The Times They Are a-Changin: Revisiting the first-ever Monterey Folk Festival of 1963
Before the Monterey International Pop Festival of 1967, an event which is now considered one of the greatest celebrations of the counterculture, there was the Monterey Folk Festival, which went someway in signalling the cultural look of the rest of the decade. The inaugural edition arrived on Friday, May 17th, 1963, and ended on Sunday, May 19th. Held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, California, where the great hippie bonanza would later take place, the 1963 edition featured some of those who would become the era’s biggest stars, including the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jerry Garcia, Peter, Paul and Mary, and even Janis Joplin.
Interestingly, Garcia and Joplin would return to the site in 1967, with the former fronting the ultimate hippie group, the Grateful Dead, and the latter as the vocalist of Big Brother and the Holding Company, another of the movement’s best-loved acts. By the time the 1967 festival arrived, the pair were no longer newcomers but household names and cultural juggernauts.
The Friday of the first Monterey Folk Festival boasted acts such as Barbara Dane, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Andrews Sisters and The Dillards. The Saturday featured the likes of Barbara Dane again, but this time flanked by Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Joan Baez, Mike Seeger, Mance Lipscomb and The New Lost City Ramblers. As for Sunday, it saw Bessie Jones, Doc Watson, and Clarence Ashley & Roscoe Holcomb take to the stage. In many ways, the lineup represented the old guard passing the baton to the new breed, who took their heroes’ cues and moulded them for an era characterised by great socio-economic and political upheaval.
The 1963 Monterey Folk Festival was a significant moment, as Dylan’s set was his first-ever performance on the sunny West Coast. On the Saturday, Dylan played four songs, which according to biographer Clinton Heylin’s Life in Stolen Moments, included ‘Masters of War’, ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ and a duet with girlfriend Joan Baez on ‘With God on Our Side’. According to one festival goer on Shorpy, Baez allegedly said when introducing the fresh-faced Bob Dylan: “A young man you’re going to hear more of, Bob Dylan” — how true that was. Nine days after the performance, Columbia Records released his second studio album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, starting his metamorphosis into an icon and the definitive voice of his generation.
Demonstrating the myth that surrounded Dylan even in the early days, his bio in the festival programme reads: “Gallup, N.M. When you tour with the carnival at age 14 playing piano and guitar, you’re bound to learn a lot of life, land and of music. In the course of this learning process, Bob heard Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads and headed East to meet the great Woody. Arriving in New York, he found that the city people referred to much of the music he had been playing and writing as folk music. To Bob this didn’t matter. He’s continued to write, sing and dress in a highly individual fashion.”
It continues: “This has landed him an enviable record contract with Columbia and the publication by Leeds Music of a collection of his works. The songs he writes (often topical parodies or talkin’ blues) and sings relate to what he’s heard and seen in America. The closest he comes to international material is the parody of an Israeli song, ‘H’ava Ngilla.’ Plays jazzy blues piano, guitar and harmonica: (often both at once)”.
In Alice Echols’ 1999 biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise, the author recounts how the Texan caused “something of a stir”, even though she wasn’t a featured performer. Echols writes: “When she (Joplin) appeared at the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival she created something of a stir. Janis wasn’t a featured performer, but she did sing at the informal hoots on the second stage. Jae (Whitaker, a musician friend) contends that Janis won three hootenanny contests there and tickets to the shows on the major stage. “Everybody just loved her. She won every damn time she got up there and sang. They just went fucking wild. I started to pay attention.'”
Another band that appeared at the festival but was not mentioned in the programme was The Wildwood Boys. They comprised Jerry Garcia on banjo, Robert Hunter on upright bass, David Nelson on guitar and Ken Frankel on the fiddle. Frankel recalled to Recordmecca: “We played in the band contest, but left before the winner was announced. Later we were all sitting together watching a show, when the MC announced that we were the winners of the band contest, and would now come on stage and play a song, and we were ‘What, us? quick, where are our instruments? Does anybody have a bass Bob can borrow?’ And we somehow got on stage and played a song, which I think was ‘Nine Pound Hammer’. Garcia, backed by David Nelson, also played in an amateur banjo competition held on one of the festival stages, and finished second place.”
Listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan below.
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