Monterey Pop

What Monterey Pop (1968) lacks in sound quality it makes up for in high-power, classic performances. Four performances are the heart of this concert film, produced a year before the more famous Woodstock (1970). First is Janis Joplin, performing "Ball and Chain" with Big Brother and the Holding Company. She reinvents this song. It's doubtful one could recognize her version of the song next to more conventional performances of "Ball and Chain." She croons, screeches, screams, contorts, murmurs. She wholly possesses the song. It's a career-making performance, and the best in the film. Then is Otis Redding with "I've Been Loving You"—this performance less than a year before his death in a plane crash. Redding sings this song straight, pretty much as he does in the recorded version, but in this live performance reminds us of what a powerful and distinctive performer Redding was. Third is Jimi Hendrix and "Wild Thing," a performance that ends with the incineration of his guitar. Although this isn't the best performance of his career, it is a good one, and visually it is hard to exceed—Hendrix is all over the stage, and in complete control of his guitar, which he treats in more ways than one might imagine a guitar could be treated. Finally, there is Ravi Shankar, playing a raga so frenetic, controlled, and powerful that you want to take a cold shower. His music is distinctively different from, and at odds with, the music in the rest of the film, but on some level it's of a piece with the other great performances, all of which show that performing and listening to music is a spiritual exercise.

There are other good performances in the film, especially by Jefferson Airplane and Canned Heat. The Mama and Papas, whose guiding spirit John Phillips had much to do with the staging of the festival, performs twice, and their singing, along with their appearance, reminds us of what a limited phenomenon, locked in a specific cultural time frame, they were.

It's interesting and sad to watch the young people in this film—both in the audience and on stage—and to think that forty years have passed since the 1967 Monterey Pop Festial. Many who appear on stage are dead—Mama Cass, John Phillips, Redding, Joplin, Hendrix—others have simply faded away—some brain damaged by alcoholic or narcotic self-abuse, others simply faded. The people in the audience are now in their 50s and 60s, and if they're anything like me they don't walk with the lightness we see in this film, their faces don't glow with joy and optimism.

Woodstock captured the spirit and self-promoting frenzy of the three-day rock festival that remains the most famous and self-defining moment of the late 60s. It's a much clicker film than this one, and the sound quality is excellent. It's an entertaining film, but it shows us how some of the great acts of the day were already becoming self-parodies—how could anyone see anything but self-parody in Joe Cocker's wonderful performance of "I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends." Perhaps we see notes of self-parody in Monterey Pop too (why it's necessary for both The Who and Jimi Hendrix to destroy their guitars, I don't know), but it offers four great performances the equal of the best in Woodstock. The success of the film owes partially to its director and pop music documentarian D. A. Pennebaker and the excellent photographers with whom he worked.