The Who exploded into fire and light

More Monterey Pop video blogging.
This is how it all ended.

The Who
Monterey Pop Festival, 06/18/1967
A Quick One (While He's Away)
Summertime Blues
Substitute
My Generation



After this, the Grateful Dead blew everybody's mind
and Jimi Hendrix, baby believe me, set the world on fire, yeah!

But the festival wasn't over until The Mamas and the Papas played.

Creeque Alley
San Francisco (with Scott McKenzie)
Straight Shooter
Dancin' In The Street

They should have encored with this duet.

Laura Nyro's music made me cry

One of the major myths about the Monterey Pop Festival is that Laura Nyro was booed off the stage. This video of Laura's performance of "Wedding Bell Blues" and "Poverty Train" from the bonus DVD puts those myths to rest once and for all.



This was the second major performance by an virtually unknown 19 year old girl, in front of eighty thousand stoned hippies waiting to hear the Jefferson Airplane. If the crowd look stunned, it's only because Laura's performance was so stunning, and at the end, the closest thing to "boos" is someone shouting "beautiful". She was not booed off the stage!

I had a major crush on Laura based on the photo on the Eli and the 13th Confession album cover and it broke my heart to discover that she "played for the other side". When I saw her live in 1989, the crowd was divided between people like me who were there for the oldies like "Wedding Bell Blues" and "Stoned Soul Picnic" and a militant LGBT crowd. That was a strange experience, but probably nowhere near as strange as seeing her in 1967 at Monterey would have been.

Of course, Eric Burdon actually sang in "Monterey" that Ravi Shankar's music made him cry, but Laura Nyro's singing on "Poverty Train" makes me weepy! It's that strong. I've sampled lots of "next Nyros" from Nellie McKay to Amy Winehouse, but there will never be another Laura Nyro for me.

The Byrds and the Airplane did fly

More Monterey Pop Festival, June 17, 1967

The Byrds play after Moby Grape, and
David Crosby betrays Roger McGuinn for the last time.

Matters came to a head during the three-day Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967, where the Byrds were one of the acts in a line-up that included musical luminaries of the day such as Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix. During the Byrds' set, Crosby prosletyzed about the benefits of LSD and played with an STP sticker prominently displayed on his guitar. Moreover, Crosby prefaced the playing of the song "He Was a Friend of Mine" (McGuinn's tasteful eulogy to John F. Kennedy) by ranting that Kennedy had been shot from several different directions, that witnesses to the assassination had been killed by the conspirators, and that the whole affair had been covered up by the government. The other Byrds were embarrassed because Crosby's controversial pronouncements seemingly spoke for them all, and because his comments resulted in the exclusion of the Byrds from television and film coverage of the festival. As well, the next day Crosby performed as part of Buffalo Springfield without notifying his fellow Byrds in advance, an act the others viewed as one of open defiance and a betrayal of loyalty.

Maybe conspiracy theories on the JFK assassination were the 9/11 conspiracy theories of 40 years ago? I'm surprised that Crosby didn't offer a counterharmony to McGuinn's "from a sixth floor window" line by singing "from a number of different directions by different guns".

This onstage monologue led to David getting fired from the Byrds. They replaced his picture with a horse on the cover of Notorious Byrd Brothers,but at least he managed to escape the shadow government operatives that perpetuated the lone gunman theory!

Three electric guitars, grooving real loud

This weekend is the 40th anniversary of the Monterey International Pop Festival, which was the unofficial start to the "Summer Of Love". Razor & Tie has released a two-disc retrospective of various performance. Some of the album is available on eMusic, including songs by heavy hitters like The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Byrds, and the Jefferson Airplane that aren't usually on eMusic.

One band that isn't on the album, and wasn't in D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop film, or Rhino's 30th Anniversary CD box set, or Criterion's 35th anniversary DVD was Moby Grape. They opened the second night of the festival, but their set wasn't filmed for the movie because their manager asked too much money. They weren't even name-checked in Eric Burdon's "Monterey", but his line about "ten thousand electric guitars grooving real loud" was probably written under the influence of Moby Grape.

With three guitarists who all wrote airtight three-minute songs and sang three part harmonies like angels, the Grape were easily the most talented San Francisco band of the 60s, but they were cursed by bad management and overzealous promotion. Their debut album came out the same week as Sgt. Pepper, in tandem with five simultaneous singles which killed off any sales momentum they ever had. They went on to make a few more albums, but never delivered on the promise of the first one. Sony has just put out a single disc overview of Moby Grape called Listen! My Friends, which is a pretty good starting point, at least until their first album is reissued properly. It's currently only available on a cheapo CD on their sleazy ex-manager's San Francisco Sounds label.

Here is Moby Grape's opening set at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival from 40 years ago this weekend. After being introduced by Tommy Smothers, they blasted through four songs from their debut album, which had come out just a couple of weeks earlier.

"Three guitars leading the charge, and voices blending in delicious harmony" as Joel Selvin wrote in his Monterey Pop book.

Moby Grape 06/17/1967
from the Monterey International Pop Festival
0. Introduction by Tommy Smothers
1. Indifference
2. Mr. Blues
3. Sitting By The Window
4. Omaha

There are a few early Moby Grape performances on youtube, including this kicking version of "Omaha" from a 1968 Mike Douglas Show where Mikey calls them "the Moby Grapes".

The Open is Open

The U.S. Open started this week, and they have three channels of streaming webcasts in high-def. Watching golf on a computer probably doesn't sound that exciting to most people, but the quality is stunning, and it's a nice way to waste a few hours of the workday. My brother and I did our Open picks, just like we did at the Masters, and he has a nice advantage on me after the first day.

His ten picks have taken 17 fewer strokes than my ten picks, but there are still a lot of strokes left over the next 54 holes. My guys start their comeback tomorrow!

Multiplexed

Last month I won five free Cinemark theatre movie tickets from work for answering a film trivia question (imagine that!), and there are a bunch of Cinemark locations near where I live and where I work, but the passes are only valid for movies that are more than two weeks old, and it seems like they're all showing the same movies this summer.

The main batch are the sequels and three-quels (Oceans Thirteen, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Shrek The Third, Spider Man 3, 28 Weeks Later). I used my first pass for Spiderman 3 a few weeks ago (suck-o-rama, and I liked the first two), and am not that interested in seeing the others. I haven't even seen most of the parts two of these movies.

The next batch are so-called "chick flicks" like Knocked Up and Waitress. I liked Judd Apatow's last film, 40-Year Old Virgin, so I'd like to see Knocked Up, and it opened on June 1st, so my passes are good starting this weekend . I've also discovered that Cinemark passes are also good at CinéArts theatres, so I could go see Once which is getting good reviews from people on my own blogroll. Once also gets the metacritic edge over Knocked Up (89 to 85), so I think that's the one I'll see first.

It's probably not big surprise to my readers that I'm not as up on the movies as I am on other things, so I'm open to suggestions for other movies to see. I'm open to anything more than two weeks old that's playing at a Cinemark cinema, at least until I use up all my free tickets!

Mix tape's a mastodon

Last week I made a mix tape for a friend's birthday, just like she requested a few months ago. That's "mix tape" as in cassette (see example above). It was the first mix tape I've compiled in the last five years. In this download-mix-burn era, I forgot how much work goes into making a mix tape. Cue the tape/disc/record, check the levels, press play and record to tape a song, rinse, lather, repeat. And if you decide midway through recording side two that the fifth song on side one doesn't fit, you have to either live with it, or record the whole side over, or find another three minute and twenty second song that does fit! It takes at least three hours for me to make a 90-minute tape, but I can burn an 80-minute CDR in less than 15 minutes. It was a lot of fun to practice my tape making skills, but it's already a forgotten art.

One of my main concerns about Tower Records' going under last year was "Oh no! Where will I buy blank tapes?". Even after Tower's musical selection went downhill and their prices for new records went uphill, you could still buy a 5-pack of Maxell XLIIs for $6.99 , sometimes $5.99 on sale. Tower was the place for blank tapes, but in hindsight, being the best place to buy something I didn't need could have been a major reason they went out of business. I rescued two four-packs of Fuji 90 minute high bias cassettes (all XLIIs were gone, damn!) for $1.99 each from the Tower clearance sale last Fall, which should be enough blank tapes to last the rest of my life. I'm saving the rest of my blank tapes for times "when the moment is right", and hording them like they were Cialis tablets. Each one may be the last tape I ever make.

Is there another media format that went from ubiquitous to obsolete quicker than the audio cassette? Ten years ago, they were all over the place - I had a tape deck in my car and a Walkman, and would make a tape of almost every CD I bought. Then I got a new computer with a CD burner and a new car without a tape player, and pretty much stopped listening to cassettes. And the rest of the world stopped right along with me.

I started pondering the sad fate of the cassette after reading Rob Sheffield's book Love is a Mixtape, which explores his romance and marriage to fellow rock critic Renee Crist (who died of an aneurysm in 1997) by listing the songs the mix tapes that they sent to each other. The Rob and Renee story has a really sad ending, but I was almost as sad about their mix tapes, each one from a various stage of their relationship with their own story to tell. And there are millions of other tapes just like them, that no one ever listens to but can't bear to throw away.

Some of you may even have tapes that I've sent you over the years (Loud Family bootlegs, holiday mixes, swap mixes, and more) cluttering up your homes, or landfills near your homes if you've managed to finally throw your cassettes away. Cassettes were too popular and too pervasive to ever have the kitschy coolness of 8-tracks, and eventually they'll all be tossed in the trash with 5.25" floppy disks, VHS videotapes, and other magnetic memories of the way we were.