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Vietnam '67

The Greatest Music Festival in History

Jimi Hendrix performing at the Monterey International Pop Festival on June 18, 1967.Credit...Bruce Fleming/Associated Press

On June 19, 1967, American forces engaged in a bloody fight for the Can Giuoc District of Long An Province, leaving 38 Americans and 250 Vietcong dead, and hundreds more wounded. By mid-June of 1967, 40,000 men were receiving their draft notices every month to serve in a war that had already cost billions of dollars and 15,000 American lives.

Four days earlier and worlds away from Vietnam, a Sacramento teenager named Johnnie B. Baker Jr. turned 18. It was a big month for Baker, whom his friends called Dusty: The Atlanta Braves had just drafted him 503rd in the 1967 amateur baseball draft. As a gift to mark both his entry into adulthood and the start of his professional baseball career, Baker received one of the “greatest presents a mother could give a son”: the keys to the family’s station wagon, $20, and two tickets to the Monterey International Pop Festival.

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Dusty Baker when he played for the Atlanta Braves.Credit...Louis Reqeuna/MLB Photos, via Getty Images

The three-day concert drew Baker and 200,000 others to the Monterey County Fair Grounds in Monterey, Calif., to see some of the most important acts in pop music. For the lineup alone, it would rank as arguably the greatest music festival in American history. But it’s even more significant as a touchstone moment for the fusion of rock music, antiwar politics and the millions of young people like Baker, who that summer provided the driving force behind both.

The idea for Monterey Pop, a model for subsequent rock music festivals from Woodstock to Bonnaroo, emerged from a conversation in early 1967 among Paul McCartney, the record producer Lou Adler and the folk rock band the Mamas and the Papas. They weren’t thinking of the war; they were thinking of music — in particular, why rock wasn’t considered an art form alongside the likes of jazz. It was the right time to ask: The Beatles’ masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which would transform American pop for the next decade, was set for release in June.

Opportunity struck a few weeks later when a budding concert promoter named Alan Parsier approached John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas about headlining a blues festival he was planning at the Monterey fair grounds, home of the annual Monterey Jazz Festival. Phillips and Adler took the chance, and took over the program; over the next two months they had lined up dozens of the world’s leading rock acts. Rock music, they believed, could change the world, and Monterey Pop would be the proof.

The documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker brought in cutting-edge film equipment to capture the weekend. Philips and Adler even wrote and produced the festival’s anthem, “San Francisco,” performed by Scott McKenzie. The song served as the festivals’ beacon, calling thousands to come to the Bay Area to meet “a whole generation, with a new explanation.”

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Janis Joplin performing at the festival with Big Brother and the Holding Company.Credit...Ted Streshinsky/Corbis, via Getty Images

Monterey intentionally showcased a rich blend of national and international musicians, alongside established artists and underground acts. The first day’s highlights included the Association, Johnny Rivers, Eric Burdon and the Animals and Simon and Garfunkel. Day 2, a Saturday, featured the weekend’s heaviest schedule, with spirited performances from Canned Heat, Big Brother and the Holding Company (fronted by Janis Joplin), Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steve Miller Band, Hugh Masekela, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Booker T. and the M.G.’s and Otis Redding. Sunday’s bill finished the weekend with strong sets from Ravi Shankar, Buffalo Springfield, the Who, the Grateful Dead, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Scott McKenzie, with the Mamas and the Papas closing the festival.

The rock lore emerging from behind the scenes is as incredible as the performances. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Nico of the Velvet Underground played the honorary king and queen of the ball, wandering the festival grounds arm in arm like rock royalty.

The Grateful Dead, suspicious of Adler and Phillips’s desire to capitalize on the San Francisco music scene they’d helped build, refused to be in the documentary. Joplin, still relatively unknown, floored the music industry luminaries backstage with her gut-wrenching blues, immediately elevating her career into superstardom.

Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix quarreled over who would follow the other, with Townshend accusing Hendrix of stealing his guitar demolition act. A coin toss won the Who the earlier slot. Disappointed at having to follow the Who’s bombastic set and rampant stage destruction, Hendrix, playing the role of an electric shaman in his first American show with the Experience, lit his guitar on fire in sacrifice to the gods of a new age.

As Phillips and Adler had hoped, Monterey Pop ushered in a new age for American music. But just as important, it was a signal moment in a cultural and political upheaval that had been incubating in the Bay Area for nearly a decade. The Beats and their bohemianism of the late ’50s and early ’60s built a crucible from which a new anti-establishment worldview would emerge.

Many at Monterey, like Dusty Baker, were members of the first wave of baby boomers, moving into adulthood in an era of unparalleled affluence, but experiencing resentment of their ostensibly comfortable lives. Disaffected, these mostly white, middle-class young adults came of age watching televised coverage of a seemingly endless Cold War, the assassination of a president, social upheaval in the civil rights movement and now, by 1967, the rapid escalation of their country’s involvement in Vietnam — by that summer there were some 500,000 American troops in the country.

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The football field at the Monterey International Pop Festival on June 17, 1967.Credit...Monterey Herald, via Associated Press

The generation’s disenchantment found an outlet in a new age of social and cultural activism that burst forth with the 1967 “Summer of Love,” centered in San Francisco and opened, symbolically, by Monterey Pop. Tens of thousands of young people descended on the Bay Area to experiment with new drugs like LSD, explore changing sexual mores, exhibit new trends in fashion, and challenge the status quo under the guise of newfound freedom. Pennebaker’s 1968 film, “Monterey Pop,” highlighted dozens of voices echoing the transformations centered at the heart of the counterculture movement, what Otis Redding called at Monterey “the love crowd.”

The “love crowd” stood in contrast to the boomer’s central concern — Vietnam, which struck them as immoral and unjustified, as well as an immediate threat to their lives and livelihoods. Monterey, then, wasn’t just a music festival; with its overt antiwar statements by Country Joe and the Fish (who sang “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” in their set) and others, it became the place where rock’s anti-establishment posture and the boomers’ anti-Vietnam attitude merged.

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Otis Redding performing before “the love crowd.”Credit...Bruce Fleming/Associated Press

It also became a fixture in the backlash against rock, boomers and the antiwar movement. As antiwar activism coalesced across college and university campuses and entered in to the larger framework of the counterculture, its images, ideals and rhetoric clashed with earlier generations’ morality and sense of patriotism. Just 200 miles from Monterey, near Dusty Baker’s Sacramento home, the Hollywood actor turned politician Ronald Reagan was settling in as California’s 33rd governor. Vowing to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” Reagan in part built his presidential aspirations on attacking the Free Speech, New Left and growing antiwar movements in the San Francisco Bay Area. His early tenure as governor fanned the flames of a nascent conservative movement that would reshape American politics over the next 50 years.

The politics and culture of the Summer of Love left a lasting influence on the United States. It would have happened without Monterey, but the festival provided the soundtrack, the opening bell, for the tumult to come. Like its politics, innovations and legendary lineup, Monterey transmitted one of the most important emotions of the age. To Dusty Baker, driving to the Bay Area for that historic festival, at such a self-consciously historic moment, captured “a feeling of pure freedom” in a time when the fate of the nation seemed entirely up for grabs.

Kevin D. Greene is an assistant professor of history and interdisciplinary studies, and the director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, at the University of Southern Mississippi.

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