…Monterey Pop was a seminal event... featuring debut performances of bands that would shape the history of rock and affect popular culture from that day forward. The County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California … had been home to folk, jazz and blues festivals for many years. But the weekend of June 16–18, 1967 was the first time it was used to showcase rock music....On the first of the 3 days, the headliner was Simon & Garfunkel. It looked like this:
Beautiful!
The other performers on the first day were The Association, The Paupers, Lou Rawls, Beverley, Johnny Rivers, and Eric Burdon and The Animals. I don't remember The Paupers and Beverley.
I'll post on Day 2 and Day 3 separately, so hold off on mentioning Janis, Jimi, etc. etc.
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I graduated from high school some 10 years later, so I viewed these acts as "oldies" -- like Elvis. However, the summer of my high school graduation I (finally) started listening to some of the late-60s music. I bought a bunch of Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel albums. I remember thinking I was born 10 years too late. There was some really good music that came before I took control of the car radio!
Of course, now, most of my listening is to 70s on 7. There's still a lot of great music from the 60s, but it doesn't evoke the nostalgia that the music from the 70s does for me.
Don't forget Canned Heat
I remember Monterrey mostly from "Play Misty For Me."
That was a good flick and an early indication of Eastwood's skill at making movies.
I have a 5 CD set of Monterrey Pop - not everything, but a lot. It has really held up for the years. Janis, Jimmy and Otis - all at their prime and then gone too soon after.
Only talk about Day 1 or the general idea of the festival. Performers on Day 2 and Day 3 will be discussed in posts tomorrow and Sunday. This post names everyone who played on Day 1.
Here's why no one remembers The Paupers...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ws5ay3iVUk
But the Monterey Jazz Festival is in its 60th year. :-)
Thanks Professor. You always come through.
The local weekly magazine has an article on the Festival. It was Momma Cass's idea. And a sound man for the Grateful Dead named Bear mixed up 30,000 doses of his special LSD called Monterrey Purple to give out. And he says the oscar performance of the day was the promoters assuring Monterrey officials the concert would be drug free. But the people had their own view of reality for several
days.
Great weather here. And my love for John Steinbeck is stronger than ever.
Simon and Garfunkel? Those two little fems. Ugh.
What about Otis Redding?
Here's an aging Simon and Colbert changing 'feelin groovy' for 2017 politics:
The perfect tune for when you’re no longer feelin’ so groovy
And I did talk about the day 1 performers - Simon and Garfunkel. I said I hated them.
Correction: Not hate, just thought they were high-pitched girly men who should have worn dresses.
Not that there's anything wrong with being trans-gendered.
They were a Bridge Over Troubled Genders, rocean
"They were a Bridge Over Troubled Genders, rocean"
Ha.
BTW, I'm Simon and Garfunkel remind me of my Mother.
Every time she'd see a male tenor on TV, she'd look unhappy and change the channel.
LOL.
The Paupers were actually pretty decent. They were a Canadian band whose signature was that, besides the drummer, the other members all played kettle drums beside their instruments and the opened some of their songs that way. Saw them in 67 as opening act to first Cream US tour in a little place in the Village in NYC called Cafe Wha.
Thank so for posting this. I'd forgotten how truly great they were. That godawful concert in Central Park had taken the S&G space n my brain.
https://youtu.be/w15zxDrIIP4
Oh course, Althouse thinks the S&G is "beautiful".
Please. The pseudo-profundity. The teenage boomer lyrical angst. The dime store progressiveness.
"And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”
Thanks. Back when Art really did sing like an angel.
And the audience. So respectful that you hardly knew they were there.
No Left Shark needed either.
Well, rcocean, I think they're quite good lyrics, especially from someone so young..
Here's one he did when all grown up;
Boy In The Bubble
It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry
The Carmel / Monterey area Is raising its game. First they got the Catholic's' new American Saint, Junipero Serra ; and now they get the Summer of Love's 50th Anniversary concert. A couple of days ago at the nearby Oracle Arena it was a classic win for Oakland's NBA team.
And the Steinbeck books live on. Grapes of Wrath is suddenly totally relevant in today's political clashes. And East of Eden remains the best understanding the American experience in literature.
I noticed today at the Salinas National Museum ,that Steinbeck was Scottish Presbyterian Hamilton on his mother's side and a German Lutheran ( missionary to Israel) Grossesteinbeck on the father's side. That combined ethnic cultural ancestry is the same as of our friend Trump and of yours truly. We seem to share an understanding of the world.
So tired of the 60's. Ruined the country. Play the music if u like. Enough nostalgia for the begining of the end.
Paul Simon rocks. I like Simon & Garfunkel too. Simon's art on his own is different, more complicated, with faster beats. He used Garfunkel's voice and wrote for it, and slowed down his natural rhythms because the harmonies were so cool.
I have two memories of the Monterey Pop Festival, when I was in 8th grade:
1. The dull indistinct roar coming over the hill that kept me awake a couple of nights in a row in the military housing a mile or two away.
2. After that, walking through the festival in the day time with my family, wondering at the astonishing quantities of trash and filth all around - by far the messiest fairgrounds I've ever seen.
I like Simon & Garfunkel but now when I hear them I think of Bernie Sanders.
I'm a big fan of Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints. What's impressive about those works are the musical arrangements and the Latin and African beats. Completely different from his early work.
If you like those works, you will probably love this.
Amazing.
eddie willers - Nobel Prize 2019 - count on it.
Simon, by the way, ran a boycott to record music in South Africa. This was back when apartheid was going on and it was a big no-no to do anything in South Africa.
As in, he ignored a United Nations boycott.
Simon had ventured to South Africa to record the album with local musicians, ignoring an international boycott set in place by the United Nations Anti-Apartheid Committee. "What gives [governments] the right to wear the cloak of morality?" he railed at the time. "Their morality comes out of the barrel of a gun."
I was getting ready to graduate from college, with a war and a draft board hanging over my head. I still like to play the old protest songs as YouTube videos. But Barry McGuire was wrong; we weren't on the "Eve of Destruction" back then. The Eve of Destruction is right now.
MP was a seminal non-event in the Beach Boys' career. The group was scheduled to appear, but Brian Wilson, in the throes of non-Smile, had cancelled:
(Wikipedia):
The Beach Boys, who had been involved in the conception of the event[25] 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.
There's so much wisdom and righteousness in the lyrics of "The Sounds of Silence", and such profundity of feeling in the performance! I wonder what it means.
Art Garfunkel is an interesting, complicated guy, who gets no respect precisely because he has the voice of an angel. See, e.g., his acting in Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge. Paul Simon is a better musician, but Art Garfunkel is a better instrument.
"Hello darkness, my old friend"
Hi there!
"I've come to talk with you again"
Jeez, not again...
"Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping"
Eeww!
"And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains"
I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you wrote a catchy tune but it's just eggs hatching. -- Apologies to J.H.
And heeeereeereeesss Beverley! (born Kutner, now Martyn) Pretty good folk rock tune called Picking up the Sunshine
Hmmmmm...was Art's voice one of the most perfect, beautiful singing voices ever? Has to be top 10.
And the Steinbeck books live on. Grapes of Wrath is suddenly totally relevant in today's political clashes. And East of Eden remains the best understanding the American experience in literature.
Steinbeck was a shit and a fraud.
I noticed today at the Salinas National Museum ,that Steinbeck was Scottish Presbyterian Hamilton on his mother's side and a German Lutheran
People who drone on and on about their ancestry and the ancestry of others are shits and frauds and, incidentally, your homie Steinbeck would sign his name to that. It's funny to listen to you talk shit about the king of England because that's exactly the kind of talking that people who are the king of England would do, who was sired by whom out of who. Like a horse or a dog.
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