Historic Performances Recorded At The Monterey International Pop Festival

June 18, 1967, at the Monterey International Pop Festival. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones introduced Jimi Hendrix: “the most exciting performer I’ve ever heard.” Hendrix was returning to America from London, where he’d built his reputation, playing to an American audience that had mostly not seen him yet. He ended the set kneeling over his Stratocaster, lighter in hand.

Otis Redding played the same festival. Six months later, his plane crashed into Lake Monona in Wisconsin on December 10, 1967. Hendrix died in September 1970. This record — both performances in full — is the only document that captures both artists at peak before the wave broke. It has the particular quality of things filmed as they happened without anyone knowing they were filming history.

The connection between this shelf and the hip-hop section runs through Otis and Hendrix more directly than most people account for: the recordings that James Brown contributed to the breakbeat canon, the Hendrix and Sly Stone records contributed to the psychedelic vocabulary that producers were digging through in the late ’80s and early ’90s. This is one of the source records.