Looking back at the Monterey Pop music festival that was held in 1967 in California i can only wish that somehow I could go back in time and be their in person. Be their to witness the historic American debut of Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Ravi Shankar, not to mention the incomparable Janis Joplin, giving a performance of a life time only to have it not be recorded. Reading about the Monterey pop festival from Flowers in the Dustbin, I am in awe at how this event was in a sense teh perfect meeting between folk music and legitimate Rock and Roll, standing side by side, in unison although To quote James Miller Monterey Pop integrated the hardest rock and Roll into the mainstream of the global music business. And after the summer of love Rock and Roll was no longer a genre of popular music it was Pop music." To me it seems that the Monterey Pop festival is somehow overlooked by Woodstock two years later, but for me Monterey was more tight knit, and welcoming. Woodstock was too big, a festival in excess, whereas Monterey Pop was still about the music first, before it become something garish. For me watching Ottis Reading in one his last performances before his premature death in an airplane crash six months later is both humbling and spectacular at the same time. Watching him sing Respect, and Satisfaction, backed by Booker T and the Mg's only enforces that he was the master of soul. In Flowers in the Dust Bin, Miller describes "Janis Joplin as someone of modest technical means, who shrieked and screamed, as if possessed in the grip of a demon." He would later say that upon Janis's first powerful performance which was accidentally not filmed, that her second performance wasn't as great, because hysteria is hard to fake a second time. I couldn't disagree more. I think to say that Janis Joplin was limited in her singing is an understatement. I believe that she was a master of vocal control, who chose to sing from the depths of her soul. To describe her performance as hysterical, is an insult, especially to women, hysterical being an infliction that was imposed on women in the 18th century. What Janis Joplin did as a singer and performer was something akin to James Brown, or any other rhythm and blues singer. With each performance she left a piece of her soul on the stage. Watching her sing it is raw and gritty, and wholly original for a woman to be in the same league as her male counterparts. Watching her sing Ball and Chain even if it was the second time is nonetheless spectacular.
Other highlights of the show that were impressive, were of course The Who, who appropriately sang My Generation, a fitting tribute for the changing times and culture as witnessed by the massive crowd of hippies and counterculturealists sitting on the ground. It is safe to say that watching DA Pennebaker's film of Monterey Pop their is a sense of one-up-man-ship going on between the performers. Which leads to Jimi Hendrix. Its hard to top The Who, especially Pete Townsand, but I feel that Hendrix new that he could out-guitar-him, so to speak, and he did. Watching him bang out Wild Thing is at first disconcerting, then mesmerizing. He made it look effortless, as he strummed the guitar, and contorted it, exacting every conceivable sound form it, in every possible position. And when the guitar could no longer emulate the song Jimi simply offered it to the rock gods, and set it on fire. But whats funny is that it didn't seem pretentious, it was just a humble offering from a master. And to conclude the film is of course a 20 minute clip from Shankar's four hour performance. The performance acts as a cleanser, it is so original, the sitar just washes over you, clearing your mind of all worry and thought you become almost trance-like listening to it. I can only imagine sitting their for four hours, and what effects it would have had, especially high.
