Featured performers include Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Hugh Masekela, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, the Mamas & the Papas, the Who (who also besides Hendrix destroyed equipment on stage), and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, whose namesake set his guitar on fire, broke it on the stage, then threw the neck of his guitar in the crowd at the end of "Wild Thing".

The American Broadcasting Company put up a $200,000 advance to get a film made about the Monterey Pop Festival for its new ABC Movie of the Week series.

[4] When Sony Video released Monterey Pop on videocassette in 1986, Pennebaker created three one-inch tape masters struck from a 16mm negative he had "wet-gated", a process in which sponges remove particles and also place a fast-drying chemical on the film that fills in scratches.

Unveiled in 1968, Pennebaker's vision of the 1967 event was instrumental in convincing potential organizers and participants that music was the healthiest way to crystallize the energy of a counterculture that by then seemed both blessedly inevitable and dangerously embattled.

"[5] French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard was so taken with Jefferson Airplane's performance in Monterey Pop that later in 1968 he set out to make a never-finished film titled One A.M. (for "One American Movie") in collaboration with Pennebaker and Leacock.

[7] In 1969, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld pitched an idea for a recording studio in Woodstock, New York, to businessmen John P. Roberts and Joel Rosenman.

In the documentary Woodstock: Now and Then, Rosenman said the proposal suggested that the studio would encourage occasional rock concerts in the town.