More Monterey Pop: Shake, Rattle and BURN!!

OK, you all asked for more, more, more Monterey Pop photos so in this week’s festival fantasia we break out the heavy guns (so to speak), starting off with Jimi offering up his ultimate sacrifice, burning one of his prized Fender Stratocasters at the climax of his incendiary version of “Wild Thing,” changing his career, and quite possibly the world, in one hot, feedback-drenched stroke. Like nearly every blog I’ve written dealing with Jim’s monstrously large and diverse body of work, there is so much to say about each image that it beggars the imagination, and I’ve never been quite as tongue tied as I am over the work he produced during these three historic, fog-inflected days in June down in Monterey.  If you haven’t already, be sure to check out last week’s blog for our first installment of Monterey Pop classics.

I thought I’d turn to SF Chronicle music writer Joel Selvin’s words from his text written to accompany Jim’s gorgeous highlights in their 1992 book “Monterey Pop.” From the book’s intro about what Jimi said to explain his offering that fateful night: “People say about us how we couldn’t make it here, so we go to England and America doesn’t like us ‘cause our feet’s too big, we got fat mattresses and wear golden underwear. Ain’t no scene like that, brother. … I could sit up here all night and say thank you, thank you, thank you. I wish I could just grab you, man, and just …(lips smacking) … one of them things, one of those scenes.  But, dig, I just can’t do that.  So what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna sacrifice something that I really love – thank you very much for Bob Dylan’s grandmother. … This is for everybody here.  This is the only way I can do it.  So we’re gonna do the English and American combined anthem together. … Don’t get mad.  This is it.  There’s nothing I can do more than this.  Ooh, look at those beautiful people out there.”

Words to burn by, indeed. Anybody who hung out with Jim and looked at these shots heard those stories. Here are two of my favorites: -- Jimi with his arm in the air: Nobody was there except Jim and Jimi and  Al Kooper, assistant stage manager.  This was the first moment when Jim realized a few things: there were three Jim Marshalls on the stage, him, James Marshall Hendrix and the stacks of Jim Marshall amps; Jim was again outsmarting everyone by not heading to dinner and drinks like the rest of the photographers and crews but hanging around to see what would happen. And, Jim had just witnessed (and bonded indelibly with) the future, a musical talent so original and empowered that Jim told me it actually stopped his breath.  He said it felt like when he heard Miles or Coltrane’s sheets of sound.

-- Otis Redding’s set:  One of my favorite memories of Jim is him telling me about Otis Redding at Monterey.  “It was late and everybody was heading out of the seats, nobody knew really who the fuck this guy was or why they should care.  Booker T and the MGs were backing him up and had played an intro and then, all of a sudden, Otis hits the stage running out at top speed in that electric blue-green suit, WHAM!” And with this Jim would always stand up and stomp his little penny-loafer-wearing feet as hard as he could, one-two, one-two, yelling “WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!  Otis just blasted out on to the stage singin’ Sam Cooke’s ‘Shake’ at the top of his lungs like twice as fast as it was normally played.  Oh my god!!!!  People just stopped in their tracks in the aisles like they were hit by a freight train.  The man was a consummate performer at the top of his game!  I consider it a true honor that I was there to see it.”

Then he would get real quiet, real quick and always add shaking his head, “Six months later he was dead.” I also like this sentiment from the Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady quoted by Stephen Peeples in his amazing booklet that accompanies Rhino’s original 1992 Monterey Pop box set: “There was so much love in (Otis), so much giving.  He had this chance to perform in front of an all-white audience. He didn’t try to make it safe. He was right there out in the open, a Memphis singer with his Memphis soul band. … This was not a Motown act. They represented something slicker, more thought out. The Motown acts weren’t as raw and didn’t project sexual overtones like Otis did.  And they were one of the best bands in the world. They made almost all of the tracks for Stax-Volt Records.  People in the music business or who paid attention to music knew about them.  They mirrored what was going on in the times.  It was quite extraordinary.”

By the time I met Jim, Monterey was already 17 years in the past, well in his rearview mirror, but when Jim talked about meeting Jimi Hendrix for the first time, watching Otis Redding steal the show, seeing Janis & Big Brother crash their way to another whole level entirely and The Who trash their way there, it was like he had witnessed it yesterday. He stressed how what was going down around and behind the stage and on the fairgrounds -- hook ups and collaborations both amorous and creative -- were as much, or more, fascinating and ground-breaking and life-changing than what was being well-documented on the main stage throughout those three days. I sure do wish I could have been there with Jim to see it all, the late-nights, the beautiful days, onstage and off in all it's historic glory.  Sometimes, as Jim liked to tell me, it's what happens in the before and after times, during the odd, anticipatory silences and the “negative space” that's most important. In that spirit, we've searched the Monterey archive to gather the following bunch of shots that capture those "Monterey moments" so indelibly.