Interview

There's something intoxicating, in this image-driven age of airbrushed pop stars, about female performers who are pure voice.  The memory of two of them, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, comes alive in Criterion's new Blu-Ray reissue of the 1968 concert film Monterey Pop.

Not to steal the spotlight from Michelle Phillips and Cass Elliot of The Mamas and the Papas, who helped organize the 1967 Bay Area festival captured in D.A. Pennebaker's masterful documentary, but it seems they wouldn't mind: during Joplin's mind-blowing performance of the slow blues grinder "Ball and Chain," Pennebaker cuts to Mama Cass, sitting there dumbfounded in the audience. Like Joplin, she's got her mouth open. She's not singing along, though–it's an undisguised expression of awe. When the song wraps, you can read her lips: "Wow."

The hefty Mama Cass might bear superficial comparison to today's Beth Ditto, of the Gossip, except even Ditto has a fashion line. Grace Slick's contemporary equivalent isn't clear; probably a man, come to think of it. When the Jefferson Airplane queen bee comes in on co-singer Marty Balin in "High Flyin' Bird," she makes him wear the pants. And Pennebaker plays up the gender reversal during the love ballad "Today," his camera (or that of Leacock, or one of the other cinema-verité maestros in his brigade of cameramen) closing in on her as she silently mouths the words Balin is singing in his plaintive tenor. When she finally comes in, she's the dusk dragging the young shepherd down into the valley.

Slick (who, unlike the flamed-out Joplin, is still alive) is androgynous, but not in the hyper-sexualized manner of Madonna or Lady Gaga. It's almost as though she's relinquished surface concerns in order to allow her voice free reign.

This year is Woodstock's 40th anniversary, probably one reason Criterion is putting Monterey Pop back out there. Ang Lee's strenuously feel-good Taking Woodstock kept the music at a distance. In a way, it was a clever move. That cultural moment echoed for thousands of miles, after all, and its ground zero was not necessarily the front row. Pennebaker's film serves as a sort of corrective–not to popular ideas about the Summer of Love, but about its soundtrack.

The Monterey concert was a moment when folk musicians moved towards rock, and rock really started to get loud and amorphous. Feedback was a weapon. Jimi Hendrix simulated graphic sex with his guitar onstage, and made it scream–five tons of glass falling over a cliff and landing on dynamite," journalist Michael Lydon (whose full, unedited Newsweek dispatch on the weekend is reprinted in the disc notes) wrote at the time. The Who and other British rockers ran out of things to smash.  And Lydon has a nice passage summing up how Slick, Joplin, and a whole bunch of other performers who make appearances in Monterey Pop went over the edge:

"Flowers and a groovy kind of love may be elements in the hippie world, but they have little place in hippie rock. The hippie liberation is there, so are a personal kindness, openness, and pleasantness that make the new rock musicians easy to talk to, but in their music there is a feeling of a stringent demand on the senses, an experimenting with the techniques of assault, a toying with the idea of beautiful ugliness, the creativeness of destruction, and the loss of self into whatever may come."