The Monterey International Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16–18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who, and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin, and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience.
The festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and generally is regarded as one of the beginnings of the "Summer of Love" in 1967 and the public debut of the hippie, flower power, and flower children movements and era. Because Monterey was widely promoted and heavily attended, featured historic performances, and was the subject of a popular theatrical documentary film, it became an inspiration and a template for future music festivals, including the Woodstock Festival two years later. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner said "Monterey was the nexus: It sprang from what the Beatles began, and from it sprang what followed."
Background
thumb|left|[[Jefferson Airplane in early 1967]]
In early 1967, Michael Bowen produced the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where many attendees dropped acid the first time and listened to Timothy Leary tell the crowd that people living in cities should reorganize as tribes and villages. This was one of the important precursors to the Summer of Love five months later. The Human Be-In directly inspired the Monterey International Pop Festival.
The first American hippie-style rock festival was held June 10–11 at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, produced by radio station KFRC as the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival. Star performers included the Doors, the Sons of Champlin, the Steve Miller Blues Band, Jefferson Airplane, Hugh Masekela, Country Joe and the Fish, Canned Heat, and the Byrds; the latter six acts also played Monterey Pop one week later.