Paul McCartney and Who guitarist Pete Townshend recommended Hendrix, then a virtual unknown in his native US, and Phillips hooked up with promoter Bill Graham who provided a surfeit of psychedelic acts from neighbouring San Francisco, the Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and Big Brother & the Holding Company featuring Joplin. With musicians in charge of creative control, and no money changing hands, the bill came together in a record seven weeks. The ticket money covered their travel expenses and the actual staging of the event.” None of the groups appearing charged a fee. Unlike Woodstock, which was a much more commercial enterprise, Monterey was really true to the spirit of peace, love and free music. “In essence, it was artists providing as professional a setting as possible for other artists. He also highlights the fact that Monterey was conceived by the performers of the era and reflected their beliefs and wishes. Before then, it had been the package tours and teenagers screaming at the Beatles, nothing had been done on this scale,” says Altham. For the first time, they took it seriously. “Monterey represented a seismic shift in the perception and attitude of the media towards popular music. Keith Altham, who covered Monterey for the New Musical Express, before going on to a career as press agent to many of the biggest bands of the seventies and eighties, concurs. It was conceived as an international event,” he stresses. “With Monterey, we wanted to legitimize rock music like folk music and jazz had been legitimized by the Newport Folk and Newport Jazz festivals. The Byrds musician was close to Taylor and knew Phillips from his folkie days in New York’s Greenwich Village. Not content with opening their set with ‘’San Franciscan Nights’’ on the first night, Eric Burdon & the New Animals also documented their own experiences at the festival in ‘’Monterey’’, a psychedelic piece of reportage which made the US Top 20 but struck out in the UK. But Monterey can boast the epochal ‘’San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)’’, penned by John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, one of the prime movers behind the festival, recorded by his friend Scott McKenzie to promote the 1967 weekend whose motto was “Music, Love and Flowers”, and performed on the last day of the festival. Sure, Joni Mitchell’s wrote ‘’Woodstock’’ after she missed the 1969 event and watched the traffic jams on the TV news. Monterey even inspired more songs than Woodstock. Pennebaker, and the resulting Monterey Pop, released in US cinemas in December 1968, helped to convince investors to bankroll Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld’s Woodstock. It was filmed by the acclaimed documentary maker D.A. It presented several acts – Canned Heat, Country Joe and the Fish, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Jefferson Airplane and Ravi Shankar as well as The Who, Joplin and Hendrix – who also appeared at Woodstock. It featured break-out performances by Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, The Who and Jimi Hendrix. None of these gatherings would have happened without the Monterey International Pop Festival, a three-day event held in California in June 1967. The colossal Woodstock Music & Art Fair of 1969 defined the hippie generation, and has been commemorated at regular intervals, with another major anniversary looming next year. The Isle of Wight Festival, another defining music event held in 1968, 19 was successfully revived in 2002. The Glastonbury Festival has been with us for over four decades, and is now as ubiquitous and intrinsic a part of the British Summer as the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis tournament.
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