The Monterey International Pop Music Festival - Monterey, California, 1967

The Monterey International Pop Music Festival was a three-day concert event held on June 16 to June 18, 1967, at the County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. Monterey was the first widely promoted and heavily attended rock festival, attracting an estimated 55,000 total attendees with up to 90,000 people present at the event’s peak at midnight on Sunday. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin, and the introduction of Otis Redding to a large, predominantly white audience. The list of all-star performers is a bit long to list but can easily be researched by the curious. The Monterey Pop Festival embodied the themes of California as a focal point for the counterculture and is generally regarded as one of the beginnings of the “Summer of Love” in 1967, along with the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival held at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County a week earlier. Monterey became the template for future music festivals, notably the Woodstock Festival two years later. This poster was created by artist Tom Wilkes, and were produced in two sizes. The large-size posters were used for advertising and were posted around the area, so most have some tape and tack hole damage. The foil paper used for the production of these posters is highly susceptible to damage and most copies have creasing and other problems. That woman in the middle is Maud Allan in her famous Salome costume from 1908.