The Monterey Pop Festival -- held two years before its better-known stepchild, Woodstock -- was the first weekend-long rock concert. It turns 50 on June 16th.
I was too young and too far away to join
the west coast hippie devotees who flocked to the event. So I waited for D.A. Pennebaker’s cinéma
vérité documentary MONTEREY
POP!, released over a year later, to have my first festival
experience. I went to the Kips Bay Cinema on Manhattan’s east side excited to
see the bands in the film. I left feeling that my life had been fundamentally altered, certain I wanted to become a
filmmaker (even though I had no idea know what that would entail).
True, when you’re in your mid-teens, as I was when I saw the picture, every moment is pivotal. But the twists and turns of popular culture in the late sixties were sharp and mind-bending regardless of one’s age.
True, when you’re in your mid-teens, as I was when I saw the picture, every moment is pivotal. But the twists and turns of popular culture in the late sixties were sharp and mind-bending regardless of one’s age.
In 1967, Hollywood was knocked off its center by such movies
as BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE GRADUATE and Luis Bunuel’s BELLE DE JOUR. At the same time, in the six months leading
up to Monterey, the face of rock ‘n’ roll changed even more radically.
The Doors, The Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground, Janis
Joplin with Big Brother and The Holding Company, and The Jimi Hendrix
Experience all issued debut albums. And
two weeks before the festival, The Beatles – using orchestral music, shifting time signatures, sitar and tabla solos, and revolutionary recording
techniques -- shattered rock ‘n’ roll’s few remaining limits with “Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” All of these new sounds spread quickly,
reaching tens of millions of teenagers like me who listened to FM’s
“progressive rock” radio.
Disc jockeys pioneering this new format
played album cuts that were never released as 45rpm singles. Such singles, the foundation (and only
content) of AM Top 40 programming, were generally superficial. FM’s darker, more complex tracks – with
lyrics about whiskey bars, backdoor men and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds --
became the soundtrack of my adolescence. There were songs about pills that
altered your size and made you feel eight miles high. Songs that asked, “Are you experienced?” Songs that made me feel supercool indeed!
As California, New York, London and
Liverpool bands were forging a rock ‘n’ roll renaissance, Pennebaker -- with
far less fanfare -- was transforming cinema in ways Hollywood hadn’t considered. On May 17, 1967, DONT LOOK BACK, his film
about Bob Dylan’s second British tour, hit theatres. I had just become a Dylan fan and here was an
intimate portrait that made me feel like I was hanging out with my new
hero!
I experienced the same immediacy, a year
and a half later, watching MONTEREY POP!
Again, that motion picture was life
changing.
I couldn’t fully articulate why at the
time. But as I look back 50 years I realize I watched it like a kid at a magic show, so enthralled I
needed to find out how the tricks were done. Somehow I knew I could learn
moviemaking. Even now, as I revisit the
film, I discover tropes and connections that weren’t apparent to me before. Half
a century later, MONTEREY POP! continues to inspire.
What was
groundbreaking and what enabled D.A Pennebaker to achieve such intimacy was cinéma
vérité – a term coined by
French documentarians for an array of techniques they had developed and which
were refined in the U.S. by Richard Leacock, Robert Drew and the Maysles
brothers along with Pennebaker.
Common wisdom about this genre, translated
as “truthful cinema,” is that lightweight 16 mm. cameras and Nagra tape
recorders developed in the sixties enabled moviemakers to be unobtrusive.
Consequently their subjects – people like JFK and Hubert Humphrey in PRIMARY,
Dylan in DONT LOOK BACK and dozens of musicians and hippies in MONTEREY POP! –
were unguarded and unselfconscious as they couldn’t have been in front of
Hollywood’s 350-pound Mitchell cameras and cumbersome audio systems.
But the most important innovation in vérité
wasn’t technological; it was a change in the attitude and behavior
of directors. Touring with Bob Dylan
and, later, shooting musicians and audience members in Monterey, the filmmaker
got subjects to reveal themselves to him by opening up to them. If Dylan told a joke,
Pennebaker laughed then became simultaneously vulnerable and entertaining by
telling one of his own.
Likewise, during the making of MONTERY
POP!, the director and cinematographers
engaged truthfully and openly with festival
organizers, with a young woman who seemed incredulous that they hadn’t been to
a “love-in,” with dozens of pot-smokers, and with the musicians at the movie’s
center.
Yet there isn’t a trace of dialogue from
behind camera in the finished film; it was deleted entirely during
post-production. And this absence of filmmakers as narrators or
interlocutors is another defining characteristic of cinéma vérité. The documentarians’ openheartedness and
candor off-camera enables those on camera
to speak and act without restraint, while the magic of editing keeps the
audience focused exclusively on the subject.
So despite the genre’s name – “truthful
cinema” -- these movies rely upon a great deal of artifice. In Jean-Luc Godard’s LE PETIT SOLDAT, Bruno
Forestier (a photographer played by Michel Subor) says, “Photography is truth.
Cinema is truth 24 times a second.” Errol Morris, reflecting on his experience
making THE THIN BLUE LINE and on its vérité progenitors, countered: “Film is lies 24 times a
second.”
Motion pictures like DONT LOOK BACK and
MONTEREY POP aren’t merely “windows onto the world,” easily contrasted with
fiction features’ “reflection of reality.”
Their creators select what they shoot just as carefully as Hollywood feature
directors. And they use all the
resources of theatrical film editing – disjunction of sound and image,
sequential rearrangement, deletion, repetition, sound effects and music among
them – to tell their stories most dramatically (and with the greatest emotional authenticity).
Of course, I wasn’t aware of selection and
editing when I was a young pup in the late
sixties. All I knew was how good these
films made me feel. How different they
were from what I was used to watching on TV and in movie palaces.
But blades of grass were busting through
the concrete sidewalks of suburban America – including those of my working
class Queens neighborhood. Changes were afoot not just in music and movies but
in writing about society and pop
culture.
In September ’67, I read an article in The Saturday Evening Post about kids (not
much older than I was) who had run away to Haight-Ashbury. Tens of thousands of them, living communally
or on the street, smoking weed every day and tripping every other! The piece, “Hippies: Slouching Toward
Bethlehem” by Joan Didion, went much further than more glib reporting on “The
Summer of Love” by television networks and mainstream newsweeklies.
https://nstearns.edublogs.org/files/2012/.../Slouching-toward-bethlehem
It complemented and exceeded Scott
McKenzie’s hit song, “If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers
in Your Hair).” And it was eye opening! In The
Post, no less – subscription par
excellence of my grandparents’ quest to assimilate by reading the most
Americana-infused magazine around -- with its Norman Rockwell covers and common
sense features.
www.normanrockwellvt.com/boyscouts.htm
Didion’s piece, a paradigm of New
Journalism, is actually a close relative of MONTEREY POP! and its cinéma
vérité siblings. Didion, Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night) and other
practitioners of the genre were compelled to create a fresh kind of reportage
not just because old methods had become stale, but because their stories were
about unprecedented phenomena; unique styles had to be found for the
telling.
Dan Wakefield, a reporter for The Nation,
described new journalism as reporting “charged with the energy of art.”
Wolfe had to be “on the bus” and write
with a novelist’s linguistic virtuosity to capture the “stranger than fiction”
quality of hundreds of people taking huge doses of pure LSD-25 together, come
what may. Mailer had to be an insider to
paint his compelling, insightful picture of writers, poets, critics, students,
university chaplains, Yippies and mystics who marched on the Pentagon to
protest the Vietnam War. Didion had to
live among her Bay area post-beatnik dropouts to give readers the genuine
article.
These writers interacted with their
subjects in the same way the new wave of documentarians did. But they presented their interactions quite
differently. Cinéma
vérité directors, as I said
earlier, cut themselves out of their
movies. For new journalism, the writer’s
presence became a defining
characteristic of thee story.
Being central in their own narratives, new
journalists made a clear break from traditional objective reporting. No “this reporter” or “editorial we” for
Wolfe, Mailer and Didion! Stories
written accountably in the first person could go much deeper than dry,
deadline-driven, style-less newspaper articles about acid, Vietnam War protests
and hippies.
While seeming to take the opposite approach
– deleting themselves from scenes in which they had participated during
principal photography -- vérité directors broke with newsreel tradition. Shown in movie theatres starting in the
1930’s and reborn as the basic format for TV feature stories, newsreels used
(usually bombastic) voice-overs and superimposed titles to tell the audience
what was important in any given piece.
Their creators imposed drama in the most heavy-handed manner, leaving
viewers feeling that all stories were alike and essentially meaningless.
https://archives.sfweekly.com/.../call-it-occupy-haight-street-harry-reasoners-1967
By making himself invisible, Pennebaker
let his subjects speak for themselves and allowed viewers to discover what was
dramatic.
Which brings us back
to MONTEREY POP! The film begins with a
“psychedelic” title sequence in which lights pulsate behind colored paper seen
through still-wet enamel paint on glass. Janis Joplin and Big Brother’s
“Combination of the Two” roars on the soundtrack.
Such artistry – absent from documentaries
I’d seen – gave me a sense of the light show that accompanied festival
performances as well as concertgoers’ euphoric, hallucinatory experience. Big Brother’s lyrics evoked “dancing at the
Fillmore” and made viewers at the Kips Bay want to jump out of their seats and
join in.
The title sequence holds up to this day.
And it does so because of artifice! Showing people tripping can’t capture what they see on acid. Pennebaker’s
(and editor Nina Schulman’s) inventiveness in post-production provides an
experience much richer than what “objective” camera work and newscaster narration
would have shown.
The title sequence leads easily into a
montage of people arriving in Monterey, underscored by Scott McKenzie’s “If
You’re Going to San Francisco.” There
are images of hippies smoking, dancing and blowing bubbles. Of psychedelic school buses and babies. A candid shot of David Crosby checking audio
gear, overjoyed. “Groovy!” says Crosby,
“A good sound system at last!” A plane
flies by and, in post-production, the editors decide not to use a sound effect
for it. We’re immersed in this amazing
world, not just watching it from outside.
Because editors selected, rearranged, compressed and otherwise
manipulated these images!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73jgeICl6SE
By following McKenzie’s song with The
Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreaming,” Pennebaker eliminates the need for
spoken narration. We see and hear that
we’re in California. That hippies have come
from far and wide, as have musicians. That the sound is going to be great.
There’s no need for a newscaster to repeat what we already know.
What knocks me out is that the order in
which songs are used in the film feels completely natural even though it’s
unrelated to the actual sequence of events.
A band called The Association opened the festival. The Mamas and Papas were the closing act two nights later, but their
set is the first shown in the movie.
D.A. Pennebaker, you see, found a much
more powerful organizing principal than mere chronology: the film’s performance
timeline is a genealogy of rock ‘n’ roll.
The Mamas and the Papas lead off with a love song, the foundation of
popular music. Canned Heat plays some
Mississippi Delta Blues. Simon and
Garfunkel are up next, representing folk music with a tinge of poetry. They’re
followed by the African jazz of Hugh Masakela.
After Masakela, MONTEREY POP! follows rock
to new heights – new directions which were the essence of 1967 rock. The Airplane marry Lewis Carroll and Ravel in
“White Rabbit.” Janis performs “Ball and Chain” with such power the Goddesses
of Blues look down and smile. An electric violin solo leads into Eric Burden’s
rendition of “Paint It, Black.” Keith Moon redefines rock ‘n’ roll
drumming. Jimi Hendrix descends from
another (benign, delightful) planet to perform “Wild Thing.” Ravi Shankar plays a 15-minute raga shown
mostly with thunderstruck cut-aways of listeners, including guitar virtuosi
Mike Bloomfield and Hendrix.
I must admit I didn’t know the extent to
which Pennebaker re-ordered the performances until I heard him talk about
it. But the film’s structure is perfect.
MONTEREY POP! builds and builds and builds to a point where you want to jump up
and give Shankar a standing ovation along with the festival crowd.
I could go on and on. Pennebaker’s system for making sure his ten
cameramen (yes, all men) knew which songs to shoot and which not to (involving
DONT LOOK BACK’S Bob Neuwirth) is fascinating.
That they didn’t roll on Janis Joplin’s only scheduled performance
because she hadn’t signed a release (with souls having to be sold to get her to
go on again) is probably worthy of its own post. The reason the film’s climactic raga had to
be edited on extremely primitive equipment even though Pennebaker owned a
technologically advanced system will captivate postproduction
practitioners.
But it’s time to wrap up. Which I’ll do by quoting D.A. Pennebaker's
associate Robert Drew, talking in 1962 about what he hoped a nascent cinéma
vérité would ultimately be:
“It would be a theatre without actors; it would be plays without playwrights; it would be reporting without
summary and opinion; it would be the ability to look in on people’s lives at
crucial times, from which you could deduce certain things and see a kind of
truth that can only be gotten by personal experience.”
MONTERY POP! embodies Drew’s aspirations
for the genre. That’s why it remains as
engaging and moving as it was a half century ago. That’s why – a half century
later, when pop culture is driven (into the ground) by demographic research and
marketing algorithms – MONTEREY POP! can still
change lives.
