MONTEREY POP 1967 -- UNFINISHED LIVES

I didn’t attend Monterey Pop in June of 1967, but I lived so close by that had it been held in, say, 1963, I could have heard it just down the road about a mile away out of my bedroom window.  My wife--who I also didn’t “attend” because I didn’t then yet know her—did get in and attend as part of the crowd with dubious credentials as a ‘reporter.’

Monterey Pop, which preceded Woodstock by two years, presaged a domino effect on the music and lives of an entire, and what would become iconic, generation (my generation). It was a beginning—and   who would have known it then—ultimately an anthem to a large portion of a whole generation of music fans but also to other cataclysmic transitional cultural and social movements— the Civil Rights, militant Women’s Rights, and hippie movements.

At the time, I looked forward to knowing that the venue of Monterey Pop was coming to my community only because I knew and liked the laconic, by comparison, music of The Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkle, and saw on the posters that they would be singing. Frankly, I had never until then heard of the performers who later made this seminal event so iconic: Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendricks, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane and many others.  But whether initiated or not, I suspect that few, if any, of us could anticipate what would  happen in the next decade.

 ‘Unfinished Lives’

 

The performance of Otis Redding, the final act of the Saturday night portion of the Festival (indeed, maybe the whole festival) was, and I think could be fairly said to be, the ‘tipping point,’ or jumping off point for an entire cultural era which transformed music and cultural mores. It at least introduced a style of music and pop culture dubbed—‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll’—of which I was only vaguely, and thankfully, not very familiar.

Otis Redding’s style and his voice in some of his songs painted a sound of increasing, leading to an even brutal, intensity and finally a  confrontation or conflagration leading to burnout.  His treatment of his concluding song Try a Little Tenderness seemed to be a harbinger of what happened to him as well as to a generation of followers—beginning with Monterey Pop and continuing with Woodstock and beyond.

Redding’s five song set: I’ve Been Loving You Too Long; Satisfaction; Try a Little Tenderness that Saturday night included, after a warmup, his song Respect, which he had written a couple of years before.  At the conclusion of Respect he said to the people below the stage, “You are the love generation, right?” The thousands packing the fairgrounds arena vociferously agreed.  It gave all who heard a more-or-less hazily focused identity which they lived out for the next decade.  (Respect was also recorded exactly three months earlier in 1967 by Aretha Franklin and rose to the top of the charts by June when Monterey Pop occurred).

Following the festival at the Monterey County Fair Grounds Redding felt he needed voice surgery which he had planned to have later that summer.

He barely lived to have it done.

Ironically, Otis Redding’s most popular song, Sittin on the Dock of the [San Francisco] Bay, (written by him following Monterey Pop while Redding was still in California and recorded only two days before his death by airplane crash at age 26) was released posthumously a couple of months later.

Dock of the Bay portended the temporal end for many of my generation (remember Viet Nam ) as well as for a number of other stars in that event. Within two years Jimi Hendricks and Janis Joplin were also dead.

Because of the Vietnam war, the cultural revolution of the so-called ‘Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,’ and the liberality and suggestibility through music of the ‘new morality,’ many of my contemporaries—not just musicians—continued to have ‘unfinished lives’ or didn’t even make it past the mid- 60’s to mid-70’s decade at all.  Sadly they went out with either ‘bang or a whimper’ or neither and are still to be seen around as the hapless and homeless people on the streets of America (see poet T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925).

Alas for the most colorful—and maybe tragic—decade of my lifetime.

But for me, praise the Lord, it wasn’t like that.