Jimi Hendrix drops out as opening act for The Monkees

Year
1967
Month Day
July 17

On July 17, 1967, one of the oddest musical pairings in history comes to an end when Jimi Hendrix dropped out as the opening act for teenybopper sensations The Monkees.

The booking of psychedelic rock god Jimi Hendrix with the made-for-television Monkees was the brainchild of Hendrix’s manager, Mike Jeffery, who was seeking greater public exposure for a young client who was a budding star in the UK, but a near-unknown in his native United States. It was in the UK, in fact, that Monkee Mike Nesmith first heard a tape of Hendrix playing while at a dinner party with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton. Nesmith and his fellow Monkees Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz became instant Jimi Hendrix fans, and after witnessing his legendary performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, they encouraged their own manager to invite the little-known but highly respected Jimi Hendrix Experience to join their upcoming U.S. tour.

Hendrix himself appears to have had no direct input on the decision, though he’d made his opinion of the Monkees clear several months earlier in an interview with Melody Maker magazine: “Oh God, I hate them! Dishwater….You can’t knock anybody for making it, but people like the Monkees?” Nevertheless, Hendrix joined the tour in progress in Jacksonville, Florida, on July 8. Predictably, the reception given to the now-legendary rock icon by the young fans of the bubblegum Monkees was less than worshipful. As Mickey Dolenz later recalled, “Jimi would amble out onto the stage, fire up the amps and break out into ‘Purple Haze,’ and the kids in the audience would instantly drown him out with ‘We want Daaavy!’ God, was it embarrassing.”

Jimi Hendrix managed to get through a total of only seven dates with the Monkees, culminating in his final show on July 17, 1967, which may or may not have ended with Hendrix saluting the crowd with his middle finger. There was no truth to the widely circulated rumor that he’d been kicked off of the tour after protests by the Daughters of the American Revolution that his show was “too erotic.”

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Writer, singer and folk icon Woody Guthrie dies

Year
1967
Month Day
October 03

On October 3, 1967, Woody Guthrie, godfather of the 1950s folk revival movement, dies.

In 1963, Bob Dylan was asked by the authors of a forthcoming book on Woody Guthrie to contribute a 25-word comment summarizing his thoughts on the man who had probably been his greatest formative influence. Dylan responded instead with a 194-line poem called “Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” which took as its theme the eternal human search for hope. “And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin’?” Dylan asks in the poem, before proceeding to a kind of answer:

You can either go to the church of your choice

Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital

You’ll find God in the church of your choice

You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, whom Dylan would later call “the true voice of the American spirit,” was a native of Okemah, Oklahoma, who was born in 1912 and thus entered adulthood just as America entered the Great Depression. Already an accomplished, self-taught musician, Woody Guthrie began writing music in earnest following his experiences traveling west to California with other Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930s. His first public exposure came during the latter part of that decade as a regular on radio station KFVD Los Angeles, but his most important work took place following a move to New York City in 1939.

In his first two years in New York, Guthrie made a series of landmark recordings for Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress as well as the album Dust Bowl Ballads, which served as the first introduction for many to a form that Guthrie helped pioneer: protest folk. Most famously in “This Land Is Your Land”—written in 1940 and first recorded in 1944—Guthrie fused long-established American musical traditions with a populist, left-wing political sensibility to create an entirely new template for contemporary folk. In so doing, of course, he laid the groundwork not only for the great folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, but also for such iconoclastic heirs to that movement as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

In his late 30s, Woody Guthrie began to fall ill, displaying the ambiguous physical and psychological symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as Huntington’s chorea, a genetic disorder that had probably killed his mother in 1930. In the 1950s, treatment for Huntington’s generally meant institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital, and Woody Guthrie spent his final 12 years in such facilities. In fact, it was in New Jersey’s Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital that a young Bob Dylan first encountered the man he’d traveled all the way from Minnesota to see.

Woody Guthrie was moved to Brooklyn State Hospital in 1961 and again in 1966 to Creedmore Psychiatric Center in the borough of Queens. He died at Creedmore on this day in 1967, at the age of 55.

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The Who literally spark an explosion on national television

Year
1967
Month Day
September 17

In introducing them at the Monterey Pop Festival three months earlier, Eric Burdon of the Animals had offered high praise for the up-and-coming British rock band the Who, promising the crowd “A group that will destroy you in more ways than one.” A substandard audio setup that day prevented the Who from unleashing the full sonic assault for which they were already becoming famous, but their high-energy, instrument-destroying antics inspired the next act, Jimi Hendrix, to burn his guitar and announced to the tens of thousands of Festival-goers the arrival of a powerful new force in rock and roll. The rest of America would get its introduction on September 17, 1967, when the Who ended an already explosive, nationally televised performance of “My Generation” with a literal bang that singed Pete Townshend’s hair, left shrapnel in Keith Moon’s arm and momentarily knocked The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour off the air.

As buttoned-down as its hosts appeared to be, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour came as close as any network program could in 1967 to being culturally and politically subversive. Tommy and Dick Smothers fought a running battle with CBS during their show’s three-year run over scripts that subtly tweaked “the Establishment” and guests whose off-air politics were deemed controversial by network censors. Though there was nothing overtly political about the Who, it was more than just lyrics like “Hope I die before I get old” that marked the group as happy warriors in the generational battle being waged in the late 1960s. It was also, among other things, the sheer volume at which they preferred to play and their penchant for leaving every stage they played on looking as if a bomb had just gone off. On this day in 1967, one actually did.

Keith Moon was already in the habit of placing an explosive charge in one his two bass drums to detonate during Pete Townshend’s guitar-smashing at the end of each Who performance. But for their Smothers Brothers appearance, Moon packed several times the normal amount of explosives into his drum kit, and when he set it off, a gigantic explosion rocked the set as a cloud of white smoke engulfed Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey. Though bassist John Entwistle never lost his cool, Daltrey practically flew downstage and when Townshend emerged from the smoke, his hair was almost literally blown to one side of his head. Though the incredible explosion has been rumored to have caused Pete Townshend’s eventual near-deafness, credit for that should probably go instead to the Who’s pioneering use of stacked Marshall amplifiers as a means of achieving maximum volume during their live performances.

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The Monterey Pop Festival reaches its climax

Year
1967
Month Day
June 18

By the time they got to Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who and the Grateful Dead were established superstars—heroes to the roughly half a million worshipful fans who trekked up to Max Yasgur’s farm to see them in the summer of 1969. Yet just two years earlier, they were entirely unknown to most of those worshipers. All four iconic figures on the 1960s music scene entered the American popular consciousness at an event that preceded and provided the inspiration for Woodstock itself: the Monterey Pop Festival. Held over three days during the height of the Summer of Love, the Monterey Pop Festival came to a close on this day in 1967, with a lineup of performers that included all of the aforementioned acts as well as Ravi Shankar, Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas.

From a purely musical perspective, the Monterey Pop Festival was a groundbreaking event, bringing together nearly three dozen well-known and unknown acts representing an eclectic mix of styles and sounds. The great soul singer Otis Redding, the Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar and South African singer/trumpeter Hugh Masekala, for instance, all had their first significant exposure to a primarily white American audience at the Monterey Pop Festival, which also featured such well-known acts as the Animals, the Association, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane and the Mamas and the Papas. In this sense, the festival not only pioneered the basic idea of a large-scale, multi-day rock festival, but it also provided the creative template that such festivals still follow to this day.

The organizers of the charitable Monterey Pop Festival also set a standard for logistical organization that the organizers of the for-profit Woodstock festival would attempt to follow, only to fall short under the immense pressure of overflow crowds and bad weather. In addition to arranging for private security and medical staff, the organizers of Monterey also deployed a staff of trained volunteers, for instance, whose sole task was to manage episodes among audience members partaking in the nearly ubiquitous psychedelic drugs.

Some 200,000 people attended the Monterey Pop Festival over its three-day schedule, many of whom had descended upon the west coast inspired by the same spirit expressed in the Scott McKenzie song “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair),” written by festival organizer John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas expressly as a promotional tune for the festival. The Summer of Love that followed Monterey may have failed to usher in a lasting era of peace and love, but the festival introduced much of the music that has come to define that particular place and time.

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The Beatles release “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”

Year
1967
Month Day
June 01

Bob Dylan’s instant reaction to the recently completed album Paul McCartney brought by his London hotel room for a quick listen in the spring of 1967 may not sound like the most thoughtful analysis ever offered, but it still to hit the nail on the head. “Oh I get it,” Dylan said to Paul on hearing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the first time, “you don’t want to be cute anymore.” In time, the Beatles’ eighth studio album would come to be regarded by many as the greatest in the history of rock and roll, and oceans of ink would be spilt in praising and analyzing its revolutionary qualities. But what Bob Dylan picked up on immediately was its meaning to the Beatles themselves, who turned a critical corner in their career with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1, 1967.

Writing in The Times of London in 1967, the critic Kenneth Tynan called the release of Sgt. Pepper “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization,” but 30 years later, Paul McCartney called it a decisive moment of a more personal nature. “We were not boys, we were men,” is how he summed up the Beatles’ mindset as they gave up live performance and set about defining themselves purely as a studio band. “All that boy [stuff], all that screaming, we didn’t want any more,” McCartney said. “There was now more to it.” With Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles announced their intention to be seen “as artists rather than just performers.”

Sgt. Pepper is often cited as the first “concept album,” and as the inspiration for other great pop stars of the 60s, from the Stones and the Beach Boys to Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, to reach for new heights of creativity. For the Beatles themselves, 1967 marked not just a new creative peak, but also the beginning of a three-year period in which the group recorded and released an astonishing five original studio albums, including two—1968’s The Beatles (a.k.a. “The White Album”) and 1969’s Abbey Road—that occupy the 10th and 14th spots, respectively, on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the Greatest Albums of All Time. Also in the top 15 on that list are Rubber Soul (1965) at #5, Revolver (1966) at #3 and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at #1.

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Beatles manager Brian Epstein dies

Year
1967
Month Day
August 27

On August 27, 1967, Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, was found dead of an accidental drug overdose in his Sussex, England, home. The following day, the headline in the London Daily Mirror read “EPSTEIN (The Beatle-Making Prince of Pop) DIES AT 32.” Brian Epstein was, by all accounts, the man who truly got the Beatles off the ground, and in John Lennon’s estimation, it was difficult to see how they’d manage to go on without the man who had managed every aspect of the Beatles’ business affairs up until his unexpected death. “I knew that we were in trouble then,” John later recalled. “I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared. I thought, ‘We’ve ******* had it.’”

The relationship between Brian Epstein and the Beatles dated back to Liverpool in late 1961. Entirely self-managed and without a recording contract, the Beatles had just recently returned from Hamburg and begun playing Liverpool’s Cavern Club. Epstein was then running his family’s record and musical instrument shop on Walton Road, just blocks away from the Cavern, but as he would later tell the story, he hadn’t heard of the Beatles until he had two young customers in quick succession enter his store looking for a copy of a record they’d made in Hamburg as the backing group for vocalist Pete Sheridan. Based on this rather modest “buzz,” Epstein arranged to go see the future Fab Four several weeks later.

The band that Epstein saw the first time he laid eyes on the Beatles was very different from the one that would soon conquer the world. They dressed in black leather, they played only cover tunes and they would freely eat and drink onstage during and between songs. Yet Epstein was immediately taken with their charisma and the crowd’s response to it. On January 24, 1962, he was officially hired by John, Paul, George and drummer Pete Best in a deal that gave Epstein a 25 percent cut of the band’s gross earnings for the next five years.

As a business deal, that management contract may seem to have been tilted very much in Epstein’s favor, but it is fair to say that the world might never have heard of the Beatles were it not for their manager and good friend. Epstein put the Beatles in suits, had them bow in unison after each number and, just a few months after being hired, got them their first recording contract with Parlophone Records.

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“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” opens in theaters


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Year
1967
Month Day
December 12

On December 12, 1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a groundbreaking movie about an interracial romantic relationship starring Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton, opens in theaters.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner followed the story of a young white woman (Houghton) who brings her fiance (Poitier), an African-American doctor, home to meet her parents, played by Hepburn and Tracy in their last film together. (Off-screen, the couple had a long romance, although Tracy was married to another woman. He died on June 10, 1967, a short time after the movie wrapped.) Directed by Stanley Kramer, who was known for his “message” films–including Inherit the Wind (about the Scopes “monkey” trial) and Judgment at Nuremberg (about Nazi crimes during World War II)–Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner examines the reactions of the young couple’s various family members and friends to their relationship. Until the landmark 1967 civil-rights case Loving vs. Virginia, which was decided just five months before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released, marriage between blacks and whites was still illegal in parts of America, and Kramer’s film was notable for its willingness to tackle this taboo topic. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and collected two Oscars, including Best Actress for Hepburn, the second of her career.

Hepburn (1907-2003) won four Academy Awards (out of 12 total nominations) over the course of her long career, more than any other actress. She collected her first Best Actress Oscar for 1933’s Morning Glory, with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and went on to earn Best Actress Oscar nominations for Alice Adams (1935), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), which marked her first movie with Spencer Tracy, The African Queen (1951), Summertime (1955), The Rainmaker (1956), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962). The legendary screen star followed her Oscar win for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with Best Actress golden statues for The Lion in Winter (1968) and On Golden Pond (1981). Her final feature film was 1994’s Love Affair, with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.

Sidney Poitier, born on February 27, 1927, earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for 1958’s The Defiant Ones, directed by Stanley Kramer and co-starring Tony Curtis and Theodore Bikel. For his performance as a handyman who builds a chapel for a group of German nuns in 1963’s Lilies of the Field, he became the first black man ever to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. Among Poitier’s other well-known films are To Sir, With Love (1967) and In the Heat of the Night (1967).

Spencer Tracy (1900-1967) took home his first Best Actor Oscar for 1937’s Captains Courageous, having been previously nominated in the category for 1936’s San Francisco. He won again for 1938’s Boys Town and went on to earn nominations for Father of the Bride (1950), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), Inherit the Wind (1960) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Tracy received his ninth and final Best Actor Oscar nomination for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

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Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov killed when parachute fails to deploy

Year
1967
Month Day
April 24

On April 24, 1967, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is killed when his parachute fails to deploy during his spacecraft’s landing.

Komarov was testing the spacecraft Soyuz I in the midst of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Earlier in 1967, the U.S. space program had experienced its own tragedy. Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chafee, NASA astronauts in the Apollo program, were killed in a fire during tests on the ground.

Komarov, a fighter pilot and aeronautical engineer, had made his first space trip in 1964, three years before the doomed 1967 voyage. After 24 hours and 16 orbits of the earth, Komarov was scheduled to reenter the atmosphere, but ran into difficulty handling the vessel and was unable to fire the rocket brakes. It took two more trips around the earth before the cosmonaut could manage reentry.

When Soyuz I reached an altitude of 23,000 feet, a parachute was supposed to deploy, bringing Komarov safely to earth. However, the lines of the chute had gotten tangled during the craft’s reentry difficulties and there was no backup chute. Komarov plunged to the ground and was killed.

There was vast public mourning of Komarov in Moscow and his ashes were buried in the wall of the Kremlin. Sadly, Komarov’s wife had not been told of the Soyuz I launch until after Komarov was already in orbit and did not get to say goodbye to her husband.

Despite the dangers, both the Soviet Union and the U.S. continued their space exploration programs. The U.S. landed men on the moon just two years later.

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Rocket causes deadly fire on aircraft carrier

Year
1967
Month Day
July 29

A fire on a United States Navy carrier stationed off the coast of Vietnam kills 134 service members on July 29, 1967. The deadly fire on the USS Forrestal began with the accidental launch of a rocket.

During the Vietnam War, the USS Forrestal was often stationed off the coast of North Vietnam, conducting combat operations. On the morning of July 29, the ship was preparing to attack when a rocket from one of its own F-4 Phantom jet fighters was accidentally launched. The rocket streaked across the deck and hit a parked A-4 Skyhawk jet. The Skyhawk, which was waiting to take off, was piloted by John McCain, the future senator from Arizona.

Fuel from the Skyhawk spilled out and caught fire. The fire then spread to nearby planes on the ship’s deck and detonated a 1,000-pound bomb, which killed many of the initial firefighters and further spread the fire. A chain reaction of explosions blew holes in the flight deck and had half the large ship on fire at one point. Many pilots were trapped in their planes as the fire spread. It took a full day before the fires could be fully contained.

Hundreds of sailors were seriously injured and 134 lost their lives in the devastating fire. Twenty planes were destroyed. It was the worst loss of a life on a U.S. Navy ship since World War II. Temporary repairs were made to the ship in the Philippines before the Forrestal headed back to Norfolk, Virginia. It was repaired and put back into service the following April, but never returned to Vietnam.

John McCain narrowly escaped the fire and, afterwards, volunteered for duty on the USS Oriskany. Just three months later, his plane was shot down over North Vietnam and he was taken prisoner. He was not released until five-and-a-half years later, in 1973.

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Thousands protest the war in Vietnam

Year
1967
Month Day
October 21

In Washington, D.C. nearly 100,000 people gather to protest the American war effort in Vietnam. More than 50,000 of the protesters marched to the Pentagon to ask for an end to the conflict. The protest was the most dramatic sign of waning U.S. support for President Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Polls taken in the summer of 1967 revealed that, for the first time, American support for the war had fallen below 50 percent.

When the Johnson administration announced that it would ask for a 10 percent increase in taxes to fund the war, the public’s skepticism increased. The peace movement began to push harder for an end to the war—the march on Washington was the most powerful sign of their commitment to this cause. The Johnson administration responded by launching a vigorous propaganda campaign to restore public confidence in its handling of the war. The president even went so far as to call General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, back to the United States to address Congress and the public. The effort was somewhat successful in tempering criticisms of the war. However, the Tet Offensive of early 1968 destroyed much of the Johnson Administration’s credibility concerning the Vietnam War.

The protest was also important in suggesting that the domestic Cold War consensus was beginning to fracture. Many of the protesters were not simply questioning America’s conduct in Vietnam, but very basis of the nation’s Cold War foreign policy.

READ MORE: How the Vietnam War Empowered the Hippie Movement

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