AV: The Monterey Pop Festival (June, 1967) literally propelled Big Brother & the Holding Company into the national limelight. What are your recollections of that event which were captured on film by D. A. Pennebaker and showed the frenetic show-stopping performance of Janis?PA: It was a three day festival with lots to see. It was a real, uplifting experience for the band, particularly Janis. It also gave us a chance to meet a lot of the other bands as well as Brian Jones and Paul Simon. We also got to work with John Phillips and his wife Michelle who were directly responsible, along with Lou Adler, Derek Taylor and Johnny Rivers, for organizing the festival. In fact, Lou Adler must have spent weeks mixing down Wally Heider's twenty-four track recordings. It is really good.Strangely enough, there was never an album released with the performances, other than individually, whereas Woodstock generated a lot of LP sales. This was because nobody signed releases. The only releases signed were for the Pennebaker film.Perhaps Lou Adler could put together an album or CD since he's already done the mixing. All he would have to do is edit the commercials and the interviews. The music, by itself, is pretty darn good.Whenever I talk about the Monterey Pop Festival, I always try to dispel the notion it was a hippie festival. It really wasn't. It was totally unlike Woodstock in several ways. First of all, the venue only held 20,000 and those were the entire grounds. Each seat was a reserved seat and there were ushers along with a map to find your seat. When you see the film and notice the dress and hairstyle, there is maybe only one out of twenty people with long hair and most of them were onstage. There were a couple of people who had their faces painted, but those were the exceptions.Another thing that made Monterey different from Woodstock was nobody made any money. It was a benefit. Everybody played for free. I don't think there has been another concert like it.Pennebaker has so much footage, I wouldn't mind seeing a nine or ten hour movie or have it put out on video. There are several acts you don't see on the film because they didn't sign the release. There's the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Johnny Rivers, and Moby Grape who put on a wonderful performance.One of the most important results of the Monterey Pop Festival was that all the San Francisco bands received national press. We thought our band was known all over the country, but it was only in the counter-culture press. Joe Schmo and his wife Flo in Oshkosh had never heard of Janis Joplin. When it came out there was tremendous coverage in Newsweek and Time.The festival also got Bob Shad off his ass to release our first album. By then we had progressed even further and wanted to change some things that had been recorded, but he went ahead and released it anyway. It was released in August and reached a respectable #60 on the charts. Of course, the festival also brought us to the attention of Columbia's Albert Grossman (Bob Dylan's manager) who signed on as manager of the group. This led to Columbia buying out our contract with Mainstream in March of 1968.