Articles
Lou Adler on the Monterey Pop Fesyival
Lou Adler was the festival producer
"I'd been in the music business since l957, and had worked every kind of hall as a manager. I was all too familiar with how acts were treated: The dressing rooms were toilets, there wasn't a restaurant open by the time the show was over, the accommodations were, 'Oh, I'm sorry, the guy forgot to make them,' and all the rest.
So our idea for Monterey was to provide the best of everything -- sound equipment, sleeping and eating accommodations, transportation -- services that had never been provided for the artist before Monterey ...
... We set up camp, brought in a construction crew, established a communications center, and assigned a crew armed with walkie-talkies to canvass the entire Fairgrounds.
The transportation crew we organized included not only cars and drivers for all the acts, but scooters, motorcycles, bicycles, whatever else it took to get around. We had cleanup crews, and an arts committee to oversee the booths and displays.
We set up an on-site first aid clinic, because we knew there would be a need for medical supervision and that we would encounter drug-related problems. We didn't want people who got themselves into trouble and needed medical attention to go untreated. Nor did we want their problems to ruin or in any way disturb other people or disrupt the music.
If someone got in trouble they were taken care of as quickly as possible. Dr. Bowersocks of Monterey was in charge of the on-site medical treatment center. In an interview, he said the volunteer first-aid team there was years ahead of its time, citing the one-on-one rapport and communication techniques employed to cool out concert-goers who were freaking out due to ingested substances.
We established our own security, supervised by David Wheeler. With Wheeler as the liaison, our security worked with the Monterey police. The local law enforcement authorities never expected to like the people they came in contact with as much as they did. They never expected the spirit of 'Music, Love and Flowers' to take over to the point where they'd allow themselves to be festooned with flowers."
Quoted from Wikipedia, Monterey Pop Festival, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterey_Pop_Festival