Monterey International Pop Festival

Monterey International Pop Festival
Art by Tom Wilkes
Genre	Rock, pop and folk, including blues rock, folk rock, hard rock and psychedelic rock styles.
Dates	June 16–18, 1967
Location(s)	Monterey County Fairgrounds, Monterey, California
Coordinates	36°35′40″N 121°51′46″W / 36.59444°N 121.86278°W / 36.59444; -121.86278
Years active	1967
Founded by	Derek Taylor, Lou Adler, John Phillips, Alan Pariser

The Monterey International Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California.^[1] The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience.

The festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and generally is regarded as one of the beginnings of the "Summer of Love" in 1967 and the public debut of the hippie, flower power and flower children movements and era.^[2] Because Monterey was widely promoted and heavily attended, featured historic performances, and was the subject of a popular theatrical documentary film, it became an inspiration and a template for future music festivals, including the Woodstock Festival two years later. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner said "Monterey was the nexus – it sprang from what the Beatles began, and from it sprang what followed."^[3]