In June 1967 a young John Meyer supervised the set-up of the on-stage amplifier systems he had designed for a relatively obscure blues-rock guitarist named Steve Miller to use at a festival in Monterey. Fifty years later to the day, he returned to Monterey for a commemorative festival, where Meyer Sound was the official sound partner.
The Monterey International Pop Festival launched 1967’s Summer of Love, and was instrumental in Meyer meeting future wife and business partner, Helen. It also saw Meyer’s passion for sound focus on high-level concert reinforcement. This year’s event, Monterey International Pop Festival Celebrates 50 Years, was jointly produced by Another Planet Entertainment and Goldenvoice in association with the Monterey International Pop Festival Foundation. Another Planet’s Gregg Perloff stressed that great sound was a top priority for the event…
‘Sound is so important in a setting like this, and we wanted to make sure it would be perfect,’ he says. ‘We are an independent entertainment company based in Berkeley, and fortunately the world’s top sound equipment manufacturer happens to be another Berkeley-based independent company. Meyer Sound proved to be an ideal partner for this year’s return.’
One important goal for the production team was to revive the spirit of the 1967 event while recognising the music of today’s younger artists. One solution was to keep a unified focus at a single stage. ‘At other big festivals you have people running all over to see different acts at different stages,’ Perloff says. ‘Here, everybody comes together at one stage. It may mean something different to each person, but at least everybody has the opportunity to join together to hear all this fabulous music at the same time.’
Folk-rock impresario Lou Adler – a central figure in the 1967 festival and also involved in this year’s event – is well aware of the changes brought about by that first seminal festival: ‘I’m proud of the fact that we treated all the artists with great respect, the way they should be treated, both on stage in performance and within the industry,’ he says. ‘And the fact that we are still talking about Monterey Pop 50 years later, I’m proud of that as well.’
For his part, John Meyer was gratified to find that the way audiences respond to good music as heard through a good sound system has not changed over the past half century. ‘When these young bands get on stage and the crowds move forward – a mixture of younger and older fans – you can tell they are really engaged. They are not just observing something from the past. Yes, in some ways it’s a different scene now, but there’s still that same enthusiasm, the same excitement.’
Among 2017’s headline acts were Jack Johnson, Leon Bridges, Norah Jones, Father John Misty, Gary Clark, Jr and Regina Spektor. Michelle Phillips (Mamas and the Papas who performed at the original festival) made a guest appearance with The Head and the Heart. Three billed acts also featured 1967 veterans: Booker T Jones with his Stax Revue (he backed Otis Redding), Eric Burdon and the (new) Animals, and the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh with his Terrapin Family Band. As an echo of Steve Miller’s ‘proto-Meyer’ stage system of 1967, Lesh played through a custom amplification rig largely based around Meyer Sound components.
The main PA system at Monterey 2017, supplied by UltraSound, was anchored by main front arrays of 12 each Leopard line array loudspeakers with two per side MSL-4 loudspeakers as out fill. Bass was supplied by eight 1100-LFC and four 900-LFC low frequency control elements with six additional Leopard as front fill. The artist foldback system comprised 12 MJF-210 stage monitors, five 700-HP subwoofers, four MSL-4 for side fill, and one CQ-2 as drum fill top. The small Garden Stage, active only when the main stage was quiet, deployed a system with four CQ-1 loudspeakers, four 700-HP subwoofers and six UM-1 stage monitors.
‘At that time [1967] it was all brand new, with this whole new style of music just coming out of the woodwork,’ John Meyer recalls. ‘I realised that we would have to start building a whole new generation of equipment that could cope with this level of outdoor festival, systems that could be not just loud but also articulate. Monterey really opened things up. It was an important event, and I knew it was not going to fade away.’
More: www.meyersound.com
