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By Ted Liebler from Scram #16 While the highly documented Monterey International Pop festival continues to be remembered as the crowning and turning point event of the 1967 Summer of Love, another pivotal festival took place just two weeks before the John Phillips/ Lou Adler/ Andrew Oldham-directed affair. On June 2nd and 3, 1967, the celebrated Summer of Love kicked off with the KFRC Fantasy Fair & Magic Mountain Music Festival at the summit of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, CA. The festival presented a line-up teeming with pop gems, starring many bands simultaneity floating on the then open-ended AM and FM airwaves of the time. Canned Heat, Every Mother's Son, the Merry-Go-Round, the Mojo Men, the 5th Dimension, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Seeds, the Blues Magoos, and the Byrds were just a few of the acts which shared the stage with icons like Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and Captain Beefheart. Over 15,000 people attended. The charity festival, benefiting the San Francisco Hunters Point Child Care Center, is also fascinating because it was assembled by a commercial AM radio station, just as the FM free-form cadre were gearing up for their eventual coup. KFRC 610, being the big RKO-Bill Drake "Boss" Top 40 AM radio station in San Francisco, had the universal clout to pull in counter-culture bands/ heads, commercial bands /casual listeners, and all those in-between. (Incidentally, the festival seemed to be sort of an adult playground with its concentric domes display and a giant Buddha balloon greeting the attendees when they were dropped off at the summit by "Trans-Love" buses. In darker foreshadowing contrast, it's also rumored to be the first festival to use the Hell's Angels as security.) Alec Palao wrote of the fair in Cream Puff War #1: "The dichotomy in Bay Area music was never so evident, as the self-proclaimed "adult" scene separated itself from the "teen/pop" scenes." Paradoxically, Greg Shaw recalls that there was not really a large gap splitting the radio preferences of the teens and the hip until Tom Donohue's free-form KMPX fully flowered in the fall of '67. "Being a KFRC event, it probably attracted some younger fans who wouldn't have minded Mother's Son , with the older hippies coming for their own reasons, if only a groovy day out in the sun." |
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