It was the first festivaI of its kind.
The first pop festivaI
that brought alI different types of music together.
There had been jazz festivals, bIues festivals,
and foIk festivals.
There reaIly hadn't been a rock festival.
lt seemed like the time to give something back to music.
So we tried to find the most talented people who hadn't been exposed.
The theme of the Monterey Pop festival
was music, love and flowers, or something like that.
It was to show that music, love and flowers
could transcend anything and conquer the world.
Monterey was the launching pad for Jimi in America.
Most people there, l'd say 99% ,
did not know who the heck
Jimi Hendrix and the Experience were.
Well, it was like probably the most important gig
in Jimi Hendrix's career.
And that made the band in America.
Less than a year
before Jimi pIayed Monterey,
he was playing an unknown in Greenwich Village
when he was spotted by Chas Chandler,
who was the bass player in the Animals,
and was looking for his first venture into managing a band.
l'd been out with a girlfriend of mine,
and she played me a recording by Tim Rose of "Hey Joe."
And l said I'm going to, at the end of this tour,
l'm going to go back and find an artist to record this song with.
We were in New York, of course.
Linda Keith, who was, l believe,
Keith Richard's girlfriend at the time, or was his girlfriend
had asked Chas to go along and see this, this guy sing.
And she said he was, uh...
she felt he was going to be the new thing.
And so Chas, of course, went.
I saw him in Cafe Wha?
And the very first song he played was "Hey Joe."
I knew the only thing I wanted to do was take this guy to England.
l thought he would change the music face of England,
if not the world.
I knew he was going to be a sensation in England.
I first heard about Jimi Hendrix
when l was at Melody Maker
and my old friend, Chas Chandler
who was formerly the bass player with the Animals,
rang me up and said, "Chris, you've got to come and see
this fantastic new guitar player."
And he was telling me all about Jimi Hendrix
who he had just brought over to England from New York.
The first flat we had was... belonged to Ringo Starr,
'cause Ringo had let...
it was again, it was the old pals act,
you know, all the bands and that there.
AlI we did was music, you know?
We'd go to a gig, we'd come back, he'd be writing a song.
We'd be picking on it.
Pick a song to pieces just in our flat, you know?
It was a very exciting time to be in London in 1 966,
because not onIy were there lots of venues for bands to play at,
there were also what were called "The ln Clubs,"
which were nightclubs where people went after hours
to drink and chat, where the industry sort of met.
Chas was kind of smart in the sense
when he first brought him to England,
that's what he did.
He just took him around to those clubs.
That's where l first saw Hendrix.
He got up and started
jamming with this band, and it was, um...
It was, like, "Uh-oh,
I think I should take up another instrument."
He was just amazing.
It's 1 966.
Kit Lambert and myself were partners.
We were young fiImmakers.
We'd begun with The Who
and we were very involved in the whole sort of
rock and roll sort of thing that was happening.
And there were, like, two clubs, three clubs at that time
that you went to after the gigs, that sort of thing.
We were at one of them.
Chas came in with this guy and, you know, from word go,
when he started to perform, we were just totally enamored.
We knew Chas and we said, "Can we produce him?
We'd Iove to produce him."
And Chas said, "l'm going to produce him."
We said, "Has he got a record label?"
And of course he didn't have a record label,
so we immediately, you know, created--
got into the machinations of creating the record label because of Jimi.
And we sat at the table
and literally did a deal on a beer mat
for Jimi to be on Track Records.
We didn't even have a band in that day.
Noel and Mitch weren't there yet.
And then we had a jam session, um, at one club in England,
you know, and that's how Mitch, Noel, and l got together.
Right now l'd like to introduce the cats in the group.
That's Noel Redding playing bass.
Hello.
And Mitch Mitchell playing drums.
Good evening.
Noel comes down, expecting to play guitar, you know.
He was trying for The AnimaIs.
So l dug his hairstyIe, so... l asked him to play bass.
We're going back to what, September '66,
when l actually went to do an audition
as a guitar player for Eric Burdon and the new Animals,
'cause The Animals had broken up,
and at which point Chas, he said can l play bass?
I said, "No, but l'll give it a go,"
and l was handed this bass. We played three tunes.
This American gentleman said, "Do you want to join my group?"
And that was it.
l got a phone call from Chas Chandler.
"Hey, l got this guy coming over from America.
Do you fancy having a play with him?"
And he was the first person l knew, ever heard,
that knew how to pIay
that Curtis Mayfield style of guitar
and also, "You want Wes Montgomery?"
Without being a fIesh git.
I remember the first gig we did in England.
They just stood there with their mouths open,
so l said to myself, "Damn, what happened, you know?
Did we, did we do good or what, you know?"
And then we started doing
what we caIled "the club scene" in London.
And then suddenly we noticed we were filling the place.
And then suddenly you'd see John Lennon in the corner
or McCartney or BiIl Wyman.
There was definitely a time period where--
what was London up to?
It was tracking Jimi Hendrix.
Nobody had much time off then,
but what were they doing when they had time off?
They were tracking Jimi Hendrix.
The reason he took off so quickly in England
was because of The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.
The Beatles and the Stones would go
to see Jimi play anywhere,
especially in the West End of London.
They'd talk about him in interviews, say this guy was--
"You've got to go to see Jimi Hendrix."
I'd put another thousand on the door the next day
when Mick Jagger or John Lennon or Paul McCartney was saying,
"This guy is great."
We had been tipped off, actually by John Lennon.
He said, "You've got to come and see this guy."
He had been signed for Europe
and the rest of the world, actually, and the U.K.,
and all that was open was North America.
And so we grabbed what we could
and we signed him for North America.
As we started in '66,
things happened so... darn... quickly.
And it was just great because we went out at gigs,
worked on songs, went in the studio, partied.
It was just great.
The whole direction was just on making it a success.
It was like a jigsaw. You could see the pieces coming together.
First of all, there was the hit single "Hey Joe,"
and then came "Purple Haze,"
which established him as a singer/songwriter/guitarist.
You know, the complete works.
He was accepted by the British audience
with a reverence that happened with The Beatles.
That happened with him.
You know, he was loved in England immediately,
you know, and really appreciated as the great artist that he was.
Chas now had to sort of, like, move towards the next stage,
and the next stage was obviously to break America.
Well, "Hey Joe" was played in the predictable places--
the FM stations.
Very few AM Top 40 stations would take a chance with it.
It was so off the beaten track.
They were struggling to get a foot in the door in America.
You know, they were struggling to get records played
and they were struggling to get that kind of attention.
But what they did have
was the word within the business.
They had the Beatles, um, accreditation.
The Beatles had given them their blessing, so to speak.
If my memory serves me, he got a phone call--
Paul McCartney had something to do with it,
but l know he got a phone call from The Mamas and The Papas,
asking if he wanted to be...
They were going to do this California pop festival
and did he want to be part of it?
He said yes, of course.
It was intended as a fabulous summer event
by the man who thought of it, a man called Alan Pariser,
who went to a promoter called Benny Shapiro.
They came to me one morning and said they had
a wonderful idea to do a pop festival in Monterey
where the jazz festivals had been.
A fellow calIed me
and he said that he had been to the Monterey Fairgrounds
and he wanted to put a 1 2-hour show on from noon to midnight
and he wanted us to close the show.
He offered us a huge sum of money to do it, so...
And so, I said l'd let him know the next day
and l thought it over and l woke up in the middle of the night
and l thought, "You know, wouldn't it be great
if we made it like a three-day thing?"
And so l called Lou Adler in the middle of the night
and he said, "Yeah, great idea, good-bye,"
and hung up.
Next morning, he caIled me back and said, "That's a great idea."
They had some good acts,
a couple of San Francisco acts, a couple of blues acts.
They didn't have anyone really to draw people in,
so they wanted to hire The Mamas and The Papas.
But if anyone was going to run this thing, it was going to be John Phillips,
Michelle PhilIips, and Lou Adler.
They co-opted the idea of the pop festival,
made it a voluntary thing for charity,
aced out Benny Shapiro,
aIlowed Alan Pariser to be a co-producer.
I was to be press officer.
It was at that point
that the transition started to take place,
to make it more than one day,
to make it three days, to hire a lot more groups.
So the concept was changed by John and Lou.
Since there had never really been
a pop festivaI or a rock festival before,
they were kind of flying by the seat of their pants.
Now the number one thing that l noticed here is
that there's no clearly defined areas of responsibility
that one can just know... Charlie's taking care of that,
or so-and-so is taking care of that.
That's not true at alI, man.
Then if there are these areas of responsibility,
may l suggest, may l suggest, that we go around,
and the guy who's in charge of so and so,
say, "l'm in charge of art.
We are ten hours away from completion."
"l'm in charge of security, where this...
So when the citizens
learned Monterey was to be the scene
of the first annual international pop festival,
they were somewhat less than overjoyed.
I think our position, primarily, was that the pop festival
was brought in here without the people of the town
realIy knowing what it was.
It bothers a certain segment of our population without a doubt,
but to me, more frightening than the type of people
is the sheer numbers
that we're going to, that we expect to get.
But they were very clever in the way that they put it together
and the way that they presented it.
They convinced
the city council that there would be no drugs.
That, you know, hippies were the most peaceful
and wonderful people in the world,
and that, a, a crowd of 200,000
was not going to affect affect the town of Monterey,
which is about this big.
The truth is that the more people that they got involved,
the more it started to snowball into a reality.
The Mamas and Papas said
Why don't you give all the money to charity
and we'lI work for nothing?
So we said okay, so Simon and Garfunkel
agreed to work for nothing as well.
Then everyone foIlowed.
The first acts we had on were obviously the Mamas and Papas.
We figured they can close one night.
Simon and Garfunkel, we thought, that's another night.
We got Otis Redding,
and those were to be the three headliners,
and then we started to fill in with those acts
that represented
all the different kinds of pop music at that time.
Everyone was encouraged
to submit names that they thought would be interesting.
Everybody was part of the committee.
There were some that were very active. Andrew Oldham obviously
was very active and whenever we thought
about the European acts or the English acts,
we went to Andrew, we went to McCartney.
You know, "Who do you think we should go after?"
And it was all logical. l mean, you couldn't...
It was The Who and Jimi Hendrix.
And either John or Lou said that's funny,
that's exactly what Paul McCartney said.
Everybody in the office was quite excited
and everybody wanted to have this little trip to California,
because, up until that point, we'd just tour Bristol,
as they say, and Manchester, Birmingham, so, wow.
California, here we come.
There was no major plan, just, you know...
Jimi was an American
and naturally an American wants to be big in America,
so we just went there.
Well, we realized when we saw
the lineup of talent from Monterey,
this would be a marvelous venue for him,
to debut his American experience.
For Jimi, it was his coming out party.
The idea of going to America,
especially the West Coast...
l'd just got this flavor of West Coast America,
and it lived up to my expectations and way beyond.
I'm seeing, like, young girls, young ladies, putting roses
in policemen's, like, heImets...
I haven't seen anything like that
before or since.
It was so well organized and controlled
in the sense that everyone who paid to get in had a seat,
and then there was the outer fairground
at Monterey where you could just wander around
and enjoy the music.
There was no mud, and there was no trouble with lavatories
or bad drugs or being ripped off
or not being able to park anywhere.
A lot of people who were at the festival were smoking dope
and a lot of people were taking LSD
and putting on a wonderful three-day event.
When I showed up on Friday morning,
there were television from Europe,
from every major channeI.
Unheard of. It just...
It just blew our minds, the coverage we were about to get.
It was just amazing.
We couldn't believe that it
had all come together in such a wonderful,
and, you know, l don't think we knew at the moment,
but in such a historic way.
We had no trouble with the police, no trouble with the fire,
no trouble with traffic.
The place sold out
and the bands did appear for nothing.
It's one of those magical things that happens,
and l don't know if it ever happens again.
I hope it does.
Because, um, from a musician and an audience
and the tone of Monterey, it just came out perfect.
Everyone wanted to be the best they could
for their fellow musicians.
It it wasn't for the $1 0,000 fee or this or that or something.
You know, it was just a matter of pride.
The audience was making a transition from, uh...
going to pop concerts
to something much closer to a jazz concert.
They were, uh,
in most cases, not listening to a record,
but were listening
to a musical performance by the artist,
and not wanting to miss any part of it.
One of the greatest things
was all the band's meeting backstage.
I mean, there were tabIes
and snack places set up backstage,
and you'd see aIl these people
sitting and getting to know each other.
The atmosphere, and people hung out.
It allowed the acts who may have heard about somebody
and hadn't seen them, and certainly hadn't
sat at the same table and talked.
And I think it made more of a community out of the artists,
or put them into a community
as opposed to just independent acts.
One of my most vivid memories of Monterey
was the first day we were there,
and walking down the midway and there was Brian Jones.
And to see Brian Jones there in his cape walking around,
was just like, you know, somebody
from Mount Olympus had stepped onto, uh...
stepped into our town.
Brian Jones was with us
aIl the way through from the English flight.
He was a great friend of Jimi's and ours.
And of course, he was introducing us.
And there was this rumor that there was this
very exciting new artist coming out,
but nobody had heard of him, nobody knew anything about him.
During the course of the festival,
his name came up in various contexts.
I remember, l think, David Crosby of the Byrds
had mentioned him in passing, during,
you know, something between songs.
Some of the musicians that had traveled
between England and the U.S.,
um, some of them were aware of both Hendrix and The Who.
Jimi and The Who knew each other from England.
They pretty much knew what kind of act they were doing.
l don't know if they had played shows together,
but obviously they knew that it was going to take a lot
to top the other act once that act had been on stage.
The Who and Jimi were determined to outdo each other.
And l'm not really sure who really won.
There was some conflict
about whether The Who should follow us
or should we follow The Who.
We said, "We don't care."
We couldn't really decide.
I said to Jimi, l said, "Fuck it, man,
we're not going to follow you on."
So he said, "l'm not going to follow you on."
So I said, "Listen, we are not going to follow you on
"and that is it.
"You know, as far as l'm concerned, you know,
"we're ready to go on now.
Our gig is going to be there, that's the end of it," you know.
And there was a certain look up in his eye,
and he got on a chair
and he played some amazing guitar,
just standing on the chair in the dressing room.
Janice Joplin was there, Brian Jones, Eric and me,
and a few other people just standing around.
And then he got down off the chair and just said,
turned around to me and just said,
"If l'm going to follow you, l'm going to pull all the stops."
And now the next act
is one of the hottest bands from England.
It's Iead by an American, Jimi Hendrix.
It felt okay.
The time of the evening,
the time of everything.
I mean, you know, the adrenaline was definitely pumping.
And here to introduce him,
he's come all the way out from London,
is Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones!
Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Jones!
I'd like to introduce a very good friend,
a fellow countryman of yours.
The prettiest this performer,
the most exciting guitarist l've ever heard,
The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Yeah, baby, good lovin'.
Yeah, what's happening, brother?
Here's something else we got a little thing called "Foxy Lady."
My fingers wiIl move as you see,
you don't hear no sound, that you hear, but dig this.
Hey, brothers and soul, hey, baby, what's happening?
Dig, I tell you what, let's get down to business.
All right, just give me one second to get down to business.
I don't want y'all to think, aw, you know...
I've got to keep people honest. Dig this.
Yeah, dig, brother, um...
lt's really out of sight here. Didn't even rain, no buttons to push.
Right now l'd like to dedicate this song to everybody here
with hearts, any kind of hearts and ears.
It goes something like this here.
Yeah!
Yeah, what I say now?
Hey!
Yes, so as I said before, it's really groovy.
I'm about to bore you for about six or seven minutes,
to do a little thing, you know.
Yeah.
You'll have to excuse me for a minute. Just let me play my guitar, all right?
Right now l want to do a little thing by Bob Dylan.
That's his grandma over there.
It's a little thing called "Like a Rolling Stone."
Yes, l know, I missed a verse, don't worry.
Thank you very much.
Dig this. They got a little tune running around named,
"Rock Me, Baby," you know.
And aIl this kind of...
Yeah.
We got our own little "Rock Me, Baby" and it goes something like this here.
The words might be wrong but that's all right.
Dig this anyway.
Thank you.
Right now we've got a song named "The Wind Cries Mary."
Gotta keep going real quick.
Thank you very much.
This is something else, man. lt isn't no big story about,
we couldn't make it here, so we go to England
and America doesn't Iike us because, you know, our feets too big
and we got fat mattresses and we wear golden underwear.
Ain't no scene like that, brother. You know, it's just--
Dig, man, just, you know, Iater on,
went to England, picked up these two cats,
and now here we are, man.
It was so, you know, groovy to come back here this way
and really get a chance to really play.
l can sit up here all night and say thank you, you know, but...
I just wish l could just grab you, man, and just, ooh...
One of them things, man, you know, one of them scenes,
but dig, I just can't do that, so...
so I'm gonna sacrifice something right here that l really love.
Thank you very much, Bob Dylan's grandmother.
Anyway, I'm going to sacrifice something that l really love, man.
Don't think l'm silly doing this, 'cause l'm not,
I don't think l'm losing my mind.
Last night, man, ooh, God.
But anyway, wait a minute. Honestly, wait...
Anyway, man.
But today l think is everything all right, you know, so...
l'm not losing my mind. This is for everybody here.
This is the only way l can do it, you know.
So we're going to do the English and American combined anthem together.
Don't get mad.
l want everybody to join in, too.
Now don't get mad. This is it, man.
There's nothing l can do more than this.
Look at those beautiful people.
Come on, man! Come on, sing it with me!
Come on!
Jimi Hendrix!
I was in the audience,
but I was shocked.
I had never seen anything like this in my life.
There was pandemonium, absolute pandemonium.
People were running through--
running up and down the aisles, yelling.
Just, and this sheer excitement of this thing,
people were going nuts and l was one of them.
And l remember thinking at the time
that l had seen history in the making.
Monterey proved to all the music critics that were there
that this was something special, this guy.
You know, and they'd better keep an eye on him
and what he was going to do next.
And l had phone calls up in Monterey
from people in New York who said, "What was that?
We heard about it, people called us."
So that was a big bounce for him,
and it didn't stop after that.
At that point, we knew,
"This is big and everyone realizes it."
It was a 40-minute spot. Yeah, 40-minute spot.
Maybe 45-minute spot.
Hey, the right place, the right time.
One of those darn lucky things, eh?
lt was such a good feeIing, especially in your own home country.
And l guess they feel the same way.
Jimi was an American.
He didn't want to live all his life in England.
The minute things started happening in America,
he naturally wanted to be in his home country.
You know, he was an American.