Gould Jonathan - Otis Redding: an unfinished life

I was pretty sure that Id seen God onstage.

BOB WEIR

L ate on the evening of June 18, 1967, as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, the San Franciscobased rock group known as the Jefferson Airplane concluded their forty-minute set to rousing applause from the 7,500 fans who filled the fairgrounds arena in the resort town of Monterey, California, on the second night of an event billed as the First International Pop Festival. The Airplane were local heroes to the crowd at Monterey, many of whom lived in the Bay Area and had followed the bands career from its inception in 1965. Along with other whimsically named groups like the Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, they had gotten their start in the folk coffeehouses and rock ballrooms of the Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood on the eastern edge of San Franciscos Golden Gate Park whose recent emergence as a bohemian enclave had captured the imagination of young people across America. During the first half of 1967, a series of sensationalistic articles had appeared in newspapers and national magazines describing this self-styled psychedelic city-state and the long-haired, hedonistic hippies who populated it. This rash of publicity had inspired tens of thousands of footloose college students, college dropouts, teenaged runaways, and flower children of all ages to converge on San Francisco in anticipation of an idyllic Summer of Love.

The Monterey Pop Festival was timed to coincide with the start of that summer. The idea for the festival had originated a few months before as a gleam in the eye of a neophyte Los Angeles promoter named Alan Pariser, who envisioned it as a pop-oriented version of the seaside jazz and folk festivals at Newport and Monterey that had served as a fashionable form of summertime entertainment since the 1950s. After booking the fairgrounds and enlisting a well-connected Hollywood Brit named Derek Taylor (who had previously worked for the Beatles) as their publicist, Pariser and his partner, a talent agent named Ben Shapiro, approached the Los Angeles folk-rock group The Mamas and the Papas with the intent of hiring them as headliners. The groups leader, John Phillips, and their producer, Lou Adler, responded with a vision of their own. They proposed expanding the size and scope of the festival and using it to showcase the explosion of creative energy that had enveloped the world of popular music in the three years since the arrival of the Beatles in America in 1964. They also proposed staging the festival on a nonprofit basis, with the performers donating their services and the proceeds going to charity.

When Shapiro balked at this idea, Phillips and Adler bought out his interest and formed a new partnership with Pariser. They then set out to assemble a roster of some thirty acts, enough to fill three nights and two days of music. Toward this end, they established a tony-sounding board of governors that included such prominent pop stars as Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Smokey Robinson, and Brian Wilson. Though none of these luminaries actually attended or performed, they gave the festival enough cachet to ensure that most of the artists the promoters contacted accepted their invitation to appear. In the deft hands of Derek Taylor, the advance publicity for the festival also attracted some twelve hundred loosely credentialed representatives of the press, as well as enough agents, managers, and record company executives to lend the proceedings the feeling of an open-air music business trade fair.

Phillips and Adler recognized that staging the festival on a nonprofit basis was essential to realizing their more parochial goal, which was to celebrate Californias sudden ascendancy in the world of popular music, with Los Angeles now recognized as the pop recording center of America and San Francisco as the home of the countrys most dynamic underground music scene. (Fully half the acts that performed came from the West Coast, with the balance drawn from points east, including the new pop capital of London.) Yet bridging the gap between the Northern and Southern Californian nodes of musical sensibility was no simple matter, for the two factions approached one another with the suspicion of rival tribes, vying over their respective notions of the California Dream. The music business in Los Angeles was just thata branch of the entertainment industry governed by conventional Hollywood standards of stardom and success. The music scene in San Francisco, by contrast, subscribed to a bohemian ethos whose insularity and self-regard had been supercharged by the grandiosity of the psychedelic drug culture. Bay Area bands that could barely sing or play in tune professed to disdain the commercialism and slick professionalism of their counterparts in L.A. At this point, the music of the Haight-Ashbury was a hodgepodge of strident folk harmonies, impressionistic lyrics, modal improvisation, and sophomoric electric blues. But the purported affinities of this music with the effects of hallucinogenic drugs had earned it the label