How Janis Joplin and Otis Redding Conquered Monterey Pop FestivalRevisiting the festival that launched these two legends into a new stratosphere of stardom
by Wren Graves
on June 18, 2017, 11:30am
Dusting ‘Em Off is a rotating, free-form feature that revisits a classic album, film, or moment in pop-culture history. This week, Wren Graves looks back 50 years to when Janis Joplin and Otis Redding conquered Monterey Pop Festival.
1967, the “Summer of Love.” For the middle-aged and middle class, it must have felt like a plague had descended on California: Tens of thousands of youths, many with long hair bedecked with flowers, full of new ideas about politics, property rights, love, drugs, spirituality, and (in a few over-reported cases) what constitutes proper hygiene. They were called “hippies,” but this is one of those words that covers such a variety of people as to be almost meaningless. Intellectuals and mystics, revolutionaries and drugged-up burnouts, all were lumped together, united by little more than a rejection of consumerism and a belief in a better way of life.
The road they walked had been paved in the 1950’s by the Beat generation — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs — but hippie culture was less cynical than those writers, and the growing popularity of television gave the hippies a national platform on which to spread their ideas. What started as a political revolution in the cloistered halls of Berkeley soon gave way to a hazier cultural revolution, the new capital of which was the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Hunter S. Thompson christened it Hashbury.
It was against this background that the Monterey International Pop Festival was held, organized in a quick seven weeks by John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, publicist Derek Taylor, manager Alan Pariser, and the legendary Lou Adler, who in addition to producing records by The Mamas & The Papas and Carole King, would later direct Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke and bring The Rocky Horror Picture Show from the stage to the silver screen.
Today, Woodstock is more famous, but Monterey International Pop Festival not only came first, but brought a wider audience to many of Woodstock’s most famous performers. Two years before Jimi Hendrix wowed Woodstock with an electric “Star Spangled Banner,” he gave a fiery performance (literally) at Monterey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U5dvC5qr6YContinued:
https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/06/how-janis-joplin-and-otis-redding-conquered-monterey-pop-festival/
