Barney Hoskyns - Hotel California - Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976

Country Joe McDonald described Monterey as ‘a total ethical sellout of everything that we’d dreamed of’. Perhaps it was. But it was also the inevitable moment when the underground went mainstream. ‘The San Francisco groups had a very bad taste in their mouths about LA commercialism,’ Adler admitted decades later. ‘And it’s true that we were a business-minded industry. It wasn’t a hobby.’

From the perspective of Haight-Ashbury, LA was an apolitical anti-community, a sprawl of suburbs whose only focus was the lie of mass entertainment. The Haight bands would have agreed with embittered folkie Phil Ochs, who described his adopted Los Angeles as ‘Death City…the ultimate in the materialistic exaggeration of America’. Yet it was the very tension between LA and SF that made Monterey so fascinating. ‘I saw everything change there,’ Judy James, wife of Billy James, says. ‘It was as if everyone went, “Wow! We’re no longer preaching to the converted.” They walked into this candy store of drugs and sex and saw that people would buy the music as the soundtrack to that.’

‘The industry totally changed after Monterey,’ says Tom Wilkes, who designed the famous poster for the festival. ‘The festival was basically a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War, against racism and all those things that were going on. Afterwards, everything opened up.’

A year after Monterey Pop, English underground poet Jeff Nuttall looked back in disillusion at the summer of love. ‘The market saw that these revolutionaries could be put in a safe pen and given their consumer goods,’ he wrote. ‘What we misjudged was the power and complexity of the media, which dismantled the whole thing. It bought it up. And this happened in ’67, just as it seemed that we’d won.’

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