band, Jefferson Airplane, Hugh Masekela, Country Joe and the Fish, Canned Heat and the Byrds; the latter seven acts also played Monterey Pop one week later. Planning The festival was planned in seven weeks by John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, record producer Lou Adler, Alan Pariser and publicist Derek Taylor. Monterey and Big Sur had been known as the site for the long-running Monterey Jazz Festival and Big Sur Folk Festival; the promoters saw a notional Monterey Pop festival as a way to validate rock music as an art form in the way in which jazz and folk were regarded. Taylor announced the festival on March 25, 1967, in his regular column for Disc and Music Echo magazine. The festival's board of governors included some such as Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy who displayed initial enthusiasm but did little to organize the event. Local Big Sur resident and Stage Manager for the Monterey Jazz Festival, Paul Vieregee was brought in to be the Stage Manager for the Monterey Pop Festival, along with McCune Sound for production. The artists performed for free, with all revenue donated to charity, except for Ravi Shankar, who was paid $3,000 for his afternoon-long performance on the sitar. Country Joe and the Fish were paid $5,000, not by the festival, but from revenue generated from the D. A. Pennebaker documentary, Monterey Pop. The artists did, however, have their flights and accommodation paid for. Apart from Shankar, each act was given up to 40 minutes for their performance. Several ended their sets earlier, including the Who, who played for only 26 minutes. Monterey's bill boasted a lineup that put established stars like the Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds alongside groundbreaking new acts from the UK and the U.S. Crowd estimates for the festival have ranged from 25,000 to 90,000 people, which congregated in and around the festival grounds. The fairgrounds' enclosed performance arena, where the music took place, had an approved festival capacity of 7,000, but it was estimated that 8,500 jammed into it for Saturday night's show, with many extra attendees standing around the sides of the arena. Festival-goers who wanted to see the musical performances were required to have either an 'all-festival' ticket or a separate ticket for each of the five scheduled concert events they wanted to attend in the arena: Friday night, Saturday afternoon and night, and Sunday afternoon and night. Ticket prices varied by seating area, and ranged from $3 to $6.50 ($27–59 in 2024, adjusted for inflation). The song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" was written by Phillips and sung by Scott McKenzie, released in May 1967, to promote the event. Performances Friday night The Los Angeles–based band the Association with hits such as "Along Comes Mary" and "Never My Love" was the first act to perform at the festival. Newsweek magazine's reporter Michael Lydon reviewed their performance as having a "professional style and entertaining manner," especially on their latest hit single "Windy", which was rising steadily on the Billboard Hot 100. The Association was followed by the Paupers, a rock band from Toronto, who delivered a "screaming volume and a racy quality," according to Lydon. The Paupers were proud to be judged on their music alone, not relying on "gimmicks" or lighting effects. The next act was blues singer Lou Rawls fronting a big band, the song arrangements conveying a "rock 'n' soul" style. Rawls also spoke to the crowd about the gritty experiences of African American life. After his set, he said to reporters that he was confident that "the blues is the way of the future. The fads come and go, but the blues remain. The blues is the music that makes a universal language." He described how rock artists were increasingly drawing from the blues to give their music more substance. Beverley Martyn sang a short set followed by Johnny Rivers. After Rivers was Eric Burdon leading his new incarnation of the Animals, introduced as the New Animals, re-interpreted the Stones song "Paint It Black", adding electric violin. With this appearance, Burdon signaled a change to more of a politically charged hard rock style mixed with psychedelia. He later wrote the song "Monterey" about his experience at the concert. The headliner of Friday night was Simon & Garfunkel, who started after midnight, and performed minimally with just two voices and one guitar. They finished at 1:30 am on Saturday morning. Lydon reviewed their set as sweetly retrospective, but "they seemed sadly left behind" by the shifting of rock music away from the duo's established folk rock style. Saturday afternoon Canned Heat started the Saturday afternoon show; their set was deemed "uninspired" by Lydon. In a thrilling display of raw emotion, Janis Joplin sang next, backed by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Joplin's wildly elemental interpretation of the blues standard "Ball and Chain" was described by Lydon as "the blues big mama style, tough, raw, and gutsy, and with an aching that few black singers reach." For the first time at Mo.... Discover the Phil Elwood popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Phil Elwood books.