When the First Annual Monterey International Pop Festival was organized by music producer Lou Adler and John Philips, the frontman for the folk-pop band The Mamas & the Papas, there had never been anything like it before. While we now live in an era in which pop/rock festivals are ubiquitous all over the world, there had never been such a gathering prior to the summer of 1967 (which would come to be dubbed the “Summer of Love”). Thus, the Monterey festival was revolutionary not only for the way it established one of the first major stakes in what would become known as “The Sixties,” but it gave credence to the idea that pop music could be art.

The three-day festival, which took place at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in northern California, was filmed by documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, who was initially hired with the idea that his resulting film would be shown on network television. At the time, Pennebaker was a proponent of Direct Cinema, a specific style of documentary filmmaking that privileged the camera’s observational, rather than intrusive, nature. He had already captured part of the era’s zeitgeist with his 1967 Bob Dylan documentary Dont Look Back, but he had never made a concert film before. In fact, prior to Monterey Pop, no one had made a concert film before. Like the festival it recorded, the film became a pioneering work for others to emulate.

Despite its brief 80-minute running time, Monterey Pop indelibly captures the spirit of the festival and also displays some of the most powerful moments of rock music ever captured on film. The simple, quite rhythms of Simon & Garfunkle’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song” (with its soft refrain about “feeling groovy”) stands in stark contrast to The Who’s loud, rebellious anthem “My Generation,” which they conclude by smashing their instruments, an act of violent defiance the crowd was clearly not expecting. The first performance we see is The Mamas & The Papas singing “California Dreamin’,” which might as well be the festival’s theme song, and the last performance we see is Ravi Shankar’s “Raga Bhimpalasi,” whose rapid-fire sitar is a reminder that the word international in the festival’s title means something.

In-between are performances by such ’60s luminaries as Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin (performing with her original group, Big Brother & The Holding Company), and Otis Redding, who was performing in front of a predominantly white audience for the first time and subsequently became an overnight star. The film reaches its climactic moment, though, with Jimi Hendrix’s iconic performance of “Wild Thing,” which begins with his revving the distortion on his electric guitar like a motorcycle engine and ends with him literally making love to the instrument before setting it on fire, a moment that was immortalized as a Rolling Stone cover image. As a result, Hendrix solidified his star status as one of rock music’s most electrifying and original performers.

One of the most intriguing things about the festival, as it is depicted in Monterey Pop, is that it never seems particularly large. It has a tight, intimate quality that even wide shots of large audiences can’t quite dispel. Although records indicate that some 200,000 people attended the festival, after watching the film you would swear there were only a couple thousand there at most. The sense of intimacy is enhanced by Pennebaker’s decision to focus heavily on close-ups and medium close-ups of both the performers and the people in the audience. Monterey Pop frequently plays like a study in faces.

The observational nature of Pennebaker’s Direct Cinema approach has its limitations, though, as we see virtually nothing of the behind-the-scenes activities that made the festival possible (only a brief scene of John Phillips on the phone and some shots of the stage being constructed), and there are no interviews with any of the performers. What were they thinking during this momentous event? Did they know they were making history? Such questions are not answered because Pennebaker never attempts to answer them. Instead, he focuses on the music and lets it speak in its own clear, loud voice.

At its best, Monterey Pop captures a moment that might otherwise have been lost in time. As the apex of the Summer of Love and a moment of unprecedented coalescence for rock music, the festival was a high point of the 1960s, a pinnacle of possibilities that were ultimately, sadly doomed. Within two years of the film’s release in 1968, the Mamas & the Papas had broken up, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix were all dead, and the disastrous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont (captured in the extraordinary 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter) had literally shut the door on the perceived power of peace, love, and happiness. But, for those three days in June of 1967, it was a dream that could be had, and Monterey Pop captures it beautifully.

Copyright © 2017 James Kendrick

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All images copyright © The Criterion Collection