ABSTRACT
The Monterey Pop Festival was the first of its kind. As the first acknowledgement that pop music was building a history worthy of a three-day celebration, it provided the template for the festivals at Woodstock, the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury. Monterey Pop was based on the successful models of the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Monterey Folk Festival, themselves based on the established East Coast festivals at Newport. The idea of a 'festival' - a celebration of a given type of music - was in the 1960s a challenge to genre conventions. Those early 'happenings' of 1967 - the Giant Freakout, the Human Be-In - were the natural extensions of the hippie ideology. This was not restricted to San Francisco, but San Francisco was its figurative home. The local music industry can be a gauge of contemporary local character, and San Francisco and Los Angeles were decidedly distinct in the mid-1960s.
