Music

 Music

Just as air, water, and food are essential for the survival of the human body, music is essential for the nourishment of the human soul. It is music that creates neurological and emotional pathways that can evoke memories, enhance learning, and recall, and is now used in therapeutic interventions for cognitive decline. There is a unique interplay of emotions and personal significance associated with music. Music feeds the human spirit.

I am an omnivore when it comes to music and my eclectic tastes run through rock, folk, blues, country, classical, jazz, and several others, albeit with a certain selectivity within some genres. After I graduated from my early children’s music that included the traditional stuff along with some folk and Disney inspired classical stuff as soundtracks for their animation, I was introduced to rock and roll. Elvis Presley was one of the first to be allowed to cross from rockabilly to that new rock and roll. He was first only because he was white and previous “rock” entertainers were segregated to venues outside the reach of a young teenager. I still own some of my original 45 rpm records of the 50s.

It was not until the 60s that rock and roll gave way to a broader range of a youth culture that would embrace soul, folk rock, and psychedelic rock. Part of this began with the British Invasion of the Beatles and similar groups. The early evolution from blues-folk-soul to the Motown Records of pop and rhythm and blues brought us The Supremes and The Temptations. Folk music was represented by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger.

While I appreciate much of what was to come in the decades that followed, it was the 60s that most strongly influenced my musical memories. When it comes to cognitive decline, there is an old saying that goes, “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.”

I bring all of this up as I was recently moving to a new computer and would need to eliminate my oldest pc with its five hard drives. I yanked the drives and donated the remains. As I began salvaging files of value that were decades old, I came across a video of one of the greatest music concerts of all time. While many would say that would be the August 1969, Woodstock festival, only a few might remember the concert that inspired that watershed moment. That concert would be The Monterey Pop Festival heldtwo years earlier in June 1967. Who played at that festival? Yes, they did. Sorry for the Abbot and Costello segue, but The Who did play at Monterey.

See if you know any of the featured acts from Monterey 1967. There was Scott McKenzie, Mamas and Papas, Canned Heat, Simon and Garfunkel, Hugh Masekela, Jefferson Airplane with Grace Slick, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Eric Burdon and the Animals, The Who, Country Joe and the Fish, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Buffalo Springfield, The Grateful Dead, The Association, Lou Rawls, Johnny Rivers, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steve Miller Band, The Byrds, and Booker T. & the M.G.’s with the Mar-Keys.

My video includes many of these groups. It was shot by D.A. Pennebaker on 16mm film just like Woodstock1969 would be filmed by Michael Wadleigh with Martin Scorsese as his assistant. My digitized copy of the Monterey Pop opens with an interview of a young girl of the “flower child” persuasion who gives her ecstatic hippie-like description of what she expects to see. The lead-in to the flower child was Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco" telling us to “be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." One of my favorite moments in the film comes when Janis Joplin is belting out the bluesy vocals of Ball and Chain, and Mama Cass Eliot turns and you can read her lips saying OMG.

Over 200,000 attended the 3-day Monterey Pop 1967 event. It was the “Summer of Love.” The 60s music scene closed out with Woodstock in 1969 at Max Yasgur’s farm, but it was the year I graduated college that Monterey Pop would mix the soul of Otis Redding, the sitar of Ravi Shankar, the trumpet of Hugh Masekala, the screaming blues of Janis Joplin, and the flaming guitar of Jimi Hendrix.

I used my new computer to clean up and restore my digital copy of The Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It has to be one of my favorite concert films.