The Monterey Pop Music Festival Represented Free Speech.

Music festivals are a prism to view culture at a certain moment in time when a particular fragment of a civilization has an opportunity to express itself. Music festivals are as old in western culture as the Olympic Games in Greece and have been part of American culture since well before the Pageant of the Patterson Strike in June of 1913. Music festivals, whether rock, country, jazz, or folk, are used by people to express their ideas through song, dance, speech, art, and music that represent their culture, politics, and views of society. One famous festival of the 1960s, The Monterey Pop International Music Festival, represented an idealistic drive for peace, love, and the utopian dream of ultimate freedom. Some of the artists that expressed these ideas were Derek Taylor, Erik von Schmidt, Lou Rawls, Cass Elliot, David Crosby, Steven Stills, Joe McDonald, and Jefferson Airplane.

Monterey Pop began as an expression of a newly growing counterculture that seemingly started in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco and the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. The success of the January 14, 1967 so-called Human Be-in at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and a rock concert held on June 10–11 at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California were the inspiration for the festival that was held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California on June 16, 17, and 18. Approximately 200,000 people attended Monterey Pop filled with “Music, Love, and Flowers” that expressed the new counterculture, launched several successful rock careers and funded various music education causes such as the Harlem Musical Instruction program, San Francisco Free Clinics, the Sam Cooke Scholarship, Los Angeles Public Television, the San Francisco Earthquake Relief Fund, Romanian Angel Relief, and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. “It was a time of enormous optimism,” remembered Derek Taylor, the festival's publicist. “We were going to change the world by smoking marijuana and taking LSD. There would be no more wars, and we would celebrate this by getting all these peaceful people to Monterey, as audience and as artist.” According to Eric von Schmidt, “The Monterey Pop festival was the first union of what was becoming the new American pop music.”

Lou Rawls, whose music was heard in the Friday evening program, was very aware of the political and social importance of the festival.

The people at Monterey Pop were not only rock'n'rollers, but they were also socially conscious and politically aware musicians. They were the people that made the world become aware of exactly what was going on; be it radical, political, or environmental. Monterey Pop was like a forum, a stage, a place where they could speak their piece, say what they had to say, and the message would get across. You could equate it to a seminar. People were not only there for the music, but also for the commentary being made through the music.   

 Many of these musicians believed in the same social philosophy. “If you are in a position of influence, you should do something about it,” said Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. “Not necessarily inflict your opinion on other people, but if you really think you're right, you should tell it.” David Crosby also felt that the music festival was very important to the counterculture's expression of their values. “What happened at Monterey was the flowering of an entirely different set of values.” Crosby explained, “We were just blowing ourselves loose from the fifties and had a whole different entire value system... one that values life and creativity and freedom and equality and civil rights....” One anonymous hippie commented to an interviewer: “We struggle in our own humble way to destroy the United States.” This counterculture revolution was defined by Warren Hinckle for readers of Ramparts magazine in 1967.

Hippies have a clear vision of the ideal community... communal life, drastic restriction of private property, rejection of violence, creativity before consumption, freedom before authority, (and the) de-emphasis of government and traditional forms of leadership.  

The political messages expressed at Monterey Pop challenged the contemporary thinking in the United States. David Crosby of the Byrds made a very strong statement of political protest about the Kennedy assassination at the Monterey Pop Festival when he introduced a song called “He Was a Friend Of Mine.” Crosby began by commenting that the festival was being filmed and his statements would probably be censored. He continued:

When President Kennedy was killed, he was not killed by one man. He was shot from a number of different directions by different guns. The story has been suppressed, witnesses have been killed and this is your country...

This direct political statement was strong coming from a rock musician. Crosby's approach towards the Kennedy assassination was a blatant defiance of the Warren Commission and the official position of the U.S. government.

Buffalo Springfield was another band that were already known by the time of Monterey Pop because of their 1967 song “For What it's Worth,” written by Steven Stills, reaching #7 on the Billboard charts. It was a statement of protest for people being beaten and arrested for exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech and assembly. The lyrics were vague enough that it could be applied to any protest, and the song became a rallying cry for the American counterculture in California.

There's something happening here

But what it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware

There's battle lines being drawn

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

Young people speaking their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind

What a field day for the heat

A thousand people in the street

Singing songs and they carrying signs

Mostly say, “Hooray for our side”

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you're always afraid

Step out of line, the men come and take you away

 I think it's time we stop

Children, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down?

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down?

The origin of the song goes back to 1965 when Buffalo Springfield was playing at a club called Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. As they became more popular, unusual-looking people flocked to their shows to dance and listen to the music. Other bands with similar new sounds arrived, including the Lovin' Spoonful, and the Mamas and the Papas. By 1966, the area became a haven for artists, musicians, and enthusiasts of a new flowering counterculture. The older residents reacted to this influx of a new culture in early 1967 by creating a community development project. This would move these kids out of the area and tear down old establishments like the favorite hippie hangout, Pandora's Box, a coffee house at the intersection of Crescent Heights and Sunset Boulevard. The hippies banded together in protest and marched in the streets holding signs with sayings like “Give Us Back Our Street” and “Protest Not Riot.” Jim Dickson, the Byrd’s producer, remembers the young people peacefully protesting the community development project, “The kids hadn't done anything evil enough to bring out big crowds of police, whole platoons with billy clubs and helmets just beating people up. They arrested 300 people one night and it never made the papers....” After releasing “For What It’s Worth,” Buffalo Springfield performed the song for the Smothers Brothers Show in 1967 and it became a hit performed at Monterey Pop. 

Two other bands that played at Monterey Pop and had a lasting impact with their unique message were The Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. When Pete Townsend and Keith Moon of the The Who destroyed their instruments during the final song of their set and then Hendrix engulfed his guitar in flame during his performance of “Fire,” both performances were acts of theatrical violence that expressed rebellion. Eric Burdon remembers, “The climax of the show was just like a terrorist attack, with the bombs and the smoke. It was just shocking.” Whatever the motivation for the violence against their musical instruments (artistic competition for example), both these performances used artistic violence as part of their musical performance as if the war in Vietnam had seeped its way into the festival.

Another important contributor to Monterey Pop’s element of protest against mainstream culture was Country Joe and the Fish. This group was formed by Joe McDonald in the Berkeley area as a comical protest of the United States' war in Vietnam. “Country Joe and the Fish were the left-wing band from Berkeley!” Steve Miller remembered, “These guys were political commentators in a pop/rock arena, and they did it with humor.” One of their most memorable songs from the festival was “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag,” a comical song which made the whole Vietnam War feel like a game. McDonald’s song protested leaders of the military industrial complex whose focus is to prepare for war against the Soviet Union with the help of the money manipulators on Wall Street. The final verse of the song was a message of draft resistance aimed at parents who have conscription age children by creating an image of their kids coming “home in a box.”

The final group I examined for this article were probably one of the biggest acts of the festival, The Jefferson Airplane, who were also very important to the expansion of the hippie message of anti-establishment, peace, and love. By the time of Monterey Pop, the group had a number five hit with “Somebody to Love,” a number eight hit with “White Rabbit,” and their album Surrealistic Pillow reached number three on the Billboard charts. These songs contained messages of love and the hippie ethic of the communal lifestyle promoting freedom and drugs. Grace Slick, a major songwriter and driving force of the band, viewed Monterey Pop as a symbol of the special relationship between the audience and the musicians. “I didn't think of anybody as celebrities.” Slick remembers, “Nobody was really famous. We were just all doing this 'thing' and all that separated the performers from the audience was the physical fact of the stage.”

The Monterey Pop Music Festival was only one of many music festivals that carried messages of protest through songs and the spirit of performances. In the years following Monterey Pop, other music festivals would continue the tradition such as Woodstock, Farm Aid, Live Aid, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, and Burning Man to name only a few. As these festivals continue, we must remember that if a music festival represents a particular culture at a certain moment, there are those who would use this as a target of terrorism. Recently, on October 7, 2023, The Re'im Music/Nova Dance festival in Israel was used as a target for murder and brutal terror and on October 1st, 2017, the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada was a target and dozens of people were slaughtered. According to the NIH’s National Library of Medicine, there were 60 attacks on music festivals worldwide in the 2010s, eight more than the previous decade and five times the number of attacks from the 1990s. In other words, while music festivals represent free speech and seem to be increasing in number as youth of today flock to these musical events, we must also remember that music festivals are soft targets for those looking to spread terror and death. There are always people that try to stop free speech and expression and we must not let them.