Otis Redding Watched Janis Joplin From the Wings at Monterey. He Said One Thing Before She Went On. D

Monterey, California, June 17th, 1967. In the wings of the outdoor stage at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, Janis Joplin was standing in the dark waiting to go on. The crowd beyond the stage was 50,000 people. She had performed in front of crowds before in bars, in clubs, in the rooms that Big Brother and the Holding Company had been playing since the San Francisco music scene began assembling itself in 1965 and 1966.

But not like this. Not this many people, not in this context, not with this specific weight of what was at stake. The Monterey International Pop Festival was not just a concert. It was a statement about where popular music was and what it was becoming and who the people were who were making it. The lineup was a document of a moment.

The Mamas and the Papas, who had helped organize it, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Ravi Shankar, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with a singer that most of the country had never heard of and that the people who had heard of her were still in the process of understanding. Standing in the wings in the minutes before she went on, Janis Joplin was aware that this was different.

She could feel it, the way you feel a change in atmospheric pressure, not through thought, but through the body registering something the mind has not yet processed. She was not alone in the wings. Otis Redding was there. He had been watching her. Otis Redding arrived at Monterey as the most successful soul singer of his generation.

He was 25 years old. He had released five albums since 1964. He had toured constantly, had built a reputation on the rhythm and blues circuit that was comprehensive and undisputed. A voice of enormous physical power and emotional directness. A stage presence that had been developed through years of performing in rooms that did not give you the option of being less than completely committed.

Soul music in 1965 and 1966 did not reward half measures. Neither did Otis Redding. He was also, at Monterey, crossing into a world that had not yet fully seen him. The rock and pop audience that would fill the Monterey fairgrounds was not entirely the same audience that had been packing venues on the soul circuit.

Otis Redding was not unknown to this audience. He had crossed over in various ways. His music had been heard places. But Monterey represented something specific. A moment when the wall between soul and rock was going to be tested. And the test was going to happen in front of 50,000 people. He was prepared for this.

He had been preparing for it his entire career. The voice he had developed, the stage presence he had built, the specific combination of physical power and genuine emotional access that made his performances different from simply being loud. All of it was exactly what the Monterey audience needed, even if they did not yet know it.

But first, he was in the wings. And Janis Joplin was about to walk on stage. And he was watching her prepare to go out there. The Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967 was the first large outdoor rock festival in American history. The word festival sounds ordinary now. It has become an ordinary part of the musical landscape.

In June of 1967, it was not ordinary. It was an experiment in the idea that the music being made in the previous 2 years by a loosely connected group of artists and bands and movements in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and London was important enough to gather in one place and present to a large audience as something worth taking seriously.

The people who organized it, John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, Lou Adler, the record producer, had understood something that the mainstream music industry was only beginning to process. That what was happening in popular music in 1967 was not a trend or a fad, but a genuine cultural shift. And that the audience for that shift was large enough and serious enough to fill an outdoor venue for 3 days in Northern California.

The performers were not paid. This was intentional. The festival was structured as a charitable event with proceeds going to music education programs, but the artists who agreed to perform, and most who were asked said yes, understood that what Monterey offered was not money, but something harder to quantify.

Visibility, context, the specific legitimacy that comes from being placed by the people who decide these things in a room with other people who are understood to matter. Janis Joplin was in that room. Most of the 50,000 people in the audience had never heard her name. What he said to her in those last minutes before she walked on stage is the kind of detail that exists in several versions.

Each version slightly different in its specifics, consistent in its essential shape. The accounts come from people who were nearby, crew members, bandmates, photographers working the wings, the few who were in the specific geography of the backstage at that moment. The consistent shape is this. Otis Redding said something to Janis Joplin in the minute before she went on stage that was neither a compliment in the conventional sense, nor a piece of technical advice.

It was a recognition, a recognition of the specific thing she had, the quality of her voice and her performance that set her apart from other voices and other performers. The thing that the Monterey audience was about to encounter for the first time. He told her that they were about to find out what she was, and he told her to let them find out.

This is the kind of thing that one serious performer says to another. Not encouragement in the way of someone who is trying to manufacture confidence, recognition in the way of someone who has seen the thing clearly and is naming it. He had watched her from the wings for long enough to understand what she was about to do out there, and he wanted her to know that he understood it.

She did not say much in response, according to those who were nearby. She did not need to. She walked out onto the stage at Monterey, and then the song began. Janis in the wings before Monterey was not the woman who would walk off stage an hour later changed by what had just happened to her. She was still in those minutes the woman who had been building toward this without knowing it was coming who had spent two years in San Francisco doing exactly this kind of work in front of much smaller crowds who had been absorbing her education through the specific school of performing live night after night in rooms that ranged from welcoming to indifferent to actively hostile. She was not a settled performer in the way that settles into arrogance or complacency.

She was a settled performer in the way that settles into a kind of clear-eyed understanding of what she was and what she was capable of. She had been doing this long enough and hard enough to know what she had. She also knew standing in those wings that she was about to be asked to produce it in front of an audience and a context that were unlike anything she had previously encountered.

The internal landscape of a performer in the minutes before a major performance is not simple. It is not simply nervousness and not simply confidence but something more complicated than either. A state of heightened alertness that is close to both without being fully either. She was ready in the way that readiness feels when it has been earned through actual work rather than assumed through expectation.

But she was also in the particular territory that precedes something you cannot predict. Otis Redding had been in that territory. He had been there many times. He recognized it when he saw it. He walked over to where she was standing. Otis Redding performed at Monterey the following day, on June 18th.

His performance has become one of the defining documents of his career. The recording of it shows a singer at the absolute height of his powers, commanding a rock audience that had not previously claimed him, delivering the evidence that the wall between soul and rock certain people had believed to exist was not a structural wall, but a temporary one built from assumptions that his 45 minutes on that stage dissolved permanently.

He and Janis Joplin did not share a stage at Monterey. They shared the wings and a conversation and the specific understanding that exists between two performers who are doing the same fundamental thing from different directions. The thing of using a voice with zero reservation, of giving the song everything the song asks for, and not holding anything in reserve for the sake of looking controlled.

Otis Redding died in December of 1967, six months after Monterey, in a plane crash over Lake Monona in Wisconsin. He was 26 years old. Janis Joplin died in October of 1970. She was 27. Two of the most genuinely committed vocal performers of the 1960s, both of them gone before 1970 was finished. Both of them at Monterey in June 1967, when the thing they were each separately doing was most visible to the widest audience.

They had met in the wings. One had said something to the other before she went on. What happened after she went on, what the world heard and went on hearing for the next 50 years began in that conversation. What happened when Janis Joplin walked onto the Monterey stage in June of 1967 has been described many times by many people in many different ways.

The descriptions are consistent in one thing. They all reach for language that the writers acknowledge is inadequate to the event. The crowd that had been waiting for Big Brother and the Holding Company, a crowd that included some people who knew the band, many who had heard of them in the context of the San Francisco scene, and a large number who had no particular frame of reference for what was coming, received something they were not prepared for.

She sang Ball and Chain. The song is a blues song. Big Mama Thornton wrote it. Thornton recorded it. The lineage was clear to anyone who knew the tradition. What Janis did with it was not cover it, not reproduce it, not pay tribute to it in the careful way of a performer who understands the material from the outside and is showing that understanding. She inhabited it.

She was inside it. The specific quality that Otis Redding had seen in the wings, the absence of distance between the singer and the song, was present in front of 50,000 people in exactly the way it had been present in the wings. The crowd responded in a way that crowds respond when they encounter something they were not prepared for.

Not with the kind of enthusiasm that a familiar song produces, with something quieter and more significant. The specific stillness that happens when a large group of people receives something simultaneously that none of them can quite account for. 50,000 people and among them, in the wings, Otis Redding.

Watching what he had told her to let them see. The story of Otis Redding and Janis Joplin in the wings at Monterey is not a story about two famous people meeting. It is a story about recognition. The specific act of one artist seeing in another artist the exact quality that makes their work serious and naming it in the minute before the performance that will make that quality visible to the world.

Otis Redding had that quality. He had built his career on it. The absence of distance between the interior and the exterior. The voice as a vehicle for the complete truth of experience. Not the presentation of that truth, but the thing itself. He had learned this through the soul tradition, through years of performing in rooms that demanded it, through a musical lineage that had been developing this specific approach to the voice for generations.

He knew what it was when he saw it. He saw it in Janis Joplin in the wings of the Monterey stage in June of 1967. He told her to let them see it. She walked out and let them see it. And the 50,000 people in that outdoor amphitheater and the many millions who have heard the recording since received something that evening that had been in the music for a long time waiting for the right moment and the right stage and the right voice to deliver it with nothing held back.

Otis said, “Let them find out.” She did. And they found out something they could never afterwards forget.