The greatest music festival of all time, according to David Lynch: “It’s so beautiful”
There’s a very good reason why music festivals have proved so popular over the last 60 years – in fact, there are several very good reasons.
If you’re a music fan, a good line-up is like a fine smorgasbord to a foodie, a selection of fantastic artists to sit back and soak up in the summer sun, wandering from stage to stage, sometimes discovering a band you didn’t know previously. It is the bastion of the music lover, and that’s certainly a label you could apply to the sadly missed genius David Lynch.
The American filmmaker who passed away in January this year was a music obsessive, a musician himself, and indeed an appreciator of a fine festival. At the top of his list was an event that happened right in the middle of the summer of love in California, with a lineup that has gone down in folklore.
The Monterey Pop Festival was a one-off that took place in June 1967 in the Monterey County Fairgrounds, with all the bands involved playing for free. It was a mix of big American acts and up-and-coming groups from the UK, like The Who, and was headlined by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Simon and Garfunkel and the Mamas and the Papas. The Beach Boys were also scheduled to play, but disastrously cancelled at the last minute.
It was filmed by the legendary music documentary maker DA Pennebaker, the man behind Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, for a movie titled Monterey Pop, using state-of-the-art cameras and microphones. So good was the resulting sound and footage that it inspired others to hold and film other festivals around the globe, and several of the artists involved were so pleased with the audio alone that they released their performances with live albums.
One of those was Otis Redding, who released several tracks in a joint album from the festival with Jimi Hendrix. In fact, several of Lynch’s favourite performances of all time occurred during those magical three days, and of Redding’s ‘I’ve been loving you too long’, recorded on the Saturday night, Lynch said: “I just couldn’t believe that version. It was so, so, so beautiful. So much feeling comes through that thing; it’s one of my all-time favorites. I just go nuts. I start crying like a baby when I hear that thing.
“This song and the way Otis sings it,” he added. “There’s the story and the way the story is told, there’s the song and the way it is sung. An incredible song and Otis Redding, an incredible rendition.”
Lynch was equally effusive in his praise of other performances at the festival, notably Hendrix, who he described as “The Greatest. Watching him at the Monterey Pop festival in DA Pennebaker’s film is just incredible. He becomes one with the guitar.”
Hendrix’s performance at the festival has gone down as something extraordinary – aware of The Who’s propensity for smashing their equipment he decided to one-up them by asking for lighter fluid and setting fire to his guitar at the end of his set, before obliterating the instrument on stage. Combined with the previously unheard levels of feedback it left the audience dumbstruck.
The festival wasn’t repeated after that year; there was a desire for it to stand as a moment in time and not succumb to commercialisation. However, it was revived for a 50th anniversary celebration in 2017, with Father John Misty and Norah Jones appearing.
