"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."

"A little known '80s band from New York City. They were pretty much unknown to anyone outside of there, too. They used just two basses, a violin and a synth. No drums. They used a little bit of drumming on this album but live they had none at all. That was something which was quite central to The Light In You, where nearly all the songs have two basses going all the time. We grew up with Hugo Largo, we recorded with them and they actually got us our first recording studio gig back in '87. Another band heavily influential to Mercury Rev, very early on. I put it up there with some of the most beautiful, hypnotic music that a number of bands would point to these days. I think Brian Eno released this and had Drum been released or even re-released today, it probably would have had a much larger audience; if Drum was released today it would be album of the year, no question."