A Long Strange Trip (29 page)

Alan Pariser was an heir to the Sweetheart Paper fortune who happened to sell superior marijuana and consequently had gotten to know various musicians, and he had a good idea: he wanted to replicate the popular Monterey Jazz Festival with a rock and roll version. He hired the Beatles’ former and future press agent, Derek Taylor, and began to line up bands. They approached Ralph Gleason for his blessing, but it came back “Judgement reserved.” Shortly after, the festival became nonprofit, to be run by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and his record company president, Lou Adler. From the beginning, it was clear that a successful Monterey Pop Festival would need the style and cachet of the music from the two psychedelic cities, San Francisco and London. And immediately there was conflict, because almost nothing could be more instantly repugnant to any San Francisco musician in 1967 than an ultra-hip Los Angeles record producer like Lou Adler, whose instincts were superbly commercial. Early on in the process, Derek Taylor, who’d stayed with the project, filled a slow news day by floating a notion that the festival would benefit the Diggers. Not appreciating being so used, Peter Berg, Emmett Grogan, Bill Fritsch (a Digger and Hell’s Angel commonly called Sweet William), and Peter Coyote drove to Los Angeles to meet with Adler at Phillips’s mansion. Emmett disappeared, wrote Coyote, “to rifle the coatroom, we later discovered,” while the other three laid down a simple message: the festival could not charge money for anything associated with the Diggers. Free was not an L.A. concept. Coyote “said it nicely, Berg said it coldly, and Bill made it dangerous.” Then Derek Taylor got up and ended the meeting, “announcing over his shoulder breezily as he walked out the door: ‘That’s it, I’m out of here. These guys have always been the hippest. If they say it’s not happening, it’s not happening.’ ”

But the notion of the festival had assumed an enormous momentum. There was so much wonderful new music around, and showcasing it in one spot for three days made sense. There was also money involved. ABC-TV had put up $250,000 for film rights, with the distinguished documentary director D. A. Pennebaker to direct. The producers forged ahead, leaving the good name of the Diggers out of the mix. Still needing the San Francisco hipness/integrity quotient, they recruited Paul Simon, a member of the nonprofit board that theoretically ran the festival, to act as an emissary. Rock and Danny spent a day with Simon, taking him around San Francisco and to a free show in the park while explaining their fears of being co-opted by Adler. Simon said, “I get it,” recalled Rifkin, and established a personal relationship with Danny so cordial that he later gave Rifkin the keys to his New York apartment.

At length, Adler and Phillips flew up to meet with the San Francisco bands at the Fairmont Hotel. The festival had a number of groups signed, but they were all from Los Angeles, and hardly cutting-edge. They needed San Francisco. The San Franciscans were simultaneously skeptical and naive. They wanted to know where any expected profit would go, and Adler was vague. They wanted to know who would end up owning the film, and Adler was vague. Fair questions. But they also ingenuously wanted to know why it couldn’t be a free show and why the musicians were being flown in first-class. Rifkin asked, “Are you gonna let the people on the fairgrounds, Lou? What do you mean, for a buck? Music should be for everyone, Lou; those prices are ridiculous. These bands are all rich, why do you have to pay expenses?”

Adler would later say that it was only the calming influence of Ralph Gleason and Bill Graham that kept him from walking out, especially when Rifkin floated the notion of a free antifestival, to be held a few miles up the road at Fort Ord. Aside from the improbability of an army commandant welcoming a full-on hippie festival, the idea lost all momentum when Rifkin and Emmett went to check out Fort Ord as a campsite and Emmett developed an allergic reaction to military police and fenced-in compounds. Rock braced his former employer, the local state representative Fred Farr, and the hippies were able to get the use of the Monterey Peninsula College football field for camping and a free stage. With that, most of the hippie bands threw in the towel and agreed to play. The movie was the one place where the San Francisco bands drew the line. Correctly apprehending that the film would be the final prize to the whole event, the Dead, Quicksilver, and Big Brother united in refusing to sign performance releases. They would play for Adler’s pop festival, but giving Adler control over their image on film was too much. The Jefferson Airplane, influenced by their manager, who was now Bill Graham, didn’t seem to care.

In between jousting with the San Francisco bands and negotiating with the city of Monterey, John Phillips decided to write a song that would promote the festival and put out the message “to come in peace and stay cool.” Phillips couldn’t miss. In half an hour he had a tune and gave it to his old friend Scott McKenzie, who then recorded “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).” Released the last week of May, it was an instant hit. The song and Derek Taylor’s efforts combined to give the Monterey Pop Festival a fabulous velocity as opening day, Friday, June 16, approached. “1,100 people who said they were media,” wrote Taylor, “and we allowed them all in,
all . . .
the best-covered pop event in history—and for the first time the straight press had to realize that there was another sort of press . . . Every plane skimming low over the Pacific, bright with fresh cargoes of acid heads and amps and coats of many colors.” Bear whipped up a special batch called Monterey Purple, and assumed a visible and respected presence backstage. There were nicely decorated booths selling beads, bells, flowers, underground papers, and so forth in the fairgrounds. One hundred thousand orchids were flown in from Hawaii, and every attendee got a flower. Tickets were relatively expensive, ranging from three to six dollars, but the number of people without tickets was manageable, and loudspeakers outside the seating area helped. The hippies slept at the college football field, were fed by the Diggers, saw some free music, and stayed peaceful. The police ignored the smell of pot and stayed relaxed, and for three days it really was a living “Sgt. Pepper summer of love.” The face of American music was about to change.

On Friday night 7,500 people filled the seating area, with Goddard Lieberson and Clive Davis of Columbia, Mo Ostin of Warner Bros., Jerry Wexler of Atlantic, and Jerry Moss of A&M in the dress circle, along with celebrities like Candice Bergen. Backstage, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones mingled with the performers, and rumors of the imminent arrival of the Beatles swirled everywhere. The slick pop-folk group the Association kicked off the festival with its tune “Enter the Young,” followed by the Paupers, a Canadian band brought in by Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, then Lou Rawls. Johnny Rivers, a Lou Adler act backed by the house band that included Jimmy Webb and Hal Blaine, the king of the L.A. studio session drummers, came next, followed by Eric Burdon, with Jerry Abrams’s Head Lights splashing visuals behind him. Simon and Garfunkel closed the show. If the festival had ended after one day, no one would have ever remembered it.

The Dead had played on Friday in Los Angeles, where Phil’s bass was stolen. They flew up Saturday morning and enjoyed meeting Ravi Shankar at the airport, then scattered around the fairgrounds to pass the day before their performance on Sunday night. Weir found himself in the Guild Guitars tent on the concourse. Paul Simon was there, and some black guy. There weren’t many amps, so Weir and the black guy plugged into the same Standell amp, while Simon strummed on his acoustic. “You won’t be able to hear me,” said Paul, “but you’ll be able to feel the vibrations.” They began to jam on a Miles Davis riff, and Weir proceeded to feed back his guitar, and then the black guy joined him. “We’re both right up on the amp, crawling on it like a couple of monkeys, having our way with the amplifier, both of us, and we got close.” It was that sort of day. The police were covered in flowers, and by afternoon, Chief Marinello sent most of them home, especially when Chet Helms and Danny Rifkin defused the last potential glitch by giving the Hell’s Angels free tickets— to Ravi Shankar, on Sunday.

Onstage, the music began to heat up, first with Canned Heat, then with Big Brother and the Holding Company. With “Down on Me,” “Combination of the Two,” and “Ball and Chain,” Janis ripped glory out of her tortured larynx, and the audience stood screaming in disbelief as chills slithered up 7,500 spines. Every showbiz cliché of ecstatic success she or the band could ever have dreamed cascaded down on them like the flowers. And when their music was done, the mental cash registers went
ka-ching,
and Albert Grossman, even then looking to sign Big Brother, suggested to Janis that she really should be in the movie. Big Brother’s manager, ex-Prankster Julius Karpen, had held out for creative control, but Janis wanted her triumph Now. As the arguments raged, the music continued. Country Joe and the Fish, the Butterfield Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steve Miller, and the first public performance of the Electric Flag, with Harvey Brooks, Buddy Miles, Nick Gravenites, and Michael Bloomfield, completed the afternoon. It was a gooood afternoon.

But magic happens in the dark. As the sun set, a Head Lights light show flickered behind the entire night’s program. Moby Grape opened, then Hugh Masekela in a too-long set, the Byrds in one of their last performances, featuring David Crosby rambling about JFK’s assassination, Laura Nyro, who exited crying, and then the Jefferson Airplane, at the top of its game. “Somebody to Love” was just leaving the Top Ten, “White Rabbit” was climbing, and they whipped the crowd. The night came to a thundering climax with Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, and the Bar-Kays, in a set as triumphant as Big Brother’s. It was a fabulous night, and afterward, some musicians went over to the Peninsula College football field and played on, most notably Eric Burdon. Oddly, the Dead did not join them.

Sunday afternoon was reserved for Ravi Shankar, and he entranced the entire fairgrounds with his perfection. Though he did not approve of LSD, the audience certainly found Indian music suitable to trip to. Sunday evening opened calmly with the Blues Project, then Big Brother. Janis had gotten her way with the band, and they had overruled Julius; they would be filmed. Buffalo Springfield, without Neil Young but with David Crosby, followed. Backstage, the Dead stood around, not particularly familiar with the band they would follow, the Who, or the band that would follow them, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Weir knew Hendrix could play, because he was the black guy he’d jammed with at the Guild tent the day before. Otherwise, they were blissfully ignorant. The Who’s Pete Townshend had followed Hendrix before, and he didn’t care to repeat the experience, so John Phillips flipped a coin, and the Who went on first. It was only the Who’s second American performance, and while they’d had success in England, they hadn’t really hit in the United States. Though they were closely identified with the mods, an English youth social group that was central to Swinging London, they’d come through much the same material as the Dead, blues like “Big Boss Man” and “Smokestack Lightning.” In personality and performance, they were miles apart. Sometime before, they’d been playing in a low-ceilinged room when Townshend took one of his trademark leaps and broke his guitar neck against the ceiling. It became part of the act.

At Monterey they followed a strong but poorly received set with high theater. As smoke bombs went off, Townshend rubbed his guitar against the mike stand, then smashed it repeatedly until he stabbed the amp with the neck. Keith Moon kicked over his bass drum, sound techs ran to rescue microphones, and the audience went crazy. Standing at the side of the stage with Florence, Lesh muttered, “We have to follow this?” Kreutzmann threw up and became convinced his hand was frozen. In the melee, Weir grabbed the neck of Pete’s guitar, briefly thinking to give it to Sue Swanson, then gave it up to a member of the Who’s crew. Garcia thought the choreography of the destruction was beautiful, but he knew that following it was going to be hell.

“You know what foldin’ chairs are for,” drawled Weir as they hit the stage. “They’re for folding up and dancin’ on.” It was a good opening line, and deeper than the usual showbiz work-the-crowd throwaway. It revealed a fundamentally different philosophy of performance. The Dead really
were
a dance band, and “felt that we weren’t there to put on a show,” as Weir said later. “We were there to play, and the people were there to put on the show.” Following the Who’s destructo-derby with good but untheatrical music was almost impossible. They were also trying to follow an epic moment with several handicaps. Because of the theft, Phil was playing on a backup instrument, and since it was a festival situation, they had no time to warm up together onstage. With the cameras pointing down to the floor, the Dead opened with “Viola Lee Blues,” and people began to dance, first on the stage, then out in the audience. Adler personally moved to clear the dancers from the stage, while ushers did the same out in the house. It was exactly the sort of thing the Dead didn’t like, and there was more. Imaginary Beatle sightings had been floating around the fairgrounds since Friday, and now kids on the concourse were trying to sneak in, both to see stars and to hear the music. Adler sent out Peter Tork, one of the Monkees, a faux television band that lip-synched rather good pop material, to talk to the audience at a moment between songs. “People,” Tork said, “this is me again. I hate to cut things down like this, but, uh, there’s a crowd of kids . . . um, these kids are like crowding over the walls and trying to break down doors and everything, thinking the Beatles are here.”

Phil Lesh was full up with the situation. Tork was annoying, but the audience was more his concern. “This is the last concert,” Lesh barked. “Why not let them in anyway?” The audience clearly sided with Lesh, and Tork limped away. The doors opened, kids filled the back of the space, and the Dead played a set that contained what at least one critic would declare the best guitar playing of the weekend. As though anyone would ever remember it.