Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival

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Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival
Live album by
the Jimi Hendrix Experience (side one) and Otis Redding (side two)
ReleasedAugust 26, 1970[1]
RecordedJune 1967
VenueMonterey Pop Festival, California
Genre
LabelReprise
Producer
Jimi Hendrix U.S. chronology
Band of Gypsys
(1970)
Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival
(1970)
The Cry of Love
(1971)
Otis Redding chronology
Tell the Truth
(1970)
Historic Performances
(1970)
The Best of Otis Redding
(1972)

Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival is a live album recorded at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. A split artist release, it includes some of the performances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on side one and Otis Redding on side two. It has been supplanted by later more comprehensive releases, Live at Monterey (Hendrix, 2007)[4] and Captured Live at the Monterey International Pop Festival (Do It Just One More Time!) (Redding, 2019).[5]

Release and charts[edit]

Reprise Records released Historic Performances in the United States on August 26, 1970,[1] less than a month before Hendrix died. It reached number 16 on the Billboard 200 albums chart[6] and number 15 on the magazine's Top R&B Albums chart.[7] The Recording Industry Association of America certified it as a gold album, signifying one million dollars in sales.[8] The album was not released in the United Kingdom.

Critical reception and historical significance[edit]

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[2]
Christgau's Record GuideA−[9]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music[10]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[11]

In a contemporary review of the album, Jeffrey Drucker of Rolling Stone magazine said "memories are made of sets like this", and "even if you weren't [there], you'll find some very satisfying music by two of our most gifted artists."[12]

In Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), music critic Robert Christgau called the album "as evocative a distillation of the hippie moment in all its hope and contradiction as you'll ever hear." He described Redding and Hendrix as "two radically different black artists showboating at the nativity of the new white rock audience", who had both "performed more subtly and more brilliantly" elsewhere, and were "equally audacious and equally wonderful" at the festival.[9]

In a lukewarm review, AllMusic's Bruce Eder regarded Historic Performances as a significant album when it was released, but it has become "purely of historic interest as an artifact of the time."[2]

Before the Monterey Pop performance, Jimi Hendrix was a musician with success in the UK but nowhere else in the world. At Monterey Pop, Hendrix performed in front of an estimated 25,000-90,000 people.[citation needed] At the end of the song ‘Wild thing’--which appears on this recording-- [13] Hendrix lit his guitar on fire, smashed it 7 times, and threw its remains into the crowd. This performance gained national attention and made Hendrix famous in the US, and led to the later opportunity to headline at Woodstock, one of the largest rock festivals of all time and a highlight of the 1960s in the US.

Track listing[edit]

Side one: the Jimi Hendrix Experience
No.TitleWriter(s)Length
1."Like a Rolling Stone"Bob Dylan6:22
2."Rock Me Baby"B.B. King, Joe Josea3:00
3."Can You See Me"Jimi Hendrix2:30
4."Wild Thing"Chip Taylor7:30

Personnel[edit]

Side one

Side two

Production

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b "August 26, 1970". The Jimi Hendrix Encyclopedia. Experience Hendrix. Archived from the original on September 26, 2008. Retrieved July 12, 2008.
  2. ^ a b c Eder, Bruce. "At Monterey - Jimi Hendrix/Otis Redding – Review". AllMusic. Retrieved June 8, 2013.
  3. ^ Kubernik, Harvey; Kubernik, Kenneth (2011). A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop. Santa Monica Press. p. eBook. ISBN 978-1595808721. The headlining slot on Saturday night was opened up when the Beach Boys failed to appear. It was taken by a young (only 25!) soul singer named Otis Redding
  4. ^ Ruhlmann, William. "The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live at Monterey – Review". Allmusic. Retrieved February 4, 2023.
  5. ^ Captured Live at the Monterey International Pop Festival (Do It Just One More Time!) (Album notes). Otis Redding with Booker T. and the MG's. Monterey International Pop Festival Foundation. 2019. Back cover. MIPF 1967-5.{{cite AV media notes}}: CS1 maint: others in cite AV media (notes) (link)
  6. ^ "Otis Redding: Chart History – Billboard 200". Billboard.com. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  7. ^ "Otis Redding: Chart History – Top R&B Albums". Billboard.com. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  8. ^ "Gold & Platinum – Jimi Hendrix". RIAA. Retrieved August 21, 2018. Since it was certified gold in 1970, this was six years before the RIAA changed the definition for album sales from a monetary measure of $1,000,000 to a units shifted measure of 500,000 copies.
  9. ^ a b Christgau, Robert (1981). "Consumer Guide '70s: R". Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. Ticknor & Fields. ISBN 089919026X. Retrieved March 10, 2019 – via robertchristgau.com.
  10. ^ Larkin, Colin (2007). Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195313734.
  11. ^ DeCurtis, Henke & George-Warren 1992, p. 315.
  12. ^ Drucker, Jeffrey (October 15, 1970). "Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival". Rolling Stone. New York. Retrieved June 8, 2013.
  13. ^ "The Jimi Hendrix Experience Setlist at Monterey Pop Festival 1967". setlist.fm. Retrieved 2023-12-05.

Bibliography[edit]

External links[edit]