If there was ever an event which succinctly captured all the energy, innovation, and cultural rebellion of the 1960s, it was the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Still, the ‘peace and love’ manifesto of the gig didn’t always reach the event themselves.
It was back in the 1950s that rock and roll arrived on the musical mainstream, birthing youth culture and planting the seeds of rebellion for multiple generations. However, it was during the following decade that those seeds sprouted into widespread political, artistic, and cultural dissent. From The Beatles’ experiments with LSD to profound political commentary of Nina Simone, the music scene of the decade was vastly diverse, but always tended to maintain an innovative, revolutionary streak.
Monterey Pop Festival was the defining moment of that revolution – when this new generation of artists stormed the Winter Palace and instated a new mandate for rock and roll expression. The line-up of the California event reads like a who’s-who of iconic musicians, including everybody from Otis Redding to Jimi Hendrix. However, the gig was particularly important in popularising the defining sound of the hippie counterculture: psychedelic rock.
The inspirational power of LSD spread far and wide during the mid-1960s, but San Francisco seemed to be the base of America’s greatest acid rock outfits, with Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead leading up the charge. Not far behind those two, Big Brother and the Holding Company were also making waves in the world of psychedelic counterculture, with the distinctive, era-defining tones of Janis Joplin forming the bulk of their appeal.
All three of those groups performed over the course of the Monterey Pop Festival, but Big Brother didn’t come off quite as well as their Bay Area comrades. Originally, the group took to the stage on Saturday afternoon, in between Canned Heat and Country Joe and the Fish. However, the entire festival was being filmed by D A Pennebaker, which didn’t sit well with Big Brother’s staunchly anti-establishment manager Jules Karpen.
Karpen ordered the organisers not to film Big Brother and the Holding Company’s set, which quickly turned out to be an incredibly flawed decision. Thanks to the blues-tinged vocals of Joplin, and the expansive psychedelic mastery of the group’s instrumentation, their set was one of the stand-out moments of Saturday afternoon at Monterey, and the manager had lost them a colossal chance for publicity by refusing for them to be filmed.
Cap in hand, the manager begged the organisers to squeeze Big Brother in for another slot, and they managed to land a short three-song set on Sunday night. That performance – caught on film – turned into a real turning point, especially for Janis Joplin, whose powerhouse vocals finally hit a wider audience. But away from the stage, Joplin was already plotting her break from the band.
Perhaps as a result of Karpen’s catastrophic mismanagement, Joplin quietly recruited Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager, to work with the band, which essentially spelled the beginning of the end for the psychedelic outfit. A few short months later, Joplin severed herself off from the San Francisco psychedelic masters, embarking upon a truly legendary solo career which would elevate her to the upper echelon of American rock.
So, even if Big Brother and the Holding Company boasted one of the greatest performances of the greatest music festival in history, they certainly didn’t leave Monterey unscathed.
