Various Artists - Monterey International Pop Festival, Monterey County Fairgrounds, Monterey, CA, 6-16-1967

The 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival was the first famous rock festival. In my opinion, it was one of the best, if not the very best, in terms of the quality of all the musical acts involved. 

Here's what the beginning of the Wikipedia entry about the festival has to say: "The festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and generally is regarded as one of the beginnings of the 'Summer of Love' in 1967 and the public debut of the hippie, flower power, and flower children movements and era. Because Monterey was widely promoted and heavily attended, featured historic performances, and was the subject of a popular theatrical documentary film, it became an inspiration and a template for future music festivals, including the Woodstock Festival two years later. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner said 'Monterey was the nexus: It sprang from what the Beatles began, and from it sprang what followed.'"

Here's the link to the full entry, if you're interested:

Monterey International Pop Festival - Wikipedia

I had no plans to post this festival at this blog, because there a four CD box set of festival highlights was released in 1992. I had that for ages, and added some other songs to it as I found them. But I changed my mind a few days ago. I happened to notice that the complete performances by Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds were released last year, but obscurely, as "record store day" limited releases. Each of those contained extra songs that I'd never heard before, at great sound quality. That inspired me to dig further, and I found a project someone named Simon put together in 2022, gathering everything he could find from the festival that was publicly available up until that time. This is basically what Simon did, plus a few more recent releases, especially the Buffalo Springfield and Byrds ones mentioned above. 

The 1992 box set contains five hours of music. But thanks mostly to Simon's work, I'm able to present eleven hours of music from the festival! That's more than double! And all of it is in fantastic sound quality, despite the fact that a big chunk of it is from unreleased sources. There's no audience bootleg sourcing here, except for half of one song later in the festival. So this is a must have, in my opinion, for anyone who enjoys music from this era. 

It is now accepted fact that something very special happened in the San Francisco Bay Area in the summer of 1967, a time which is now widely known as "The Summer of Love." I don't want to go into it too much, but there's a very big Wikipedia article about that as well:

Summer of Love - Wikipedia

In short, young people from all over the U.S., and even the world, were drawn to the Bay Area to experience the rising counter-culture there. The Monterey Pop Festival was a big part of that. There was one rock festival that took place a week before that in my opinion sounds even MORE musically amazing, the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival. You can read about that here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Fair_and_Magic_Mountain_Music_Festival 

Rolling Stone Magazine wrote a great article about it in 2014, which you can find here:

Fantasy Fair & Magic Mountain Music Fest: Story of 1st U.S. Rock Fest 

Unfortunately though, very little audio from that festival has survived (even though it seems there was an attempt to record it all). So it has pretty much been forgotten. But Monterey Pop was the opposite in that a popular documentary movie about it, "Monterey Pop," was released in 1968, and had a huge influence. Here's a quote from Wikipedia: "The screening of Monterey Pop in theaters helped raise the festival to mythic status, rapidly swelled the ranks of would-be festival-goers looking for the next festival, and inspired new entrepreneurs to stage more and more of them around the country." 

Another factor to consider is the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)," written by John Phillips, the main songwriter for the Mamas and the Papas, and recorded by Scott McKenzie. According to an NPR report, "local authorities in Monterey were starting to get cold feet over the prospect of their town being overrun by hippies" attending the festival. Phillips specifically wrote it "to smooth things over." It succeeded beyond all expectations. The single "only" reached Number Four in the U.S. singles charts. But it had a long staying power, ultimately selling over seven million copies worldwide. It had a very real impact, like a pied piper call, drawing people to the Bay Area, and specifically to the Monterey Pop Festival. It's estimated 30,000 people attended the first night of the festival, but that grew to 60,000 by the third and last night. This was the very first big rock festival anywhere, with the exception of the somewhat smaller Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival the week previously.

Monterey, California, an hour or more drive from the Bay Area, was chosen as the location because there had been a popular Monterey Jazz Festival taking place there annually since the 1950s, as well as a similar Monterey Folk Festival. It was thought that by giving this festival a similar name in the same location, it would help give rock more credibility as an art form, like jazz or folk music, both of which were much more respected at the time. Even the same stage manager and sound company were hired. That resulted in the festival having truly exceptional sound quality for rock concerts at the time, which resulted in excellent sounding recordings as well.

I'll write more about the festival as a whole later. But for now, I want to explain how I split up the eleven hours of available music. The festival itself was split up into five separate tickets: one for June 16th, then another for the afternoon of June 17th, another for the evening of June 18th, then afternoon and evening tickets for June 18th as well. So I'm splitting this up in a similar way. This one, containing all the available music from June 16th, is the shortest by far. I'm guessing that each of those five time periods contained roughly the same amount of music, give or take. But this is the shortest because it's the one with the most missing music.

Here's yet another useful Wikipedia link. It shows all the songs known to be played by all the performers at the festival:

Monterey Pop Festival set list - Wikipedia 

Each act was allowed to play for 40 minutes, but is possible some of the lesser known acts got less than that. The Association performed first. But two songs are missing, and there were an unknown number of other songs missing as well. The second act was the Paupers. Their entire performance is missing. (Simon did find a couple of songs, but they were of such poor sound quality that I couldn't even include them as bonus tracks.) Next was Lou Rawls. We have three songs from him, but two more are missing, plus an unknown number additionally missing. Next up was British folk singer Beverly Martyn. She just played three songs, all missing. 

After that was Johnny Rivers. He was a big star at the time. Interestingly, his keyboard player at the festival was the great songwriter Jimmy Webb. He played eleven songs, which must have been right at the full allowed 40 minutes, but only one song from his set is publicly available. Here's an interesting quote from Rivers about the festival: "Driving north on Highway 101, I had never seen so many VW buses pained with paisley and flowers, cars, trucks, and lots of out of state license plates. People were from everywhere. The vibe was very mellow and kind of the theme of the whole thing. It was a gathering of tribes and hadn’t really gotten to the wild hippie stage yet. The 'Summer of Love' was [really more] the summer that came after that. It wasn't going to be frantic, out of control, but everyone digging on the music. Because there was such a variety of music."

It seems we only have the full performances of the two final acts, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and Simon and Garfunkel. The Animals played for 27 minutes. As an aside, lead singer Burdon was so moved by the festival that he wrote a song praising it, "Monterey." It became a Top Ten hit.

Simon and Garfunkel played for only 22 minutes, despite the fact that they had to be the most popular act of the evening, by far. It appears they wanted to play longer, but they couldn't due to some kind of curfew for the evening as a whole. We know this because you can hear Paul Simon talking about how he chose the last song played, an unusual (and at the time still unreleased) final choice of "Punky's Dilemma," because he'd just been told they only had two minutes left and that song was two minutes long.

Normally, I put all the source material details in the mp3 tags of each song. But for this festival instead, I'm just including a PDF made by Simon, since that contains a great chart showing the sources. Hopefully, more music from this day in particular will come out in recent years. It seems at least one set from the festival has been released each year as part of "record store day" releases for the past few years. So far, most of those have been big-name performers where all or most all of the set was already available. But if that keeps going, maybe they'll get to things like Johnny Rivers' set, where 90 percent of it is missing.

Note that although the sound quality was already excellent in general, one problem I've often noticed with concert recordings is the vocals being too low in the mix. I checked every song in this festival for that, and I'd estimate about half of them had that problem. So for all those songs, I remixed them using the UVR5 audio editing program. So this should now sound even better than before. 

Oh, one last thing. I had so many other things to write about that I didn't really get to discussing the quality of the music. I'd say it's excellent across the board. But in case you're curious, here's the link to an article written by music critic Michael Lydon, which came out in Newsweek just two days after the festival. (Disregard the 2009 date shown at the top.) He was overly critical sometimes, as critics usually are, but still it's interesting to see a fresh take from that time. Plus, he has a lot of interesting information about how the festival came to be, and what happened behind the scenes. For instance, there's mention of a private jam at the end of the festival that lasted four hours consisting of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix. Wouldn't it have been amazing to have been a fly on the wall for that?

Monterey Pop: The First Rock Festival | Current | The Criterion Collection 

Here's a couple of relevant quotes about the festival. Art Garfunkel: "Monterey was the cherry on top of the sundae that was the 1960s. It was unprecedented, and the audience was unprecedented in their joy." And Tommy Smothers, who was one of the festival emcees: "There were no problems. The only problem was, just how happy could you get without hurting yourself?"

This album is an hour and 15 minutes long. Each section of the concert reportedly lasted about five hours. No doubt a lot of that was down time between acts. But still, I would imagine a full version of this part of the festival would consist of at least three hours of music. If more gets released in the future, I will try to add it in and revise this.

01 talk (John Phillips)
02 The Machine (Association)
03 Along Comes Mary (Association)
04 Windy (Association)
05 talk (Peter Tork)
06 Love Is a Hurtin' Thing (Lou Rawls)
07 Dead End Street (Lou Rawls)
08 talk (Lou Rawls)
09 Tobacco Road (Lou Rawls)
10 Memphis (Johnny Rivers)
11 talk (Chet Helms)
12 talk (Eric Burdon & the Animals)
13 San Franciscan Nights (Eric Burdon & the Animals)
14 talk (Eric Burdon & the Animals)
15 Gin House Blues (Eric Burdon & the Animals)
16 talk (Eric Burdon & the Animals)
17 Hey Gyp (Eric Burdon & the Animals)
18 talk (Eric Burdon & the Animals)
19 Paint It, Black (Eric Burdon & the Animals)
20 talk (John Phillips)
21 Homeward Bound (Simon & Garfunkel)
22 At the Zoo (Simon & Garfunkel)
23 talk (Simon & Garfunkel)
24 Feelin' Groovy (Simon & Garfunkel)
25 talk (Simon & Garfunkel)
26 For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her (Simon & Garfunkel)
27 The Sound of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel)
28 talk (Simon & Garfunkel)
29 Benedictus (Simon & Garfunkel)
30 talk (Simon & Garfunkel)
31 Punky's Dilemma (Simon & Garfunkel)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/JdvDszNw

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/user/files/POFIfnCamxiHogl/edit

It was too hard for me to pick just one picture for the cover, so I chose four, just like I did with the "Live Aid" albums I've posted. From top left clockwise, that's the Association, Lou Rawls, Simon and Garfunkel, and Eric Burdon of the Animals. All of them are from this exact concert.