"So the The Wolf King Of L.A. and There's A Riot Goin' On were both recorded in the same studio. John Phillips bought Jeanette McDonald, a Hollywood actress, a mansion in Bel Air. And he illegally built a studio in the attic, which was huge. I guess there were building restrictions, but he just wanted to build a recording studio in there. He recorded the album in that place. Now coming on to the transcendent, joyous, pop glory of The Mamas & The Papas, The Wolf King Of L.A. is a very strange album. I think John was hanging out with Gram Parsons and as a result, the record is a country-soul-pop album. In The Mamas & The Papas, he was writing for a pop audience and I guess that was a message to Michelle Phillips because they're both adulterers, I think. John would write a song and get Denny Doherty to sing it because he knew he was having an affair with his wife. John was quite a dark guy! They were very personal songs, but also universal because he was writing for a pop audience. But with Wolf King, he went solo. Phillips became deeply addicted to heroin, coke and everything else. He was a very advanced drug addict. Wolf King Of L.A. is a very soulful album. John wrote and arranged the songs for The Mamas & The Papas but his voice was hidden in the mix as Denny and Michelle had incredible voices. But on this album, it's just his voice. And I believe that the session musicians were Phil Spector's Wrecking Crew and are the same guys who played on The Mamas & The Papas records. They loved John Phillips and thought he was a fucking great guy. It's one of those records I haven't stopped playing for 30 years and a great document of rock and LA culture in the late '60s. It's also got a great cover with John wearing a top hat standing on Malibu beach with the sun setting looking absolutely wasted."

"Take great care with this documentary film of an all-day concert staged by John Phillips in small-town Monterey, California, for it holds within it the greatest single performance by any electric-music instrumentalist you have ever seen, or are likely to: the U.S. debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Known as the man who revolutionized the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix appears onstage in this film a man possessed. As David Bowie sang in “Ziggy Stardust”: “He could lick ’em by smiling/ He could leave ’em to hang/ They came on so loaded, man/ Well hung and snow-white tan/ . . . He was the nazz/ With God-given ass/ He took it all too far/ But boy could he play guitar.” Never will you see a performance so sensual. There are many great films to be found of Jimi playing, but none to rival this. In Monterey Pop, there are many performances worth watching, seminal, even—Janis Joplin, Otis Redding among them—but they are all just warm-up acts to Jimi, the greatest rock-and-roll star to ever tread the boards."

"Most people think that the concert at Altamont was the antithesis of Woodstock. But one of my students at UCSB recently commented that you could tell a lot about what went wrong at Altamont by watching what went right at Monterey. I couldn’t agree more . . . It’s fascinating to watch both of these films and compare what happened just a few years and less than a hundred miles apart. First off, Monterey Pop, which may be my favorite of all Criterion DVD packages. The booklet is printed on nature-rough hippy-grade paper stock that you would have first encountered on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, in the form of a free press or psychedelic poster on a telephone pole, and later on your thrift-store coffee table with a pile of pot about to be rolled next to it! Yes, it is this evocative! The DVD box set includes amazing outtake performances with Laura Nyro, Quicksilver Messenger Service, TINY TIM (!), and Buffalo Springfield . . . and another DVD, Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey, contains the complete performances by Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding (with commentary by the ever-enlightening Peter Guralnick, who knows the history of Memphis musicians better than anyone alive). The accompanying doc of a conversation between record producer Lou Adler and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker is such a coup—not only do you hear how the concert came together and how it was organized during the entire event, but you also get to hear Lou Adler’s story. A lot of people don’t know (although smarty-pants me did) that Adler started his music career with Herb Alpert, as songwriting and producing partners . . . and he has awesome stories of Paul McCartney hanging out at Cass Elliot’s house in Laurel Canyon . . . There’s endless music-nerd gold like that! The color in the film is all that psychedelia had to offer—vibrant, otherworldly, and hyperreal. There’s an innocence throughout Monterey Pop that exceeds the “positive vibes” of Woodstock a few years later and that is of course completely nonexistent in Gimme Shelter. You can also see in Monterey Pop the cops in the crowd (who were replaced by Hells Angels at Altamont) and SEATING! My student pointed out there were folding chairs on the lawns at Monterey—very civilized. Now that wasn’t throughout the concert grounds, but it was more in the tradition of the Newport Folk Festival than the mayhem to follow in Altamont. Also like Newport, the performers were in the audience—they were not in some rarefied backstage area, cut off from the fans or their fellow performers—and you get to see the moment when Mama Cass Elliot in the audience has her mind blown by the powerful performance of young Janis Joplin. There’s a fabulous interview with Papa John Phillips, who cofounded the event with Adler, and a gorgeous photo exhibit by photographer Elaine Mayes. Gimme Shelter director Albert Maysles was one of seven cameramen on Monterey Pop. And I need to point out that you do see a few Hells Angels on the lawn toward the end of Monterey Pop. So the Angels already had a presence at large outdoor rock events that far back. I’ve talked to a lot of people who were at Altamont as performers, friends of bands, and audience members, and the consensus is that nothing in this film was manipulated in the least: the vibe was bad from the very start, and the filmmakers didn’t create that in the editing room. Interestingly, the film is shot much darker than the saturated colors in Monterey Pop—but then again colors were becoming less vibrant in pop culture and fashion at that time too. But interestingly—here you have some of the same players—you have Jefferson Airplane, who are almost humble on the Monterey Pop stage (despite the fact that Grace Slick shows off her powerful rock pipes at Monterey—she was the first true female rock singer and very underrated in my opinion), having to stop their set at Altamont when singer Marty Balin is dragged off the stage and beat up by the Hells Angels. The Grateful Dead play a soothing jam at Monterey and don’t even make it to the stage at Altamont. Chris Hillman with the Byrds plays an evening set to the Monterey audience, and in Gimme Shelter his band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, only get two songs done before the mayhem drives them off the stage at the Speedway. Watching Charlie Watts listening to the interviews with the promoter and with Hells Angel Sonny Barger makes Watts your favorite member of the band if he wasn’t already . . . His quiet devastation over the murder at his band’s concert is profound to witness (and you do feel as though you are let in on a very private event)."