Flash Back to the Real Pop Mart

When I think back on the 1967 "Summer of Love" it's amazing it could even be called that.

The first generation raised on television and rock 'n' roll came of age that summer and there was much for them to be negative about.

John F. Kennedy had been assassinated only 3 1/2 years before. A huge U.S. military buildup was underway in Vietnam. The antiwar movement was roaring. Martin Luther King Jr. urged massive civil disobedience and Stokely Carmichael was calling for a black revolution. Race riots erupted in eight U.S. cities. The Six Day War pitted Arab nations against Israel. China tested its first A-bomb while youthful Red Guards overwhelmed that nation in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Meanwhile, the youth of America were involved in their own cultural revolution, against traditional values and beliefs. The times, they were a-changin'. . . .

The Summer of Love obviously got its name from something else: the behavior of an alternative face, or counterculture. I became a part of it by co-producing the event that kicked off that summer, the Monterey International Pop Festival.

In early 1967, promoters Alan Pariser and Ben Shapiro proposed a two-day rock music event at the Monterey County fairgrounds. They booked Ravi Shankar and approached John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas. Because I was the group's producer and manager, John Phillips came to me.

He said it was to take place at the Monterey fairgrounds, home of the Monterey Jazz Festival. It brought to mind a recent conversation we had with Paul McCartney at Mama Cass Elliot's house about how rock music, for all its growing sophistication and creativity, was still not regarded as an art form like jazz.

John and I realized two things: One, the festival ought to have an international bill of the best performers from every pop genre, and two, no one could afford to pay them. The answer was to have all the participants donate their performances to charity. Shapiro was not interested in a nonprofit event, so John and I, Paul Simon, Johnny Rivers and Terry Melcher bought him out.

To validate what we were doing, we put together a board that included such names as Simon, McCartney, Brian Wilson, Donovan, Mick Jagger, Smokey Robinson and Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones. Although it never met, the board served its purpose.