The Monterey Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California.
The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield, the Who, Eric Burdon and the Animals, 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.
The first rock festival of this type had been held just one week earlier at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival.
The festival was planned in seven weeks by John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, record producer Lou Adler, Alan Pariser and publicist Derek Taylor. Monterey and Big Sur had been known as the site for the long-running Monterey Jazz Festival and Big Sur Folk Festival; the promoters saw the Monterey Pop festival as a way to validate rock music as an art form in the way in which jazz and folk were regarded.
Crowd estimates for the festival have ranged from 25,000 to 90,000 people.
The song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” was written by Phillips and sung by Scott McKenzie, released in May 1967, to promote the event.