2017-06-18 Monterey Pop Festival 50th
Blues
Project
Janis
Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company The Who
Jimi Hendrix
The Mamas and the Papas
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I am
vacating my regular time slot, 2-5PM on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the
month, for June and July because I have had construction workers disrupting my
day sleeping habits since November and I just don’t feel comfortable driving to
the station, but I am filling in for Mark Owens this weekend in order to
remember the Monterey Pop Festival. The
show will be on Sunday, June 18th between 1-3PM. Conveniently, Mark was going to find a
fill-in anyway. Good timing. I plan to be back August 9th with
a show dedicated to Chuck Berry in advance of our Oldies Marathon weekend a little
more than a week later.
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Dateline: June 18th 1967. I was hanging out with my friends’ band, the
Druids, after they had just finished a Saturday night gig in Los Gatos at
Apogee West when three of us decided last minute to head down to Monterey to
catch The Who performing at the Monterey Pop Festival. Steve and I lived about two blocks apart so
Mark drove us there to grab a quick change of clothes before we hit the
road. Mark had an Anglia, an English
Ford that probably made a Volkswagen beetle seem roomy. In fact, the car was so small that Mark
wouldn’t let me tap my feet to the music because it shook the vehicle too much.
We must have gotten to the Fairgrounds around
3AM. Mark grabbed a nap in the front set
and I climbed into the back but Steve, who had vacated the back seat, was
likely the most comfortable sleeping on the ground.
Since we had no tickets, we went to the box office and
were told that the evening show was sold out but if we came back in a couple of
hours we would get the first group of three cancellations. I’m thinking that access to the grounds was
free of charge so we went inside and tripped around the vendor area where, for
the first time in my experience, we saw booths of hippie clothing, posters and
paraphernalia. Even if we didn’t get
tickets, this atmosphere might have been sufficient to make the trip
worthwhile, but when we revisited the box office they had a set of three
tickets for us. Perhaps we didn’t get
onto the grounds until then, but after fifty years this is an item that is a
little vague in my memory.
Anyway, the entire Sunday afternoon show was taken up
by Ravi Shankar and friends. We ran into
a musician friend of Steve’s from high school and told him we came down to see
The Who and he told us, “Yeah, The Who is going to be great, but check out this
black cat coming back from Britain with a new band.” So, the time has come and we enter the
concert area and discover that our seats are in the first row of the general
audience behind about a dozen rows of VIP seating. And the cost was six, maybe seven bucks, for
a lineup that had The Blues Project, then Buffalo Springfield, and a group
called The Band with No Name. Following
these were Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, who had
impressed enough on one of the earlier shows that they were brought back when,
I presume, another band cancelled. A piece
of personal trivia: I had the opportunity to jam with Big Brother guitarist Sam
Andrew, but by this time about fifteen years ago he was playing saxophone.
All the acts leading up to the group we went there to
see were top-notch, with the possible exception of The Band with No Name whom I
have yet to learn anything regarding who was in the ensemble, but when The Who
came on stage it seemed to jump to another level. The rhythm section was incomparable with
Keith Moon absolutely wailing on his drums as John Entwhistle stood back calmly
as if it was totally effortless to produce his often outrageous bass licks. Peter Townsend had that windmill motion as he
struck his power chords while singer Roger Daltrey swung his microphone above
his head with the long chord acting like a cowboy’s lariat.
The band had just released their second American album
in May (known in the US as Happy Jack, reaching only #67 compared to its
British charting of #4) and the first two numbers in the set, Substitute (#5 UK)
and Summertime Blues (as far as I know never recorded in studio), were
unavailable to US buyers and therefore relatively unknown to even the three of
us. These led to a couple of items they
were promoting, Pictures of Lily, which reached #4 UK and eventually #51 after
its June US release, and A Quick One and their March US-released Happy Jack,
both from their new album. The only
readily recognizable tune was My Generation (#2 UK and only #74 US and the
album of the same title #5 UK, no listing for its US charting, but the song justifiably
remains a Rock anthem) and by the time the tune was over (and The Who’s set)
any pent-up energy possibly remaining had been exhausted, particularly after
Townsend had smashed his guitar on stage, something he had taken to doing but
quite novel to this American audience.
Okay, I have never been a big fan of the Grateful Dead
and when they followed the excitement of The Who they just seemed listless, and
to be followed by Jimi Hendrix didn’t make them seem any more thrilling in
hindsight. It is well known that neither
The Who nor Hendrix wanted to play after the other and Hendrix drew the short
straw. While The Who had two American albums out by the time of the Festival,
Jimi had only released three singles in England (a #3 and a couple of #6’s) and
his Are You Experienced LP, which reached #2 UK but did not surface here until
a couple of months after the Festival in August, the same month as his first
45, Purple Haze / The Wind Cries Mary.
Already, Hendrix had become such a sensation that his LP rated #5 but
the single only #65. As I saw it, if you
wanted Hendrix, why would you buy the single when you could get the two tracks
on the album, and anyone who wanted Hendrix probably wanted as much as they
could get.
There’s not a whole lot I have to say about the
Hendrix performance – I think it speaks for itself better than I could analyze
it – except that he opened up with a Howlin’ Wolf tune (Killing Floor) and
later a version of B.B. King’s Rock Me Baby with a couple of his exceptional
self-penned rockers, Foxey Lady and Purple Haze in the set. Jimi had Noel Redding backing him on bass and
Mitch Mitchell behind the drum kit, but all eyes were on the amazing Mr.
Hendrix, and when he got to his closing number, Wild Thing, which he referred to
as “the English and American combined anthem”, he was not about to be outdone
by The Who and so provided a bit of Stage theatrics by combining his guitar
with a cigarette lighter to leave his audience with a memorable touch of
pyrotechnics.
After the concert I could not tell you who I thought
stole the show (since I present them both today, I’ll leave that decision to
you, but I think Jimi shows up better as a recording while The Who were generally
more visually impressive), but never before had I seen anything to compare with
either The Who or Hendrix. Jimi played
at the Fillmore Auditorium the next weekend (The Who had played it the week prior
to the Festival) and there was no way I was going to miss that. Once again, the performance was phenomenal
and as soon as it came out, I’m sure I bought the LP. I loved (and still do) the album except for
the psychedelic tune Third Stone From the Sun and, since that is the direction
he moved toward, I pretty much lost interest and was well on my way to devoting
almost all of my listening to Blues. Actually,
the Festival had a profound impact on me as I gave up the job I had at a gas
station, have not trimmed my moustache since (50 years!) and began to take
interest in things like trying to end the war in Viet Nam. I proudly consider myself a hippie (which I
did not then) because I still believe in the same basic things I did back then.
The concert was pretty much the brainchild of John
Phillips so his band, The Mamas and the Papas, had the privilege of closing the
last show of a great weekend. I often
hear about Woodstock being the first mega-concert but Monterey pre-dated it by
about two years, I believe; summer of ’69?
Today’s show only presents you with the bands I saw, three of whom unfortunately
were not presented on the four CD set which I believe was released as a
twenty-fifth anniversary issue. I wonder
if there will be more coming out this year.
As
usual, there is a projected playlist. I
have a few other numbers on the discs I made up for the show just in case, but
what you see is about what I can fit in a two-hour show.
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Since it is still relatively new, I thought I’d
mention that KKUP is now streaming on the internet and, while it is still in a
developing stage, we have been putting out the word. I’m not all of that good with high-tech
stuff, but it seems pretty easy to access.
If you go to our website at KKUP.org you will see on the home page a
strip of options immediately above the pictures of the musicians the next to
the last option being LISTEN ONLINE. By
clicking this, it brings up a choice of desktop or mobile. I can only speak for the desktop but after
maybe a minute I was receiving a crystal clear feed. As already mentioned, this is still a work in
progress and we are currently limited to a finite number of listeners at any
one time. I mention this so you will be
aware to turn off the application when you are not actually listening. (I put the player in my favorites bar for the
easiest of access.) Now we can reach our
listeners in Los Gatos and Palo Alto, even my family in Canada. Let your friends elsewhere know they can now
listen to your favorite station, and while they have the home page open they
can check out our schedule.
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Down On MeCombination of the Two
Ball and Chain
Big Brother and the Holding Company
Substitute
Summertime BluesPictures of Lily
A Quick One While He’s Away
Happy Jack
My Generation
The Who
Killing Floor
Foxey LadyLike a Rolling Stone
Rock Me Baby
Hey Joe
Can You See Me
The Wind Cries Mary
Purple Haze
Wild Thing
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Straight Shooter
California DreamingI Call Your Name
Monday Monday
Dancing in the streets
The Mamas and the Papas 66mins
