Monterey Pop Festival 

The Monterey International Pop Music Festival was a three-day concert event held June 16 to June 18, 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. Crowd estimates for the festival ranged from 50,000-90,000 people, who congregated in and around the festival grounds. The fairgrounds' performance arena, where the music took place, normally had a capacity of 7,000, but it was estimated that 8,500 jammed into it for Saturday night's show.

The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a large, predominantly white audience.

The Monterey Pop Festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and is generally regarded as one of the beginnings of the Summer of Love in 1967; the first rock festival had been held just one week earlier at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival. Monterey was the first widely promoted and heavily attended rock festival, and became the template for future music festivals, notably the Woodstock Festival two years later.

The festival was planned in seven weeks by promoter Lou Adler, John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, producer Alan Pariser and publicist Derek Taylor. The Monterey location had been known as the site for the long-running Monterey Jazz Festival and Monterey Folk Festival; the promoters saw the Monterey Pop festival as a way to validate rock music as an art form in the way in which jazz and folk were regarded.The organizers succeeded beyond all expectations.

The artists performed for free with all revenue donated to charity, except for Ravi Shankar, who was paid $3,000 for his afternoon-long performance on the sitar. Country Joe and the Fish were paid $5,000 not by the festival itself, but from revenue generated from the D.A. Pennebaker documentary film.

There are so many stand-out performances, perhaps primary amongst them the shocking sonic and literal destruction of The Who. When they trash the stage, people look on slack-jawed, quite unable to believe what they are seeing.Then there was the infamous burning guitar of Jimi Hendrix. But so much great music was performed by the great, the good and the obscure across those three days. Look up the complete recordings and you'll find some superb music.

The Beach Boys, who had been involved in the conception of the event and were at one point scheduled to headline and close the show, failed to perform. This resulted from a number of issues plaguing the group. Carl Wilson was in a feud with officials for his refusal to be drafted into military service during the Vietnam War. The group's new, radical album Smile had recently been aborted, with band leader Brian Wilson in a depressed state and unwilling to perform (he hadn't performed live with the group since late 1964, although he would do so in Honolulu, Hawaii in August 1967). Since Smile had not been released, the group felt their older material would not go over well. The cancellation permanently damaged their reputation and popularity in the US, which would contribute to their replacement album Smiley Smile charting lower than any other of their previous album releases.

The Beatles were rumored to appear because of the involvement of their press officer Derek Taylor, but they declined, since their music had become too complex to be performed live. Instead, at the instigation of Paul McCartney, the festival booked The Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The Kinks were invited but could not get a work visa to enter the US because of a dispute with the American Federation of Musicians.

Donovan was refused a visa to enter the United States because of a 1966 drug bust.

Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band was also invited to appear but, according to the liner notes for the CD reissue of their album Safe As Milk, the band turned the offer down at the insistence of guitarist Ry Cooder, who felt the group was not ready.

Dionne Warwick and The Impressions were advertised on some of the early posters for the event, but Warwick dropped out because of a conflict in booking that weekend. She was booked at the Fairmont Hotel; the hotel was reluctant to release her and it was thought that cancelling that appearance would negatively affect her career. 

Even though the logo for the band Kaleidoscope is seen in the film as a pink sign just below the stage, the band did not perform at the Monterey Festival.

Although The Rolling Stones did not play, guitarist and founder Brian Jones attended and appeared on stage to introduce Hendrix. The group was on the short list of invitees, but was unable to get work visas because of the drug arrests of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

It was long rumoured that Love had declined an invitation to Woodstock, but Mojo Magazine later confirmed that it was the Monterey Festival they had rejected.

The promoters also invited several Motown artists to perform and even were going to give the label's artists their own slot. However, Berry Gordy refused to let any of his acts appear, even though Smokey Robinson was on the board of directors.

The Doors did not appear because the coordinators forgot to invite them. Drummer John Densmore, in his book Riders on the Storm, expressed his belief that the band was not invited because its music didn't express the peace and love ideals of the time.

The Monkees were the biggest-selling musical act in the United States in 1967 and were seriously considered to play, but after weeks of deliberation, John Phillips and Lou Adler decided not to invite them. However, group members Micky Dolenz (in full American Indian buckskins and headdress) and Peter Tork attended the festival and mingled with musicians backstage. Tork was asked to introduce Buffalo Springfield, his favourite group, for their set.

According to Eric Clapton, Cream did not perform because the band's manager wanted to make a bigger splash for their American debut. However, it has since been revealed that the band were not even considered by the festival organizers.

When you watch the movie now, what strikes you is how ordered and respectable it all is. A year or two later, stoned hairies would litter the highways of America on their way to some rain-sodden site in the back end of nowhere. Here, in 1967, it's all much more tidy. The festival and subsequent superb movie launched so many careers. Bands got contracts on the back of their performances here, many others increased their record sales and subsequently their appearance fees. The festival itself showed there was gold in them there rock kids.

Monterey changed everything. Woodstock would go on to the the premium festival brand, but it all started in Monterey.

This is the line-up of bands.

Friday, June 16
The Association
The Paupers
Lou Rawls
Beverly
Johnny Rivers
Eric Burdon and The Animals
Simon & Garfunkel

Saturday, June 17
Canned Heat
Big Brother and the Holding Company
Country Joe and the Fish
Al Kooper
The Butterfield Blues Band
The Electric Flag
Quicksilver Messenger Service
Steve Miller Band
Moby Grape
Hugh Masekela
The Byrds
Laura Nyro
Jefferson Airplane
Booker T. & the M.G.'s
The Mar-Keys
Otis Redding

Sunday, June 18
Ravi Shankar
The Blues Project
Big Brother and the Holding Company
The Group With No Name
Buffalo Springfield (played with David Crosby)
The Who
Grateful Dead
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Scott McKenzie
The Mamas & the Papas

 

 

Mantra-Rock Dance, Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco.

What was soon known as a rock festival, didn’t really exist until 1967. There were plenty of jazz and folk gatherings but rock n roll freak-outs really only started happening in early 1967 starting in San Francisco with the Human Be-In and also the Mantra-Rock Dance which was what was known as ‘a counterculture music event’ held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.

It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public. It was also a promotional and fundraising effort for their first centre on the West Coast of the United States.

They were somewhat pushing an open door with this sort of Eastern mysticism, partly because it was fashionable, partly because stars like George Harrison were turning onto it and partly because it all kinds of made sense when you were stoned and doing time in the universal mind.

The Mantra-Rock Dance featured some of the most prominent Californian rock groups of the time, such as the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, as well as the then relatively unknown Moby Grape. The bands agreed to appear with Prabhupada and to perform for free; the proceeds were donated to the local Hare Krishna temple.

The participation of countercultural leaders considerably boosted the event's popularity; among them were the poet Allen Ginsberg, who led the singing of the Hare Krishna mantra onstage along with Prabhupada, and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

Later Ginsberg called this event "the height of Haight-Ashbury spiritual enthusiasm, the first time that there had been a music scene in San Francisco where everybody could be part of it and participate." Cultural historians have referred to it as "the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippy era." Which is quite a claim given that for a few years, the whole of the city seemed dedicated to engaging in profound spiritual experiences, of one sort of another. 

Ginsberg was especially big on this and had been chanting for years, recommending it to hippies coming down from LSD "who want to stabilize their consciousness upon reentry.” And who doesn't want to do that?

So if your ideas of a good time was chanting ‘hare krishna’ for an hour followed by a red hot set by Moby Grape, this was a night out to remember.

What I find fascinating about this period is how the growth of the music both creatively and commercially (the Grape were signed soon after to Columba) was so tied into such spiritual and cosmic exploration. This does not seem to happen anymore and perhaps we look upon such things with the narrowed eyes of the cynic these days. But back then, people were searching for Otherness, not queuing outside an Apple store for the latest phone.

I suppose this was a time before marketing and corporate values turned people into breadheads. Worth also noting that although the outside world was only just hearing about what was going down in ‘frisco, the freaks and counterculture acolytes were already seeing the commercialisation of the scene as a negative thing, holding the Death of the Hippie mock funeral on October 6, 1967 to lay to rest what they saw as the original spirit as the The Man and his minions moved in.

This was an important gig musically and culturally. The idea of blending rock n roll and mysticism in this day and age seems an idea that belongs to a very different era. 

The Festival Of Growing Things, Marin County, California

Held on Sat Jul 01, 1967 - Sun Jul 02, 1967 at Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre, Mt. Tamalpais, Marin County California, this sounds like such a lovely event, held across a weekend in the Summer Of Love, in beautiful Marin County.

The festival was a celebration of marijuana. The poster actually features stylized marijuana leaves and the event advertised “Free Seeds,” and “barefoot dancing on the grass.” 

The music was all west coast bands, all of whom were in their first year or two of existence. 

The headlining band was Quicksilver on Saturday and Big Brother on Sunday. The full line-up was Ace of Cups, Big Brother and The Holding Company, Blue Cheer, Congress of Wonders, Country Joe & The Fish, Hugh Masekela, Mt. Rushmore, Phoenix, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Sandy Bull, Steve Miller Band, The Charlatans, The Wilde Flowers

The artwork for the poster was done by Alan Terk, also known as “Gut.” Gut was an interesting character; he was the manager of Blue Cheer (some say the inventors of what became heavy metal) and also a Hells Angel (and one-time President of the San Bernardino Chapter) as well as a poster artist. He produced several posters for the San Francisco dance halls as well as some for Hells Angel events.

The Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre is a natural amphitheater located high on Mt. Tamalpais just north of San Francisco which was fitted with carved stone seating in 1933. 

Ace Of Cups  patron Ambrose Hollingsworth was the man behind the festival. ‘Thunderheaven’ was his production company. Everyone who attended received a packet of flower seeds. 

Just a few weeks before this festival, Mt. Tam played host to what is generally considered the first outdoor rock festival, the Magic Mountain Festival on June 10 and 11, 1967, which was attended by more than 36,000 people, one week before the Monterey Pop Festival. And in fact, this festival took place just a few weeks after Monterey Pop. 

This was relatively early in the flowering of what we’d come to know as the counterculture. They were very innocent times. The idea that the authorities saw such gatherings as a threat to decency was always crazy, that they were a threat to The American Way was probably nearer the truth even if they didn’t know where they were going, they were at least searching for something other than the prescribed materialistic solutions for happiness and contentment. And they wanted to grow flowers which, as every gardener knows, is one of the best uses of your time on this spinning rock. 

 

Mountain Festival, Northern California 

This was a momentous moment in the history of rock music and of the countercultre. Held at the Sidney B. Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre, on the south side of Mount Tamalpais, Marin County, California on June 10 & June 11 1967, it is widely held to be the first authentic rock festival, held six months after the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. It was originally due, as posters state, to be held a week earlier, but was called off due to bad weather. Hey, there's no bad weather, man, it's all nature, dude. 

It was produced and sponsored by Tom Rounds and his partner Ed Mitchell. Rounds was program director at KRFC, a Bay Area radio station. It was a community project, profits from which would go to the Economic Opportunity Council that operated in the black ghetto area of Hunter's Point. Rounds is an interesting bloke and central to much development of rock and roll radio. He also was part of a set-up which did promo films for bands and the following year would put on the second Miami Pop Festival.

Magic Mountain was two events at once - an arts and craft fair for local arty types and artisans. I bet someone was selling scented candles. The music happened in an adjoining amphitheatre.

After enjoying a scenic ride up the mountain from embarkation points at the Marin County Civic Center, Mill Valley and other locations, a giant Buddha balloon greeted attendees when they arrived at the amphitheater. Of course it does. nothing says 1967 more than an inflatable Buddha. On the main stage, six 14-foot-tall banners, each displaying a different astrological sign, were set up in a row at the back of the stage. Beautiful man. I'm a typical cusp, y'know. I said, cusp, fella. 

Transportation was provided by the tongue-in-cheek-named Trans-Love Bus Lines, a variation of the line "Fly Trans Love Airways, get you there on time" from the lyrics to Donovan's song Fat Angel which was recycled by Jefferson Airplane.

The event had an 'acid doctor' present to help treat anyone suffering from a bad trip. This was also a first, it recognised the drug culture that was likely to be present and instead of sticking their heads in the sand, did something to help. It became a consistent thing to have a bad trips doc in the following years. Mind you, Owsley Stanley III, the LSD alchemist, actually flew over the crowd and dropped acid onto them..

Performances were on a main stage and a smaller second stage.

Jorma Kaukonen said of the festival. 'There's never any thought of making money off of it. It's just what we did.' And that is good enough. Just doing something for the sake of doing it is one of life's underrated modus operandi.

Larry Taylor of Canned Heat said 'People would get together in a big park and listen to music and hang out. I played music in the fifties and I remember wearing cummerbunds, plaid jackets and uniforms. All of a sudden, that was trash. I got into American Indian beads and pants with hand-painted psychedelic stuff on it. I haven't really worn a suit since. It came together out of nowhere. All of a sudden it just became this...thing.'

Various art-fair type vendors sold posters, crafts and refreshments from booths scattered in the woods around the amphitheater. The festival included a large geodesic dome of pipes and fittings covered with white plastic that contained a light and sound show.

At the time, a lot of people saw this as the first full flowering of the new hippie music scene that was only about a year old at most, at this point. The cultural divide between pop music fans and rock music fans would soon open up a popular culture schism that hadn't really existed before. It's hard to fully grasp this fact at such a distance but getting into psychedelic bands was a kind of political statement in '67. It told the world where you were at. It was all so new and so different, you had to be new and different to get into it. Yet here, there were bands like 5th Dimension, who seemed to somehow have a foot in both camps: both poppy and far out .What later became a wall between the two genres had not been built. 

These are the bands that played, pretty much a who's who of west coast freaks, minus the Grateful Dead, noticeably. 

The Fifth Dimension
Dionne Warwick
Canned Heat
Jim Kweskin Jug Band
Moby Grape
13th Floor Elevators
Spanky and Our Gang
Roger Collins
Blackburn & Snow
The Sparrow
Every Mother's Son
Kaleidoscope
The Chocolate Watchband
The Mojo Men
The Merry-Go-Round
The Doors
Sunday, June 11
Jefferson Airplane
The Byrds
P.F. Sloan
The Seeds
The Grass Roots
The Loading Zone
Tim Buckley
Every Mother's Son
Hugh Masekela
Steve Miller Blues Band
Country Joe & the Fish
Smokey Robinson & the Miracles
Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band
The Sons of Champlin
The Lamp of Childhood
The Mystery Trend
Penny Nichols
The Merry-Go-Round
New Salvation Army Band

It's thought this was actually The Doors first big show as 'Light My Fire' was burning up the charts. Morrison was reportedly 'shit-faced' drunk. 

But even so, it looks like an incredible bill doesn't it? And all for just $2.00! No wonder then that 36,000 turned up.

The Byrds were a huge band at the time, probably bigger than anyone else, with a couple of years hits behind them.

The attempt to appeal to local rock fans and top 40 pop-pickers as well was unusual and wouldn't happen to many times in the future as that cultural chasm between those worlds opened up. By all accounts it was a groovy day out in the sun for everyone.

 

It passed off peacefully and all litter was picked up and binned at the end of it all, leaving the lovely Mount Tamalpais as they found it. This was a trend sadly not followed in the next years.

This set a precedent for what could be achieved before Monterey, a week later, set them into legend.

 

 

 

Festival Of The Flower Children, Woburn Abbey 

Held over August Bank Holiday in 1967, this was the first flowering of the British hippie fests. According to the Sunday Times, it attracted over 25,000 hippies from all over Europe for a show that was inspired primarily by Monterey Pop.

The 3-day line-up was Al Stewart, Alan Price, Bee Gees, Blossom Toes, Breakthru, Dantalion's Chariot, Denny Laine, Eric Burdon & The Animals, Family, Small Faces, The Big Roll Band, The Dream, The Jeff Beck Group, The Marmalade, The Syn, Tintern Abbey, Tomorrow, Zoot Money.

In the Summer Of Love, festivals here were really very different to those happening in California and the USA in general. They aspired to be similar to the pictures we’d seen of those gatherings but somehow look more British. The psychedelic buses were smaller and people brought umbrellas just in case it rained. Drugs were far less available, tea much more so.

This was held in the grounds of the Duke of Bedford's stately English home and the promoters really pushed the whole ‘beautiful people’ and ‘love in’ angle. 25,000 paid £1 a head (30/- for the whole weekend)

You could buy flowers. Paper ones selling at 5/- each, and bells galore-10/- a tinkle from hawkers who stood on the outskirts crying, "Come on, buy a bell, and go to hell." Which is nice. 

There was no booze sold on site but ice cream vans were present and tea was sold. 

Weirdly, someone had put up a tent and put some slot machines inside in case you fancied, well, gambling some money in between bands. 

The weather held good for the whole weekend and a lovely time was had by all, especially the Duke Of Bedford who trousered his £5,000 - 10% of the gate money. 

“They were very gentle people" he was reported as saying, no doubt in a very posh voice, whilst counting his cash.

While attendees seemed to find the whole thing very groovy it actually got a bad write up in the music press. NME was critical, calling the event "WOE-BORE." which isn’t a great pun.

In an acerbic tone very much out of tune with the times it reported

 "A three-day frolic billed as the world's largest love-in, admission £1.00 per day. More than 12,000 tinkling hippies and mods made the sad scene, went away unloved (boy-girl ratio: 5 to 1), unstoned (200 constables prowled the premises in search of pot), and unmoved by the 15 jangling psychedelic bands. Though the flower children wilted, the duke got a large charge (£5,000 net) out of the love-in, and the duchess was pretty jolted (jolted?!) herself. "I was away from Woburn," she said. "I thought these people were holding a flower festival."

 

One decidedly grumpy hippie was interviewed by the Sunday Mirror and complained 'It is not a 'love-in'. It's a 'cash-in'. A hot dog is costing 1/9d...We are disgusted.' 

Musically, the headline acts were the Small Faces, the newly formed Jeff Beck Group and Eric Burdon and the Animals, all of whom were making great music at the time. But below that, some interesting vibes were going down. The Syn played, as did Tomorrow (My White Bicycle was their hit) and the reason that’s significant is Chris Squire was a member of the former, Steve Howe of the latter. They’d play together in Yes in a few years' time.

Tintern Abbey were a classic English psyche band who made one single called, improbably ‘Vacuum Cleaner’ - now very collectible. Dantalian's Chariot featured Andy Summers, later of the Police and Zoot Money. They had another long lost but now rare psychedelic single at the time "Madman Running Through the Fields"/"Sun Came Bursting Through My Cloud." The Marmalade would go on to be very successful in UK with 10 hit singles including a #1. I always thought of them as a Scottish version of CSNY but they were still a year away from their first hit, Lovin’ Things.

Photos of the festival reveal the stage to be little more than a canvas shed stuck in a field. And as was typical of the time, the PA was effectively the amplification merely stacked up on the stage. But even so, this was an important festival for all UK heads and one that set in motion all of the festivals of the coming decade.

 

Mariposa Folk Festival, Innis Lake, Caledon, Toronto 

Mariposa Folk Festival is a Canadian music festival founded in 1961 in Orillia, Ontario. Ruth Jones, her husband Dr. Crawford Jones, brother David Major and Pete McGarvey organized the first Mariposa Folk Festival in August 1961. 

It was held in Orillia for three years before being banned because of disturbances by festival-goers. 

The inaugural event, covered by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, featured all Canadian performers. The festival grew in popularity, size and rowdiness until the popularity of the 1963 festival with over 8,000 advance tickets sold and the lack of sufficient security, led to a backlash from town locals. The city of Orillia secured a court injunction to prevent the festival from continuing in the town limits. The first festival held in the Toronto area, in 1964, was at Maple Leaf Stadium. The subsequent three festivals were held at Innis Lake in Caledon, northwest of the city. In the 1970s it was held on the Toronto Islands before shifting to Harbourfront (Toronto) and Bathurst Street and later Molson Park in Barrie. 

In a simple twist of fate, in 2000, the Mariposa Folk Festival was invited back to Orillia by city councilors Tim Lauer and Don Evans. The festival continues to be held in Orillia. As well as folk music, the festival highlights other aspects of folk culture including dance, crafts, storytelling.

1967 was significant because it marked the blending of folk and rock and also documented the beginning of the singer-songwriter movement which would grow into such a big commercial thing in the 1970s.

Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richie Havens and Tom Rush were amongst the acts that played on stages as workshops went on around them. Neither had made their debut albums yet but both were on the verge of greatness.

There were blues from Buddy Guy, Arthur Big Boy Crudup and Reverend Gary Davies, again, acts that would crossover into the growing rock culture, playing the Fillmore’s to thousands of adoring hippies.

It’s great that Mariposa is still an annual event and is such a positive and encouraging place to develop musical talent and encourage kids to perform.

 

 

 

Seattle Trips Festival 

On March 19, 1967, a Trips Festival was held in the Eagles Hall in Seattle. Promoted by the wonderfully named Trips Lansing and managed by Sid Clark, the event was a combination of live music, light shows, and a variety of other sensual experiences in the tradition that had been established at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco in 1966. 

The Seattle Trips Festival began at noon. More than 6,000 attendees paid $3 each to get seriously wide and high. There was a large gold Buddha statue with emerald green eyes towering over the audience in the ballroom. Coloured lights played along the wall, some of which were created by squeezing colored liquid between two plates of glass held before the beam of an open projector. Strobe lights added to the effect, giving the dancers the illusion of stop-motion photography. As one young girl described it at the time, “It’s like you were put in a barrel and then light and sound were poured in.” 

In one of the side rooms, writer Tom Robbins presented something called “Family Entertainment,” a performance piece in which four actors alternately spoke only the lines, “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Bow-Wow,” and “I Love You.” 

Vendors in display booths sold love beads, stick incense, buttons, and hookahs. A “Psychedelicatessan” served up green jello, pickles, painted Easter eggs, and frozen bananas in chocolate sauce for anyone who had the munchies, which was probably everyone.  

The show was briefly interrupted at 9:45 p.m., when the Seattle Fire Department issued manager Sid Clark a citation for violating city fire ordinances. Police were also on hand and although the crowd was very orderly, some officers expressed disgust over the hippies’ apparent disregard for laws regarding “conduct, narcotics, and drug abuse.” 

One policeman was nonplussed by the whole scene, telling a reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “We let the Fifties have their Beatniks. Let the Sixties have their hippies. It’s weird, all right, but they’ll all work out. It’s just a game, really, just a game.” The complete bill was, Crome Syrcus, Don & the Goodtimes, Emergency Exit, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, The Electric Prunes

 

Sacramento Pop Festival 

Held at Hughes Stadium, 3835 Freeport Blvd, Sacramento on Sunday October 15th 1967. The line-up for this one-day festival was Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Hamilton Streetcar, The Hour Glass, Jefferson Airplane, New Breed, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Spirit, Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Sunshine Company

Because 1967’s Summer of Love became so associated with San Francisco, it’d be easy to assume the freaky and the deaky had not leaked out into the rest of the state just yet. But this wouldn’t be true. The focus was on the Haight Ashbury groovers, yes, but people were getting wide and experimenting with altered state and alternative living elsewhere and one such place was Sacramento.

Just because Sacramento wasn’t San Francisco, and just because the big newspapers weren’t covering local hippies, that didn’t mean that behind the scenes its young people weren’t affected by the events percolating 'Frisco. 

People involved in the local hippie scene recall that only in Plaza Park, which is now known as Cesar Chavez Plaza, did large numbers of long-hairs congregate in public. There, says Gus Kaplanis, a newsletter publisher and former owner of the underground newspaper Aardvark who in 1967 was a history major at Sacramento City College, “you’d see groups of kids and young adults walking around. You know they’re not working and probably not going to school. But they’re having a good time, sitting around, playing guitars. It’s an easy life. You’d see hippie vans converted. You know they were living there.”

Clement’s first impressions that it was a backwater might have been true, but only up to a point. Imbibing the winds of change blowing from the Bay Area, both the local music and art scenes thrived. The Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were among the slew of top draws the Memorial Auditorium and other local arenas managed to book. Tickets cost about $2.50. 

In October, the City College’s Hughes Stadium hosted a huge rock festival called, simply, Sacramento Pop which had Airplane as headliners and other scene makers such as Spirit, Gregg & Duane in Hourglass and Captain Beefheart in support.   

“We brought everybody here,” says Russ Solomon who ran Tower Records in the town and worked as a concert promoter, as well as a record-store owner. “We played Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Sly Stone. We didn’t get the Beatles. But we had two Rolling Stones concerts here in the ’60s. You could get the Stones for $25,000. It was a different age, a great age.”

Communes sprang up in the foothills around Nevada City; several Bay Area idealists, including the poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, had recently bought a large plot of land. Within a couple years, Ananda Village, a large yoga commune that followed a swami called Kriyananda, would split off from this original group of back-to-the-landers and, on 600 acres of beautiful rolling hills, create one of the country’s largest, and ultimately most durable, experiments in alternative living. It is still there to this day, still offering pathways to enlightenment and spiritual awakening. 

While the gig held in Hughes Stadium was an early big show outside of the usual SoCal and NoCal locations, more significant was that the very fact it happened at all and in doing so helped coalesce the hippie scene and long term alternative living communities in the area.  

 

 

Detroit Love-In, Belle Island Park 

This is significant as a social event, much less so as a musical event. 

When John Sinclair, a guiding hand for the MC5, conceived of an event modeled after the Human Be-In held in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, he wanted to hold a day-long event that would include free food, free drugs, free love, and free music. 

And he wanted to have it in Belle Isle Park. So, he and other members of Trans-Love Energies (his organisation/anarcho situationists) started planning. They went down the straight route and even got the proper permits.

 

They designed the posters, and booked the musical acts. On April 30th, 1967, thousands of people streamed onto the island. 

Some were cultural tourists looking to see what the new turned-on, freaky deaky culture was all about, but others were already immersed in it.

Michael Davis - bass player for MC5 recalls, “They were already there, they were stoned, they had the fringes on, they had the hair long, they had everything going.”

Also on the island that day were dozens of Detroit Police officers, including many on horseback. Gary Grimshaw - who designed a poster for the event - says as far as the police were concerned, the hippies were trouble.

“Well, because we smoked weed and hung out with black people, and we attracted suburban kids to come down and do the same. And they didn’t like that,” Grimshaw says. 

The cops turned up mob-handed to oversee the whole thing. For most of the day, the event remained peaceful. But at 7 p.m., the situation changed. The MC5 were on stage. Michael Davis explains what happened next.

“We started our ‘Black to Comm’ thing and wouldn’t you know it, ‘Black to Comm’ just, like, took the cap off the thing. And I mean, we always felt like we caused it, you know, that the chaos and the high energy of ‘Black to Comm’ just sent people, just turned it into a disaster.”

The police arrested a motorcyclist for reckless driving. A confrontation ensued with the audience before things got violent. Thousands fled the island. On the other end of MacArthur Bridge, police were again confronted by an angry mob. Glass was broken, and more than a dozen people were arrested. The day after the Detroit Love-In, Leni Sinclair — nine months pregnant at the time — started worrying about a backlash. She thought the police would blame Trans-Love Energies and hippies for the violence.

“We were scared,” Sinclair says.”We thought we may have to flee or something, I don’t know. With the foreboding aftermath, I remember we were huddling and just really being sad and disappointed and scared.”

Leni Sinclair says regardless of the Love-In’s violent outcome, change was in the air. She says things had to get better. In the following months, John Sinclair and Trans-Love Energies would continue their quest to legalize marijuana. Four days after the love-in, Leni Sinclair gave birth.

After the way the police had behaved, Sinclair would find other ways to disrupt the status quo as a founding member of the White Panther Party, a militantly anti-racist socialist group and counterpart of the Black Panthers.

Arrested for possession of marijuana in 1969, Sinclair was given ten years in prison. The sentence was criticized by many as unduly harsh, and it galvanized a noisy protest movement led by prominent figures of the 1960s counterculture. Sinclair was freed in December 1971, but he remained in litigation – his case against the government for illegal domestic surveillance was successfully pleaded to the US Supreme Court in United States v. U.S. District Court (1972).

Sinclair eventually left the US and took up residency in Amsterdam. He continues to write and record and, since 2005, has hosted a regular radio program, The John Sinclair Radio Show, as well as produced a line-up of other shows on his own radio station, Radio Free Amsterdam.

Sinclair was the first person to purchase recreational marijuana when it became legal in Michigan on December 1, 2019. 

 

 

 

The Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park Polo Fields, San Francisco 

Festivals had been held for many years in the jazz world but the rock festival as we would come to know it had its seeds in the Trips Festivals put on by Fillmore impresario Bill Graham in January 1966 at the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco. The house band for these events was the Grateful Dead and they were billed as an attempt to achieve the psychedelic experience without drugs, though acid, still legal at the time, was available and widely consumed.

Big Brother And The Holding Company played along with other local bands and the events were a big success. No surprise there: great bands, trippy light shows and plenty of acid from Owsley's lab is a recipe for success.

In the spring of 1966, various writers, poets, musicians and the San Francisco Mime Troupe  formed the Artists' Liberation Front. One of many things they did was to produce the Free Faire, an outdoor, free version of the Trips Festivals with rock bands and poets all getting their groove on.

The most important of these was The Human Be-In. There was at least one other Be-In in Malibu State Park at which the Electric Flag played, but it was the San Francisco one labelled as A Gathering of the Tribes that went down in history as an important cultural event. Held on January 14, 196, it attracted 20,000 people from the sprawling hippie, alternative, drop-out, biker, drug and free love community.

The Dead played along with Quicksilver Messenger Service, Airplane and even Dizzy Gillespie. Allen Ginsberg got up and chanted some Hindu mantras all in an attempt to usher in a new era and spirit.

Timothy Leary asked the crowd to "turn on to the scene, tune in to what is happening and drop out of high school, college, grad school, junior executive, senior executive and follow me the hard way." Who could resist? This was a time when many were seeking a new direction other than that laid down by the American Dream. Leary's brand of tripped out otherness was attractive. We are all much more cynical now, but back then, many people wanted to believe there was Another Way. 

Local communal group The Diggers gave away fruit and vegetable stew, the air was filled with the smell of incense and dope and the sound of those little tinkling bells. 

The event put the burgeoning hippie scene on national display and as such was an inspiration to people not just in the rest of America but all across the western world. The counter-culture was cool, and people wanted to be part of it. Gary Duncan, guitarist of the Quicksilver Messenger Service recalls: "By the time we got there, there were, like, 20,000 people. Word got out, and all the news crews arrived, and it became a social movement."

Ray Manzarek, keyboardist of The Doors says: "We were in San Francisco to play our first gig at the legendary Fillmore. The four of us all looked at each other and said, 'We're gonna change the world!' Of course, we didn't, but that's another story." We beg to differ Ray. You changed plenty.

Sam Andrew, guitarist, Big Brother and the Holding Company: "I've never been able to decide if we were there or not. I thought for years that we were in NYC having meetings. But every third gig someone will come up and say, 'I saw you at the Human Be-In!" Is there anything more definitive of the era than not knowing if you were there or not?

Pamela Des Barres, self-proclaimed groupie and author of 'I'm With the Band' says: "I went to that, and soon [the love-ins] started in Los Angeles. It was the most free-floating, exquisite experience every time. My girlfriends and I would make cupcakes and put flowers in everybody's hair. The communes were spreading, everybody living together. This was brand-new stuff!"

That was the Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967. Just humans, being.

 

Ancestral Spirits Festival, California Hall, San Francisco 

The idea, so commonplace now, of putting on gigs to raise money for local causes really got going in the late 60s. This one held in San Francisco at California Hall on Polk Street (long a gathering place for people who didn’t fit the mainstream) was a benefit for Haight-Ashbury Karmic Ball Fund and the Church of ONE. 

The Haight-Ashbury Karmic Bail Fund provided financial bail assistance primarily for those arrested under the marijuana and LSD possession laws. 

The Church of ONE wanted to buy damaged rural land in order to provide a free facility for people to relearn to live on and under the human relationship to the earth in the manner of the original inhabitants. That all seems very ahead of its time. 

These were the sort of organisations that had noble, forward-thinking notions at their core. Good intentions, if a little naive by our modern cynical standards. You’ve gotta dig ‘em. They were fighting for ways to live that didn’t fit the plastic world we were brought up to think of as normal, decent and good. 

The bands that played were all local outfits, the most well-known of which The Loading Zone, regulars on the west coast scene from 66 - 71. It also featured an out called The Orkustra who claimed to be the first psychedelic electric symphony orchestra. They were originally known as "The Electric Chamber Orchestra". 

The band, who counted Bobby Beausoleil amongst their number, existed a little more than a year before splitting in the summer of 1967. Beausoleil soon became one of Manson’s murderous cult and is still in jail now aged 73 for the appalling murder of Gary Hinman.

However, David LaFlamme was also in the band and went on to more beautiful things, forming It’s A Beautiful Day and creating some of the most definitive west coast music of the era, especially on their first two albums.

 

 

 

BAR-B-QUE  Spalding, Lincolnshire

Whilst almost totally unknown, this is an important UK show in the history of rock because this was pretty much the first one-day rock fest in this country. And what a stellar line-up it was too. 

Cream, Geno Washington, Pink Floyd, Sounds Force Five, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Move, Zoot Money

Held on bank holiday Monday May 29, 1967 at the Tulip Bulb Auction Hall, Spalding, Lincolnshire which is basically a massive metal shed.

Towards the end of 1966, Grantham promoter, former footballer Brian Thompson, set about booking Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band and The Move. Their management persuaded Thompson to also book three relatively unknown acts at that time, being Pink Floyd, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream. 

The event was held in Spalding at the tulip auction hall, most likely the largest building in the area that could hold a large crowd, Spalding being a big tulip growing area. The centre of rock n roll it is not and has never been. It’s a rural market town and an unlikely place to find Cream, Jimi and Floyd.

A local covers outfit, Sounds Force 5, were booked to ensure a decent turnout and were to perform in all changeovers between each band at the side of the stage. 

Advertising was national and massively underestimated, with thousands making their way to the market town causing national radio to warn travellers to turn back. 6,000 attended but an estimated 12,000 outside, ticketless.Tickets cost just £1 and the posters promised a “knockout atmosphere”.

The Monday Bank Holiday was sunny and hot which would have been very uncomfortable in a large crowd inside what was basically a metal shed. The event appeared to be unorganised and the sound was terrible. Well, no-one had done anything like this before. 

Pink Floyd performed at the rear of the venue using a white bed sheet to project moving images. Now that’s high-tech! Hendrix had many issues, including tuning problems, was late on stage meaning he played just a half hour set and finished by setting fire to his guitar and trashing his speaker stack. It was widely agreed that Clapton out-played Hendrix that day and that Geno Washington made a great show too. 

Whilst a groundbreaking event for its time in the Summer of Love ahead of the famous Monterey Pop Festival and possibly being the first Rock music festival in the UK, the event remains largely unknown outside of the area. The event became a one off in Spalding due to opposition from local residents who didn’t want no rock n rollers disturbing the tulips.

Thompson, however, moved to a location in nearby Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, for the 1968 event, Barn Barbeque Concert and Dance, which included Donovan, Fairport Convention, Fleetwood Mac and The Move. 

 

Muhammad Ali Festival, Hunters Point, San Francisco

This is a mysterious festival. Due to be held Sat Jun 10 - Sun Jun 11, 1967, did it actually take place? No-one is quite sure. The only evidence that it was scheduled to happen is the lovely poster made for the event by Joe Gomez. There are no reports of it happening and no reports of it being cancelled. 

This was at the time Ali was becoming a counter culture hero for resisting the draft as a conscientious objector. It was due to be held at Hunters Point in SF at a time when most such benefit gigs were held in Golden Gate Park, perhaps because it was a largely black area.

The bands on the bill are all the classic new San Fran hippie groups who played so many shows in the area from 66 - 69.

The excellent Rock Prosopography blog says

“Ali crystallized opposition to the War, reflecting a man so principled that he gave up money and fame to do it.

Thus an event 10 days before Ali's trial ( for formally refusing his draft notice) that says "Muhammad Ali Festival" is self-evidently intended as a celebration of racial solidarity and opposition to the Vietnam War. Of course, that would be the hippie interpretation--whether the local community perceived it as supportive or patronizing is unclear. Some of the fine print says "Free Bar B-Q", which in California was effectively code for African Americans, although how black people might have felt out about it was completely unclear. There is also a small map of Hunters Point but I cannot discern the actual place where the festival was held.

"No specific organizer or affiliations are identifiable for this event, so it makes me wonder how carefully it was organized. A lot of hippie events were thrown together kind of casually, and they did not always fall together gracefully: bands didn't show up, generators ran out of power, the cops hassled about permits, neighbours complained, and so on. Its impossible to say if this well-intentioned event had a chance of succeeding, much less whether it actually did.

“As to the mystery of this event, it happened to take place on a particularly busy rock weekend in the Bay Area. A huge rock festival that was scheduled the previous weekend at Mt. Tamalpais in Marin had been delayed and rescheduled to the weekend of June 10-11. 

"This all day event, featuring groups like The Doors, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and The Fish and a couple of dozen others, would have sucked away numerous people who might have considered journeying to Hunters Point. Numerous other people may have been saving up time or money to go to the Monterey Pop Festival the next weekend.

"Meanwhile, The Doors were at the Fillmore Friday and Saturday night (June 9-10), Big Brother and Canned Heat were at The Avalon all weekend (June 8-11) and Steve Miller Band was headlining California Hall on Friday and Saturday night as well.

"The listed performers for this concert were not well known at the time, even if some of them have grown in stature since. The acts listed are:

"Steve Miller Blues Band: a great group, but a year shy of their first album, and only known locally. Curley Cook was still on rhythm guitar, as Boz Scaggs would not join until later in the Summer.

"Orkustra: A Haight Ashbury band that played all instrumental music, featuring future Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil on guitar and David LaFlamme, later of Its A Beautiful Day.

"The Loading Zone: an Oakland band that played both rock and soul clubs, they too were a year shy of their debut album.

"The Charlatans: though Haight Ashbury legends, these pioneers were never actually that popular, and their first album did not come out until much later."

"Ulysses Crockett and The Afro Blue Persuasion: Crockett was a Berkeley vibraphonist whose modern jazz sextet played a lot on Haight Street.

"Phoenix: A San Francisco group that was still a year shy of their performing peak, although they never got the breaks they needed either.

"Anonymous Artists of America: A Santa Cruz Mountains band who lived in a commune

"SF Mime Troupe: Popular political theater group in the City

"The Committee: Improvisational theater troupe, based on Broadway in North Beach.”

Whether this festival happened or not, it is a good indication of how the counterculture of the city and the wider political situation in relation to the war and civil rights, were intermingling and in doing so, probably putting down the first roots of what would become the more overtly political Yippie movement, a movement that in so many ways was the forerunner for pretty much every progressive cause that has come to pass since.  

 

Christmas On Earth Continued, London 

A truly spectacular event in London in 1967. “Christmas on Earth Continued” was advertised to be one long party, featuring a lot of great bands. It gets sadly remembered as the last major show Syd Barrett played with Pink Floyd. Apparently, he ended the set dazed and motionless onstage, his arms hanging limp at his sides. 

The full line-up was;

Eric Burdon & The Animals, Jeffrey Shaw and The Plastic Circus, John Peel, Paper Blitz Tissue, Pink Floyd, Sam Gopal Dream, Soft Machine, The Graham Bond Organisation, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Move, Tomorrow, Traffic.

Paper Blitz Tissue were an interesting short-lived band who had released one psychedelic single on RCA Boy Meets Girl, in December 1967. Drummer Dave DuFort was later in East of Eden and also played with Kevin Ayers.

This was considered to be the last gasp of the British underground scene before all the band’s record began to tell and the whole scene became more commercial.

Trouble was it was held at Olympia which is a huge, cold exhibition hall. Not conducive to good vibes at all. And if you’ve never heard of this gig before, even though the cream of British rock was in attendance, then that’s because it was badly publicised, which, combined with the freezing cold weather meant few turned up. 

The organizers really took a bath having shelled out for all the bands. It was even filmed but the quality of the pictures were so poor they couldn’t be used commercially. Despite all this, it seems, you really had to have been there. The lineup alone will make lovers of 60s psych-rock salivate: Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Burdon, Pink Floyd, The Move, Soft Machine, Tomorrow… The Who didn’t turn up, but Traffic, who hadn’t been scheduled to play, did. 

Soft Machine played and Robert Wyatt leapt into a full bath of water on stage. Tomorrow, featuring Steve Howe later of Yes, performed with an epilepsy-inducing strobe.

If this had happened in the summer or had been properly advertised it would have gone down in legend, but as it is, it’s a psychedelic footnote in rock n roll history.