The new book “A Perfect Haze” reminisces with Monterey Pop Festival founding father and Malibuite Lou Adler about the iconic event that would shape Woodstock and every music festival to come.
by Michael Aushenker / Special to The Malibu Times
More than 40 years ago, a music festival rocked the hippie generation and its influence could be heard around the world. But this was before Woodstock.
In “A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival,” veteran music writers and brothers Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik explore the groundbreaking 1967 event that influenced not only Woodstock but every music festival that has followed. And the story behind the legendary Northern California happening has a local connection.
In 1967, producer Alan Pariser and promoter Ben Shapiro approached longtime Malibu resident Lou Adler, then managing the Mamas and the Papas, and bandmember John Phillips about hiring the group to headline a one-day blues and rock event at the Monterey Fairgrounds. Then Shapiro dropped out, and the concept for the event changed.
“The impetus to stage the Monterey International Pop Festival evolved one night in 1967, at Cass Elliot’s house,” writes Adler, who later produced Carol King’s seminal Album “Tapestry” and the movie “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” in the book’s foreword. “Paul McCartney, John and Michelle Phillips, Cass and I were discussing, along with other highly inspired issues, the general perception of rock n’ roll…”
Adler and the group of musicians put up $10,000 apiece just six weeks before the festival started, and turned it into a three-day, nonprofit event. From June 16-18, 1967, 32 acts played, culminating with unforgettable performances by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and The Who. Otis Redding, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Grateful Dead also made appearances.
The coffee table book features pictures and oral histories from people who attended and performed at the Monterey Pop Festival, where the atmosphere very much reflected the hippie movement in the mid-1960s. Booker T. Jones said in the book that “even the Hell’s Angeles [were] being helpful and nice!” Audience member Tom Law recalled sitting around “for a couple of hours at Monterey smoking hash with Jimi Hendrix…It was good hash.”
Kubernik notes that Monterey was the spiritual antecedent of 1969’s Woodstock Festival, save for one exception. “Monterey was done for nonprofit, Woodstock was made for profit,” he said. Proceeds from the Monterey concert supported a plethora of charities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles Free Clinics, and health care for struggling musicians.
Adler writes that Monterey ultimately “laid the template for Live Aid and Farm Aid. At the conclusion of the festival, David Crosby said, ‘I hope the artists know what they have here, the power of it to do good. It’s an international force.’”
Filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film “Monterey Pop” came out soon after the event, spreading its influence to those who didn’t attend the festival themselves.
Coachella Music Festival producer Paul Tollet, who used to book acts for Adler at the Roxy, said the “Monterey Pop” concert film helped inform Coachella’s format. Late Malibuite Dennis Hopper discusses in “Purple Haze” how the concert’s energy informed his classic movie, “Easy Rider.”
Monterey had long ago made an impact on the Kubernik brothers.
“We both saw the ‘Monterey Pop’ movie together in 1969 at the premiere of it as teenagers in Beverly Hills,” Harvey Kubernik said.
Over decades of gestation, Kubernik gathered quotes and information on the festival for various articles. But the decision to write the book came in 2007, when he interviewed Adler for MOJO magazine. Despite missing the festival’s 40th anniversary, the Kuberniks were able to sell publishers on the idea through the use of extensive archives in his music office on the event.
Some book highlights for Kubernik include debunking the myth that singer Laura Nyro (“Poverty Train”) bombed at the festival.
“Her flop at Monterey had been much dramatized,” Kubernik said. “But in talking to Pennebaker, who filmed it, “it wasn’t the disaster set that the media has reported over the past 40 years.”
Kubernik is also “just kind of awed on the impact that Ravi Shankar had on so many people. I had 35 different testimonies on the spell that Shankar had on the audience…as well as members of the Monkees [and other musicians].” In 1968, while editing ‘Monterey Pop,’ “Pennebaker knew he had the end of his movie when he saw Shankar on the film.”