Monterey Pop Fesitval

Posted by Matt Cipriano | 1 Comment

The weekend of June 16th, 17th & 18th, 1967 marked a new beginning for music. The Monterey Pop Festival featured the Mamas & the Papas, CSNY, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Simon & Garfunkel, Lou Rawls, The Animals, The Association, Country Joe and the Fish, Steve Miller Band, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Ravi Shankar and many others.

For the 40th anniversary of the concert that marked the summer of love and was the forerunner to concerts like Woodstock, Razor & Tie has released the “Soundtrack” to the festival. Criterion Collection celebrated as well with 2 DVDs, except they were all about the 35th anniversary, in 2002 they released 2 versions, one was just the film, the other was done up proper, including 2 hours of previously unreleased concert footage.

What really intrigued me about the film was Ravi Shankar’s performance at the end. It left me wondering about his significance in the music world. Was he doing something drastically different from classical Indian music or just exposing classical Indian music to the world? This led to a bit of research on my part into the career of Ravi Shankar.

Although Ravi’s career has spanned over six decades now, I was curious as to what his popularity was. Did he revolutionize Indian music? Or did he just introduce the rest of the world to classical Indian music? Apparently it is mostly the latter. Through his work with the Beatles and other artists and a great deal of touring and performing at festivals like Monterey Pop, Shankar helped to get classical Indian music recognition and allow for it to have a great influence on pop music to come.

So, with this weekend being the 40th anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival, play yourself some Greatful Dead with a side of the Mamas & the Papas sit back and enjoy.

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