Monterey Pop

There were a lot of pop music festivals from the late 1960s that still had a lot of mystique when I was growing up years later, the wild performances, the crazy jams, the noted spontaneity, the inspired exclamations. 

Monterey Pop features a lot of cool acts some of whom may still resonate today, Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Ravi Shankar.

With a monthly subscription to Apple Music of Spotify it's easy to listen to old bands, to everything they released in many cases, I listened to over 50 Miles Davis albums last winter.

Festivals like the Monterey Pop were growing in popularity in the '60s, and I suppose peaked with Woodstock in 1969, at least I don't recall another one boasting that 500,000 people showed up, the mass peaceful gatherings losing momentum after the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in late 1969, when a Hells Angel murdered a fan, picking up steam here and again the ebb and flow, unpredictably pulsating in subsequent decades thereafter. 

It's fun to "discover" new bands at music festivals by waiting around and checking out the different stages, stopping to listen to the ones whose music you like, noting their names then finding their discography.

I hope artists can still make money off of Apple Music etc., it seems like they must have made a lot more when they were selling albums, but I don't really understand how it works, although I've heard that you have to tour to cash in these days.

I think A.I is hoping to put writers out of business as well, although Data from Star Trek gives me hope, he's a brilliant android who tries to make art but can never sincerely manifest feeling (I imagine the A.I books of the future will be technically profound while lacking the captivating emotion you find with writers like Dickens or Proust [it's scary how quickly they can write something though]), I imagine this will therefore make A.I novels less thrilling and leave open a wide market for human writers and musicians. 

Glad A.I can't play football.

Or fix the fridge.

Or scuba dive.  

So much cool in the present as well.

Mixes and blends, infinite fascination.