Monterey Museum of Art has joined the flurry surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival with a photo show of seven photographers who were there in 1967.
Who Shot Monterey Pop? opened June 2, and on the eve of Monterey Pop 50, the museum is gathering the photographers to tell the stories behind the photos. Here are two:
Fred Arellano says when Monterey Pop reached its final day, it was a toss-up who would go on first – The Who or Jimi Hendrix, who were rivals. It was decided by a coin flip The Who would lead.
“But the band didn’t want to use the festival’s Fender amps,” Arellano says. “They wanted Vox Super Beetle amps. Or nothing. Someone went out to Gatsby Music in Salinas and came back with these Vox amps. And then, of course, The Who destroyed the stage. Later a Gatsby’s employee comes and says, ‘I’m here to pick up my amps?’ We all pointed to this smoking pile of rubble. I thought the poor guy was going to have a stroke. So the manager of The Who, this unassuming guy, pulls out the biggest wad of money I had ever seen and starts counting out hundred-dollar bills and pays him.”
Arellano loves recounting the stories of his interactions with his famous rock-and-roll subjects, including Janis Joplin, Miles Davis and Paul Simon.
He’s got a million of them.
So does Lisa Law. She brings up Woodstock to talk about what made Monterey “the best concert” – just 35,000 concert-goers, sunshine, chairs. And the police helped.
“We met with Monterey’s chief of police and told him, ‘Don’t bust anybody for smoking dope or doing acid. If you leave everyone alone, they’ll manage themselves.’ He agreed. [His officers] had flowers on their motorcycles and [helmets]. The only two busts were two drunken rednecks who were picking on the hippies. Because of that, the ambiance was just love and peace. It was beautiful.”
At the festival, Law was pregnant, bottle feeding a puppy, and manning the “trip tent” for people who had overdosed on acid. So she couldn’t take as many pictures as she wanted. But she enjoyed a storied journey through the Summer of Love, including encounters with Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Otis Redding.
“I think I was meant to be everywhere I was during the ’60s,” she says. She’ll be shooting Monterey Pop 50 this weekend, as if that concert in 1967 never ended.
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