If so, please tell me what it was like and who you saw there. Thanks. My favorite music is from this era, but I wasn't born until '68. Would love to know what it was really like. I enjoyed the Criterion Collection DVD of it immensely.

I went to the festival with three high school buddies and we got there pretty late on Friday evening, thus missing most of the first acts (I was never a big fan of The Association or Lou Rawls anyway so no biggee to me). Johnny Rivers had just started his set when we hit the fairgrounds. The Animals (with Eric Burdon) were great though some problems with the PA were a big disappointment. Simon & Garfunkel were "okay" but folk music has never really appealed to me. We pitched a camp of a sort at the nearby Monterey Junior College athletic field, with sleeping bags and backpacks. We met some cute hippie girls there in the stadium who took pity on four nerdy high school jocks and I discovered the therapeutic benefits of a "copulative relationship" that night.

Saturday was great, with most of my favorite San Francisco bands scheduled. It was also the first time I'd ever heard any "blues" music. Al Cooper and Paul Butterfield really brought the genre to the forefront (for me). Steve Miller and his original band (five pieces, with Boz Scaggs) really lit the afternoon up. We left to get some food after Moby Grape played and missed most of the Byrds set except for "So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star". Then Marty Balin and Paul Kantner let fly the Jefferson Airplane to huge wafted clouds of "herbal analgesic" (it was my first exposure to such contraband). Grace Slick had only joined the band a few weeks prior and still seemed to be learning the material. Booker T & the MG's (featuring Otis Redding) closed the night and in truth, I consider it to be the high point of the entire festival from a technical standpoint. I mean, Otis was absolutely mesmerizing.

On Sunday the opener was Ravi Shankar -- boring! We left to get some lunch and when we returned some forty-five minutes later he was still playing the same damn song! Big Brother & The HC woke everyone up once Janis launched into her "full-tilt boogie" mode. And I was sooooo jealous of Sam Andrews' backline -- he was playing two Dual Showmans! Buffalo Springfield went on just before dusk but only played about a half a set, five or six tunes IIRC. They were all good ones though. We skipped the Grateful Dead in favor of dinner but I'd seen them twice before at Winterland and the Fillmore so it wasn't that big of a loss. The Who went on right afterwards and tore the absolute crap out of everything when they finished "My Generation". Drums, guitars, Super Beatle Amps. All of it totally TRASHED. I went up to the stage to try and score a memento but the roadies had pretty much cleaned up the mess by the time I got there.

I did have a chance to speak -- briefly -- with a guy named Chas Chandler who was managing the next act up, a trio named The Jimi Hendrix Experience. I couldn't get back to my seat so he let me stand near "stage right" and watch their set. Sobriety was a lost cause for me by the time they launched into "Like A Rolling Stone" but despite the "herbage" I knew that something very extraordinary was afoot. The tone, the timbre, the volume -- just freaking a-mazing! Even when Jimi dialed it down for "The Wind Cries Mary" it was so......dynamic. From what I learned later, "Wild Thing" was actually an afterthought since their set ran a bit short due to Jimi's pharmaceutical "dalliances". When Jimi lit his guitar up there were two Monterey County Sheriff deputies standing next to me with fire extinguishers in hand, waiting for things to get out of control (they never did of course). The Mamas And The Papas plus Scott McKenzie closed out the festival but it was almost anti-climactic with folks already heading for the gates to leave. I stayed put until they finished "California Dreaming" then hooked back up with my buddies for the trip home.

Arjay

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"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

no

I never attended Monterey Pop but I have the R.A. Pennimaker(I think that's his name)movie of it and I recommend it to anyone who's interested in it as well as the Jimi Hendrix Plays Monterey Pop Festival.

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'65 Strat,65 Mustang,65 Jaguar,4 more Strats,3 vintage Vox guitars,5 Vox amps,'69 Bassman with a '68 2-15 Bassman cab,36 guitars total-15asst'd amps total,2 vintage '60s Hammond organs & a myriad of effects-with a few rare vintage ones.

Applause for Brother Arjay's story of the festival...I've been wanting to hear that ever since I knew you were there!
***** Five Star Review!!!!

Thanks, Reb.

One of these days I'll tell you about my most memorable time at the Fillmore.



Arjay

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"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

I will be waiting...it has to be a good one. ...I like the part about the hippie chicks at Monterey,man,those were the days.
Talking about these things got me to looking at some pics of the Atlanta Pop Festival,late last night,which led me to a site about the "Strip" on Peachtree St. in Hot'Lanta where all the freaks stayed in that city...here in the Southland that was the closest thing we had to Haight & Asbury...it was cool though...and when Duane and the Brothers were in town they played at Piedmont Park for free,I saw some of that era end when I lived down there and Duane and Berry Oakley died in Macon a year apart....they're buried side by side in Rose Hill where they hung out and partied and wrote songs,Dickey wrote 'In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" at her grave overlooking the river,the first album pics were taken in that cemetery.
I need to go back down there......Little Martha is still standing there,frozen in time.

Great story Arjay!

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-T

"You can't spend what you ain't got, you can't lose what you ain't never had" ~ McKinley Morganfield

Thanks Arjay I thoroughly enjoyed that account.

Thanks Arjay for the rundown. Very interesting to hear an eyewitness account.

Have you seen the Pennebaker film? You should scan the crowd and see if you can find yourself there.

Also, did they have more than one stage, or was it one band after the other the whole time?

Right......







The single stage was equipped with a large promoter-provided backline of Fender Dual Showman amps. Most of the "electric" acts shared these with the notable exceptions of The Who (Vox Super Beatles) and The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Marshall and Sunn). The acoustic acts relied on the PA system which consisted of about a dozen Altec-Lansing A7 "Voice Of The Theater" cabs powered by Macintosh 275 amps. I never saw what mixing board was used but I'm pretty certain it wasn't a Shure "Vocal Masher".



Arjay

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"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY

I noticed that Country Joe and BBHC looked like they were using the same amps.

There were lotsa shots of small sections of the crowd (~40 people at a time or less), if I remember correctly. You should check them out just for kicks if interested. They showed small groups of people hangin around their tents too.

Did you see Country Joe, by the way? I liked Section 42, or whatever that instrumental was called.

Thanks for relating your experience!