MEMORIES OF "MONTEREY POP"

I thought I would look at something in the collection of stuff I have recorded now that I have this humongous (to me anyway) 50-inch big screen TV while I was eating lunch, having finally gotten through clearing all the quotes that will show up in “Turning the Tide” to satisfy the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act. I scrolled through what was there and realized that TCM had put on “Monterey Pop” this past week and I had recorded it. So I decided to watch it.

I haven’t watched the movie since around 1988, when Z Channel broadcast it here. I have a funny relationship with this movie. You see, I was there, and it’s sort of a time check/attitude check for me to watch it and see what it brings up.

I didn’t plan to attend Monterey Pop. I didn’t even know it was happening until I got to Redondo Beach, where my old college roommate Richard had set up his pot-dealing business - which I was unaware he had done until I got there, and it turned out we were lucky we split when we did to go see the show, since that was the weekend the Redondo PD finally decided to nab him.

Richard was one guy who definitely Did. Not. Fit. at Colorado State College (now the University of Northern California), the nation’s second best teacher training institute (they told you this all the time) after Columbia Teacher’s College. He w from back east and in September 1965 he arrived with his blond hair at least several inches past his ear lobe. As it turned out we got along great because I was in the process of not getting hair cuts now that I was out of the Navy, and kind of looked like the early Beatles on their first album cover. As the only Vietnam veteran on campus (as it turned out, on any campus in the state that year), people were already giving me “my space,” and Richard fit right into the gap, sort of like a cyclist “drafting” behind an 18-wheeler. He also arrived driving a Triumph TR-3, which also Did. Not. Fit. Colorado driving conditions. At all.

Come the end of Spring Quarter, he announced he was quitting. I tried to convince him to at least do finals and drop out formally since there was no reason to bomb the abutments to the bridge on departing, but he pointed out he had only been in class maybe half time that quarter, so he threw everything in the TR-3 and headed south on US 85, headed for Los Angeles.

A year later, I was less certain of many things than I had been the year before, but I was definitely certain that no one was ever going to hire me as a public school teacher. My questions about why I had hated hated hated 12 years of public miseducation had been answered in Winter Quarter when I broke down and took the introductory Educational Psychology course. I didn’t know anything about psychology, but I soon decided that rote memorization of the professor’s monumental opus - since the tests were “fill in the blanks” sentences from the book - was not the way the subject should be taught. That and finally being in class with nothing but education majors and seeing what they made teachers out of and how they did it answered all my questions about my 12 years of torture. (That year, I worked for the school Public Relations Department part-time, and had seen a survey that revealed the average student entered with a “C” average from high school, that the majority were the first person in their family to go to college, and that for three-fourths of them, the school had not been on their top three choices of places they wanted to go to be higher educated. “You can always teach,” in the flesh.)

Unlike Richard, I did stay for finals and got good grades and then formally dropped out, since you never know, maybe you’ll need this alternative (which as it turned out after I got fired from Rolling Stone four years later and went into a slump, I did need, following my then-wife’s admonition that I was over-educated for anything I could get and under-educated for anything I would want to do). So I hopped into the ‘56 Chevy Bel Air I had bought for $50 six months earlier, and took the same route Richard had. I had a letter from him three months old that he was living just off the beach in Redondo Beach so there was where I was headed. I had no idea what it was I wanted to do, but - like all other important life decisions I have made - my action sprang from the knowledge I definitely didn’t want to do THAT.

When I got there, Richard informed me that there was this “bodacious show” going to happen in Monterey and wow it’s a good thing you have this car, we can all go in it. Being flush with drug cash, he told me my expenses were “on the house” for providing the car. And so we pulled out the next morning, as it turned out, Just. In. Time.

Watching the movie 56 years later - FIFTY-six years LATER, fifty-SIX freaking YEARS LATER!!! - several things stand out and tweak my memories.

If you watch it, about 40 minutes in there is this shot of a guy with blond hair almost to his shoulders, drinking a large cup of coffee on the far side of a fire that was started to take off the foggy morning chill, looking like something the cat dragged in. That’s Richard. Pennebaker’s cameraman is standing right next to me as I also drink a large cup of black coffee from a paper cup, fortunately off-screen since I very definitely did look like something the cat dragged in after the previous night. That was the morning one of Richard’s friends in Redondo arrived and told him of the events of the night following our early morning departure. Whatever we were doing, we weren’t going back to Redondo.

The first thing I noticed watching it this time is how so many people - including many of the performers - looked so straight. Short hair. Button-down shirts. The people for whom “The Sixties” started in 1966 or so. And less than half the audience looks like anything approaching full-blown hippiedom. (You have to remember that The Sixties everyone claims they remember didn’t really start until around early 1964. Unless you were living in Greenwich Village in New York.)

There are three performances that stand out. Janice Joplin. Otis Redding. Jimi Hendrix. For all three of them, the performance you see on the screen is literally the moment they became the people who you remember, right there in front of everyone. The performances were star-making, and 56 FREAKING years LATER, they still come across with that raw energy that stood up and smacked everyone in the audience with a smack they wouldn’t forget.

This time I noted how much time Pennebaker gave the shots of Mama Cass in the audience, watching Janice, with her mouth hanging open - Jeezus H. Christ! Will you look at her! What the Fu-u-u-u-u....????!!! - and then when the performance is finished the film cuts back to her telling everyone around her, “That was fucking GREAT!!!” And while there’s no sound, you have no trouble lip-reading. And she was right. It was fucking great. Nobody ever did “Ball and Chain” like that ever again. Not even Janice.

And Otis Redding. Man, that cat was just soooo cool. He was having so much fun and everyone got infected with his fun. And his version of “I’ve been loving you (a bit too long)” still sends a chill up my spine.

Hendrix. I was sitting in that audience probably looking exactly like everyone they put on screen for reaction shots. Ho-lee Fuuuuuuuuuu!!!! WHAT is THAT??????!!!

I got to see Hendrix two other times and had the same reaction both times that I had the first time. In the 56 FREAKING YEARS since that performance, there has been NOBODY who has even come close to him. Playing his guitar behind his back and not missing a beat. Humping the speaker behind him to give a solo of feedback like no one had ever heard before, and then lighting the Stratocaster on fire. Nobody told him that the Who - who he was copying after they destroyed the stage on completion of “My Generation” - did that as an act, that they had breakaway instruments. But by God Hendrix actually manages to destroy a Stratocaster. Many musicians I have known since say that’s physically impossible, but there he is, throwing the neck - the only thing left - into the audience. I wonder if the person who caught it kept it.

The three of them became stars in front of us. As it turned out, they were shooting stars. Redding was gone a year later and Janice and Jimi left within a month of each other three years later. Nobody’s ever filled those shoes.

Interestingly, while standing in line for food from Kesey’s Merry Pranksters that afternoon, I started talking to the guy beside me. It turned out he was from San Francisco and had money from selling his wife’s play and was going to start a better underground paper than the Berkeley Barb. When I told him I’d been writing for my college paper and people had liked what I did, he said come on up and give me a call when you get there. And he wrote down his name and phone number on a scrap paper that was blowing around, and that was how I met Marvin Garson and ended up writing for the San Francisco Express-Times, my first paid (not much but it was enough) writing gig.

Richard’s girlfriend had run across a girlfriend of hers who had driven her car to the show so they had a way back to LA, and the girlfriend of the girlfriend didn’t live anywhere near Redondo, so that was all cool. Richard even laid $100 on me to get to San Francisco, telling me “Everybody liked that stuff you used to write, go do it.” With the usual push I need, I got to my future with the benefit of a drug dealer’s gift. It’s funny, how I seem to have tripped and fallen into just about every good thing that ever happened to me.

And the end of Monterey Pop was the last time I ever saw Richard, except whenever I watch this movie.

As it ended up, I got to know most of those people up on stage, from writing about them at the Express-Times and then at Rolling Stone.

Thirty years ago, I was in The Derby, at the time a very happening “swing music” club in Los Feliz (If you ever watched “Swingers,” it’s the club Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn hung out at, where the great dancd routine was filmed.) And lo and behold, Mama Michele was there that night (it was that kind of place) and we ended up talking at the bar and she remembered me from Rolling Stone after I mentioned it, and asked me if I’d take her out on the dance floor, since nobody else had the courage to ask. We did, and she could boogie.

So there is a lot of “formative history” to be seen in “Monterey Pop.” For the people on the screen and some of us who were there.

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