With the now-famous “Summer of Love” quickly approaching, Mamas and Papas’ founder John Phillips and record producer Lou Adler organized a three-day event called the Monterey International Pop Festival, to be held in June. The first two days would feature folk and rock groups and artists and bands from San Francisco’s psychedelic subculture.
     The third day of the event was held on Sunday and featured two distinct sessions. The first was a three-hour afternoon concert by North Indian classical music sitar player Ravi Shankar accompanied by tabla player Alla Rakha. That North Indian classical music was a feature in a major popular music festival was testimony to the height that popular music had ascended at that time. Shankar’s three-hour spiritual journey prompted a thunderous standing ovation and catalyzed the “raga rock” movement, officially launching Shankar to global superstardom.
     The second session that day occurred in the evening, opening with music consistent with the first two days, featuring performances by The Blues Project, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Buffalo Springfield. Then it happened. Two groups who had flown to Los Angeles from England appeared on stage: The Who and The Jimi Hendrix experience. They would provide the opposite of the spiritual energy of Ravi Shankar’s afternoon concert, setting the stage, so to speak, for the advent what would follow – negative popular music.
     The group, The Who, had released a huge hit record in England in 1965, a rebellious anthem called “My Generation”, and been generating so much anger in live performances of the song in England that at the end of each performance, lead singer and guitarist Pete Townshend would smash and destroy his guitar on stage.
     Knowing that Townshend was planning to smash his guitar on stage at the Monterrey Pop Festival, guitarist Jimi Hendrix’s legendary finale featured a feedback-heavy rendition of “Wild Thing”, where he created a discordant massive noise by intentionally pushing his amplifiers to the brink, using distortion, rubbing the guitar against the speakers to create howling feedback, and ultimately setting his guitar on fire.
     From this point on, two streams of pop music would arise out of what had been one. One was the positive path, with groups such as the band The Moody Blues and the songs of Jimmy Webb, who collaborated with the amazing singer-guitarist Glen Campbell. The negative path will move through genres such as heavy metal, death metal, grunge, and other forms of hard rock. Popular music the world over will finally be left at the end of the century dominated by rap and hip-hop music, where true melody has been thrown to the wolves.
     An awakening is now occurring as new artists, songwriters, and composers born in the 21^st century move forward with a music filled with melody, leaving negative music behind as a tombstone for the tumultuous century that preceded them.