"What's happen' brother we gotta a little thing called Foxy Lady... my fingers will move as you see but you won't you hear no sounds as you hear, but dig this..."--Jimi Hendrix (onstage at Montery Pop Festival, 1967)
"We called the purple acid tabs pressed specially to be given away at the Monterey Pop Festival: “Monterey Purple”. Jimi did seem to enjoy it- he jammed all night long in the long shed after I was able to organize a guitar and restrung it for him… I cannot speak of acid today, but in our time, acid of this quality is not the kind of thing which would attract the term ‘haze’. To call it that would have been misleading. it was CLARITY- squared. History, like all the past (and future) ‘exists’ only in the mind. Only the present exists." --- Owsley Stanley (on "Purple Haze" being named after Owsley's acid which was given out free at Monterey)
Before the whole idea of rock concert festivals really took off with Woodstock, there was the amazing mind-blowing success of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, an outgrowth of the Monterey Jazz and Folk festivals which were all the rage in the mid 1960s hipster scene. The pop festival was a lending of the jazz and folk stamp of 'intellectual art' approval to "pop" -- the merge announced rock and pop to be art forms equivalent to any other form--from opera to cubism--as culturally relevant, profound and, like, deep, baby. Prior to Monterey Pop, rock/pop was largely the province of screaming kids and mop top haircuts; the intellectual hipsters of 1965 even booed Dylan when he went electric at Newport Folk Festival. But two years or so had passed; America was finally ready to see rock, jazz and folk all merge together in a big paisley. Oh and did I mention that the best acid in the world was being handed out at the entrances, in little purple dots scooped in handfuls out of big buckets, like a candy to an endless parade of trick or treaters? As Homer Simpson once said, "Mmmmmm, purple."And to prove acid made you groovy, the whole event went off with poetic grace and perfection and is all captured beautifully on the D.A. Pennebaker documentary, MONTEREY POP, so even if you weren't there, you can always go visit, like, back through time, man! There's none of the bad tripping and face clawing or Hells Angels bashing that would make Altamont such a disaster; no hairy nudists or rambling stage announcements like at Woodstock; just Owsley's purple purity, and enough chairs for everyone to sit down and zone out rather than having to stand all freakin' day, rocking on your feet to keep them from hurting. The vibes were so good at Monterey that the musicians themselves transformed their performances to reflect each other's. By the end of the three days, the vibe was so strong it transformed the very essence of pop and rock music forever, from something fun and dorky to something enlightening and dangerous.
If you're watching the film now, decades later, on acid, you can still feel the immediacy, the openness, and if you get lost, the constant cutting to enraptured beautiful female faces in the crowd. Pennebaker clearly edits with eye for beauty. If you're feeling like you're drifting into some bad space, man, the pretty girls all in a row keep you glued by a warm sexual-maternal epoxy. The fuzzy feedback drenching of Hendrix comes in later and wipes all the blood away and leaves just a neck and a cigarette where your head had been. And then, around the one hour mark, Ravi Shankar starts.
At first it's just Indian raga music playing as a roving camera tracks its way down the aisles of the festival seating area. Everyone seems a big hung over and bleary-eyed from the past two days; some are half-asleep in each others' arms, buried blankets, smoking off into space. Only gradually over the 18 minute-long excerpt of Shankar's four hour set do we begin to even realize someone's onstage. By the time we see him-- his beautiful, vaguely Satanic-looking brown face, rapt in the spiritual ecstasy--really getting down--we're hooked. The music has re-ignited our burnt-out prana for one last roll, and then the flame lights up the whole crowd for one final collective flash of evolution into a spiritual realm now truly global in its spread. No one would have been surprised if aliens came down to play a surprise final set to welcome us finally into the galactic brotherhood. And after them a still wider radius, God's own God.
Shankar himself must have seemed pretty alien, for this was long before yoga's popularity or New Age anything. Seeing Shankar's massive and formidable-looking sitar for the first time, on acid, must have felt like seeing a giant black centipede make love with the fingers of an ageless wizard. After three days of dorky guys in flower face paint standing around wonking electric guitars, suddenly you're dissolved into the nether regions, the great beyond, the Burroughs-ian interzone of NAKED LUNCH.
The eerie droning, spine-tingling sound of the sitar is somewhere between a flanger-pedaled electric guitar and a barber's electric razor buzzing on the back of your neck, and that's when you're straight! Gone, it's just, well -- on acid the sitar's otherworldly tones are no less accessible or strange than anything else that's come before in the more melodic tradition in the festival, from the sonic feedback textures of Hendrix to the gentle entwined harmonies of Simon and Garfunkel; acid makes the normal completely strange and the strange... whoa. At the climax of Shankar's raga the audience is suddenly caught completely up in this onstage frenzy: precision ecstasy so mind-boggling that the close-ups of Shankar's finger-picking hand just show a hummingbird blur.
Of course there are musical high (way high) points other than Shankar: Janis Joplin's career-making poetic passion and mytho-bluesetic fury of "Ball and Chain" being one of my all-time favorite concert moments) and low points (Country Joe's "psychedelic" instrumental is nice but sounds dated, even under the influence). But the lows aren't very low and the highs are so mind-bogglingly high that you may as well forget trying to top them, at least as far as concert films go. The songs all fit together with the imagery both on and offstage thanks to seamless, lyserigically inspired editing and groovy lightshow projections creating hall of mirror linkage. There are so many beautiful crazily dressed people just grooving and being themselves here that the film never gets boring no matter how many times you see it. it's a continual wellspring of love vibes, a freeze frame fountain of eternal youth. Even though several of the top players would soon be dead, they're not dead here, not yet. Nor is the crowd shambling bugged-out zombies like they'd be on the bad acid to come.
Pennebaker shot the film by using synced sound with numerous roving 16mm color cameras. The result allows him to cut amongst a wide range of material and have it all fit, so it takes a lit mind to perhaps divulge just what is hang-ups are, since it flows so well, it's just about love, baby! That's why it can't fail, why it can't be anything but terrific. The love Pennebaker has for the material is achingly clear; he's not afraid to cut from the middle of one song to the middle of another by a completely different artist if it works, or linger on Janis' feet during half her song, and the result makes perfect sense in a kind of drugged chronology of memory way. This is what recollections of a concert are like if you were there: faces, fur hats (the 1950s fake fur Daniel Boone hat craze had undoubtedly ensured the Haight-Ashbury vintage stores were well-stocked), psychedelic art for sale outside along the fence, light shows, colorful plumage, Brian Jones.
Speaking of Papa John, he was one of the founders of the festival and you can tell by his eyes when his band, the Mamas and the Papas, are playing that he's having a blast. Re-watching this recently with someone I totally dig (and who digs the Mamas and the Papas), I saw them in a whole new light: Over the years I had come to consider their songs mere filler, but with a cute Mamas and the Papas fan by my side I let go of worldly cynicism and found myself swooning for their passionate but sweetly laid-back harmonies. All it took as to let go of the way I'd learned to tune out "Monday Monday - Bah Bah" on FM radio all my life, and to allow myself to hear them again as if for the first time. Isn't that what it's all about, anyway?One thing we've kind of forgotten in our age of mercurial one hit rock stars is that before 1967, folk acts like Peter, Paul and Mary used to be on every cool person's LP player. In other words, real cool is totally sweet and open, not guarded and brooding. When Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sing "Homeward Bound" you can hear their love for the music, the crowd, and each other in the minute mellow of their combined voices; every syllable is completely in the moment. These artists love singing together. They do it well and they know the songs, both lyrically and as pure music. Their faces light up with the joy of harmonizing, being good at something, when onstage, as opposed to the "here I am, ladiez! Let me hear you say 'Hey, Ho!'" of our tru-tone-deaf pop stars today.
Of the four main singers in the Mamas and the Papas, Mama Cass is the only heavy one and yet the band all wear floor-length mu-mus for what I can only assume is a gesture of solidarity to Cass; they love her so much they widen themselves just so she isn't circled as the one who doesn't belong. Even when they sing "The Joke's on You," a savage put down of idealism or a bad break up speech set to music, either way you can feel the love and celebration in their combined voices. With the Mamas and the Papas, even a bad break-up song overflows with free-spirited love, while in the music of the disillusioned eras to follow, even love songs sound gloomy and dispirited. Which way would you rather have it? Wouldn't it be great if Owlsey brought his purples to a Conor Oberst/Bright Eyes show? Damn, man.
Another reason the film is such great acid viewing is that it's short. It leaves you on a high note at a brisk 80 minutes. But there's a lot of good stuff you miss with three days of music narrowed down so thin, and so it's essential you get the Criterion box-set, which has tons of extra footage (including great, nearly full song sets by Simon and Garfunkel and the Mamas and the Papas) and the complete Hendrix and Otis Redding performances. See them all with someone you love, on a picnic blanket in front of the TV, volume cranked, joint to hand, spores in the air, and let the last 42 years wash away until you're born anew in the crucible of Monterey Purple.
0 comments:
Post a Comment