Psychedelia, the Summer of Love, & Monterey-The Rock Culture of 1967
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Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Senior Theses and Projects Student Scholarship Spring 2012 Psychedelia, the Summer of Love, & Monterey-The Rock Culture of 1967 James M. Maynard Trinity College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses Part of the American Film Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, and the American Popular Culture Commons Recommended Citation Maynard, James M., "Psychedelia, the Summer of Love, & Monterey-The Rock Culture of 1967". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2012. Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/170 Psychedelia, the Summer of Love, & Monterey-The Rock Culture of 1967 Jamie Maynard American Studies Program Senior Thesis Advisor: Louis P. Masur Spring 2012 1 Table of Contents Introduction..…………………………………………………………………………………4 Chapter One: Developing the niche for rock culture & Monterey as a “savior” of Avant- Garde ideals…………………………………………………………………………………...7 Chapter Two: Building the rock “umbrella” & the “Hippie Aesthetic”……………………24 Chapter Three: The Yin & Yang of early hippie rock & culture—developing the San Francisco rock scene…………………………………………………………………………53 Chapter Four: The British sound, acid rock “unpacked” & the countercultural Mecca of Haight-Ashbury………………………………………………………………………………71 Chapter Five: From whisperings of a revolution to a revolution of 100,000 strong— Monterey Pop………………………………………………………………………………...97 Conclusion: The legacy of rock-culture in 1967 and onward……………………………...123 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….128 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..131 2 For Louis P. Masur and Scott Gac- The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with -The Boss 3 Introduction: “Music is prophetic. It has always been in its essence a herald of times to come. Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. Our music foretells our future.”1 Prior to this season of political retribution, turmoil on the streets, men on the moon, acid in the drinking water, and escalating wars overseas, the nascent Baby Boom generation had turned the power of its numbers and the potency of its idealism into an unmatched alliance between the popular and the revolutionary, the elite and the mainstream. Standing astride the barricades at every turn—social, emotional, political, artistic—the musicians and bands of 1965-1968, in the songs they sang, the albums they delivered, and the causes they espoused, were the only artists who consistently stood atop the mountain, commandeered the stages at the most important rallies, and issued all the crucial manifestos.2 The Monterey International Pop Festival is over, all over. And what was it? Was it one festival, many festivals, a festival at all? Does anything sum it up, did it mean anything, and are there any themes? Was it just a collection of rock groups of varying levels of proficiency doing their bit for a crowd of thousands who got their fill of whatever pleasure or sensation they sought? Was it the most significant meeting of an avant-garde since the Armory show or some Dadaist happening in the 1920s? Was it, as the stage banner said, ‘Love, flowers, music,’ or was it Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar as if it was an enormous penis and then burning it, smashing it, and flicking its broken pieces like holy water into a baffled, berserk audience? Was it a hundred screaming freak kids with war-painted faces howling and bashing turned-over oil-drum trash cans like North African trance dancers, or was it the thousands of sweet hippies who wandered, sat, and slept on the grass with flutes and bongos, beads and bubbles, laughing and loving softly?3 In the beginning-precursors of Rock’s Ascension to Supremacy: On the morning of June 19th, 1967 the mass of concert-goers, which had emerged from San Francisco and every far-reaching corner of America, awoke with one unified and disappointing realization—Monterey was officially over. The weekend of June 16th had marked the successful launch of rock music’s first ever large-scale outdoor music festival, coined the Monterey International Pop Festival. Yet by the following Monday, three days of unprecedented musical talent, peace, and universally positive vibes had disintegrated into the ether, bringing a lamentable return to reality. What had occurred at Monterey that weekend had been the materialization of something remarkable, a fleeting celebration of rock music, youthful counterculture, and the collective fulfillment of the hippies’ far-out vision of a rejuvenated, joyous America. As Robert Lydon, a music critic who was 1 Jacques Attali. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 2 Bruce Pollock. By the Time We Got to Woodstock: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Revolution of 1969 (New York: Backbeat Books, 2009), xii 3 Michael Lydon. Flashbacks (New York: Routledge, 2003), 22 4 present at the festival, exclaimed, “The Monterey International Pop Festival was a dream come true. An odd, baffling, and at times threatening dream, but one whose main theme was the creation and further growth of rock ‘n’ roll music, a music as young, vital, and beautiful as any being made today.”4 While it would be nice to consider Monterey as the apotheosis of hippie spontaneity, the fruition of Monterey and everything it so delicately and convincingly demonstrated about rock- culture’s ascension to widespread prominence as an artistic movement, the festival’s multifaceted existence had been years in the making. What makes the rock genre a unique music-culture from its birth to its present existence is its innate quality of spontaneous transformation—a quality which has allowed it to transcend the normal, fleeting life-cycle of a popular music. Between 1965-1969 rock went through an incredible transformation like no other American genre had done before, a transformation which can be attributed to the revolutionary fervor of the three great rock festivals: Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont. With a graceful fluidity, rock left behind its insular mainstream, boy-band innocence of the early 1960s to search for a more meaningful identity within American culture. This identity was built into the foundation of the rock festival, a cultural product which celebrated spontaneity, community, and most importantly, music as a peaceful means of revolt, challenging popular culture to reconsider its strictly enforced vision of the “American Experience.” So why focus on exhuming the lasting relevance of rock culture’s rise to national prominence through the vehicle of Monterey rather than covering the entire era in which three festivals stamped their legacy as the mass celebrations of rock’s most formative years? The answer is simple: Monterey represented the materialization of a community’s revolutionary vision of change—an outdoor festival which would serve as the most important contribution to rock’s development as the ultimate medium of self expression and a means of collective escape from the harsh rules and regulations of the outside world. Although folk, jazz and pop festivals had preceded it, Monterey was the brainchild of a developing countercultural scene with the ceaseless desire to utilize the festival not only as a 4 Michael Lydon, "Monterey Pops! An International Pop Festival," Newsweek, June 20, 1967, 10 5 showcase of their free-spirited rock, but as a gateway to promote their radical ideals through a music that challenged, and beckoned the nation to question societal norms through celebrating the clean slate of the present. While Monterey spawned two great festivals and a glorious era of rock music, she would always be the proud mother and the holder of the hippies’ original seed of thought. Yes Woodstock was the pinnacle and Altamont was the symbolic end of an era, but Monterey was the mythical progenitor and would always be remembered as the beginning of a revolution where revolt was peaceful and change would come if only everyone could “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” If one was to study one particular moment in time for the purpose of ascertaining the most critical element of rock-culture’s establishment within the American consciousness during the 1960s, it would be Monterey—a festival which celebrated a generation’s most exciting art form and held the vital seed of thought for its ensuing proliferation. The significance of Monterey was in its tangible culmination of rock’s complex history, at once catapulting rock’s influence from the limiting media of records and radio to the widespread accessibility of the stage while transforming American culture’s prevailing aversion towards individual self-expression through the uninhibited euphoria of psychedelia. Not only a festival, Monterey was the door through which rock’s first prolific phase of development in psychedelia could divide and conquer as a musical fountain of wealth, one which has permeated the structure of popular culture, maintaining the relevance of liberal self-expression to this day. What comes next is the story of how rock-culture blossomed; a story which began during the Beat-influenced folk-rock revival of the mid-sixties, spreading its fertile roots across each and every willing musical tangent, building at a furious pace as it embraced the seductive authenticity of the hippie aesthetic, when finally, its public marriage to the live venue sparked a new and unexpectedly decisive phenomenon—that of cultural revolution. Through Monterey, one