Monterey Pop - Influence

Influence

Jean-Luc Godard, the French New Wave director, was so taken by Jefferson Airplane's performance in Monterey Pop that later in 1968 he set out to make a never-finished film called One A.M. (for "One American Movie") in collaboration with Pennebaker and Leacock. Godard shot a sequence of the Airplane, (included on the 2004 "Fly Jefferson Airplane" DVD), playing at high noon on a business day on the roof of a New York hotel across the street from the Leacock-Pennebaker offices, with the tower of Rockefeller Center in the background. Attracted by the extremely high volume of the music, the police arrived and put an end to the shooting. This incident inspired other bands, notably the Beatles in their Let It Be film, to mount their own rooftop performances.

The screening of the film in theaters nationwide helped raise the festival to mythic status, rapidly swelled the ranks of would-be festival-goers looking for the next festival, and inspired new entrepreneurs to stage more and more of them around the country.

In 1969, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld pitched an idea for a recording studio in Woodstock, New York to businessmen John P. Roberts and Joel Rosenman. In the documentary Woodstock: Now and Then, Rosenman states that what really caught his eye in the proposal was the suggestion that the studio would encourage occasional rock concerts in the town. Rosenman had watched Monterey Pop the day before meeting with Lang and Kornfeld and recalled thinking it one of the best films he had ever seen, and was excited about the notion of being part of something similar. Rosenman and Roberts agreed to bankroll Lang and Kornfeld in an effort that morphed into the 1969 Woodstock Festival.