The Fiery Sounds of the Monterey International Pop Festival

Dear listeners,

Fifty-seven years ago today, the Monterey International Pop Festival — the three-day event that arguably invented the modern music festival — concluded in a blaze of glory. That Sunday boasted quite a bill: Ravi Shankar mesmerized the crowd with a set of ragas that lasted more than three hours. The Who obliterated the calm with a proto-punk set which ended when Pete Townshend smashed his guitar. Jimi Hendrix attempted a one-up by lighting his on fire. The headliners the Mamas & the Papas had the unenviable task of following all that.

I’ve had Monterey Pop on the brain recently, since last month I published an in-depth piece about the life and legacy of “Mama” Cass Elliot. (I began the essay with a self-deprecating joke that Elliot made onstage at the festival, which took place just six weeks after she’d given birth to her daughter.) The story of Monterey Pop is entwined in the story of the Mamas & the Papas: The group’s leader, John Phillips, was one of the organizers of the festival, and he even wrote the event’s de facto theme song, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” which was recorded by the folk singer Scott McKenzie. The Mamas & the Papas were perhaps the most famous band on the bill at the time, but that would soon change. The festival — like D.A. Pennebaker’s era-defining, fly-on-the-wall documentary “Monterey Pop” — was a snapshot of the precise moment when the prevailing sounds of folk-rock began to give way to a louder, gnarlier kind of rock ’n’ roll practiced by Hendrix, the Who and another of the weekend’s breakout stars, the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis Joplin.

One of the things that makes Pennebaker’s documentary so valuable is the fact that it captured, in vivid liveliness, so many musical luminaries who would soon be gone: Joplin, Hendrix, Elliot and Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash before the film was released. Pennebaker and his crew shot these artists in intimate, immediate close-up, pioneering the visual language of concert documentaries to come.

Today’s playlist revisits some of Monterey Pop’s legendry set list, specifically focusing on the songs performed in Pennebaker’s film. It’s a mix of live cuts and studio versions, of flower-child folk and rabble-rousing rock. It is unlikely to inspire you to go full pyromaniac like Hendrix, but just in case, you might want to have a fire extinguisher handy.

Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy,

Lindsay

Listen along while you read.