L.A. Teen Brings Home Souvenir of a Lifetime From the Summer of Love

Today, rock festivals are just part of the summer landscape. But in 1967, they were totally new.

Forty-nine years ago this weekend, the Monterey International Pop Festival introduced audiences to rock 'n' roll, camping, all-day shows and a little-known guitarist named Jimi Hendrix.

When a bunch of friends decided to take a road trip to the Monterey Pop Festival, Eddie Caraeff wasn’t thinking music. He was thinking pictures.

“I wasn’t a music lover that was there to enjoy the music and take a few snapshots," Caraeff said. "I was there to photograph it -- and I did."

Caraeff was a junior at Westchester High School in Los Angeles. He loved music, but he was crazy about photography. These were the '60s, when the California rock scene was going wild and the radio was going psychedelic. One school night while listening in bed to a local KBLA-AM radio show, "Dave Diamond and the Diamond Mine," Caraeff heard that a band he liked, the Seeds, was coming into LAX the next day.

“LAX was five minutes from Westchester High School,” he recalled. So he drove over on his school lunch hour, hoping to get some pictures.

That lunch break turned out to be his big break -- when an executive from the band's record company noticed him taking photos and asked to see them. The next day, he cut out from school and brought her a cardboard box of prints he'd made up in the school darkroom. She liked them and invited him to shoot the Seeds at the Hullabaloo Club in Hollywood that weekend. There, 16-year-old Caraeff came face to face with rock 'n' roll.

“It was a crazy scene,” Caraeff said. “There were girls on the stage, there were no guards ... the emergency exit door was chained shut. I should have photographed that!”

The band's manager, an English DJ who went by the nickname Lord Tim, saw him taking pictures.

“He grabbed me by my jacket and he said, those better f*ing come out!” Caraeff recalled, laughing. “And you know, they did. And I bought my first Nikon camera with that money.”

So he did it again. And again. And at the end of his junior year, when he heard about the Monterey Pop Festival, it sounded like another good place to get some shots and make some cash. He had no idea -- no one did -- what Monterey would turn out to be.

Held June 16-18, 1967, Monterey was one of the first rock festivals in the United States -- just a week after the very first, --the Magic Mountain Music Festival held on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County. Organized by the Los Angeles band the Mamas and the Papas, the Monterey International Pop Festival was modeled on Monterey's popular Jazz Festivals. But that weekend, it broke the mold.

“The Monterey Pop Festival was a watershed event in the entire history of rock music,” said Joel Selvin, a former San Francisco Chronicle rock critic who wrote a book about the festival, "Monterey Pop."

“This was the end of top 40 acts and the beginning of underground rock in one weekend,” he said.

The three-day, five-show bill featured acts including San Francisco's Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, and Los Angeles' The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, as well as The Who.

The Monterey County Fairgrounds sold only 8,500 tickets, Selvin said, but another 20,000 kids showed up “to sort of hang out in the park nearby.” And so the modern rock festival was born.

Caraeff was there, with a photo press pass he scored through the KBLA underground rock newspaper and a Voigtlander camera he borrowed from his family optometrist. He staked out a chair in the photo pit at the edge of the stage, and watched rock history unfold before his eyes.

“Janis Joplin, I mean right there from my chair-eye view," he recalled. "Otis Redding, that just blew me away. Simon and Garfunkel, that was so great to see that right up close like that, the two of them."

There were a few bands there almost no one had heard of. But a German photographer gave him a tip.

“I remember this vividly,” Caraeff said. “He said, 'save some film for this Jimi Hendrix cat.'”

Monterey was The Jimi Hendrix Experience's U.S. debut, and Hendrix was trying to make an impression. On stage, he was all over the place in a feather boa, ruffled orange shirt and tight red pants, doing backward somersaults and humping the amps. At the end of his set, he capped a cover of "Wild Thing" by lighting his guitar on fire -- right in front of Caraeff.

Hendrix was kneeling over the guitar, coaxing flames from the strings like a snake charmer.

“The thing's burning right in front of my face,” Caraeff recalled. He held the camera in front of him to shield his face from the heat and pulled the lever to advance the film. It stuck -- he was at the end of the roll. He had one more shot.

He took it, and with it, took his own piece of rock 'n' roll history.

Caraeff's final shot that night has lasted a lifetime. Rolling Stone chose it for the cover of its Monterey Pop 20^th anniversary issue in 1987, and it made the cover again for a special edition in 2012. It traveled around the world with the photo exhibit "Who Shot Rock 'n' Roll" from 2009-2013. Caraeff said it is his most famous photo -- and that's saying something.

Nearly 50 years after that night in Monterey, Caraeff is flipping through his archive, showing me photos from a long career that started on his high school lunch break and took him around the world as a professional rock photographer and record album art director.

He photographed and designed more than 200 record album covers in the '60s, '70s and '80s. His archive holds 300,000 photos of artists including Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Elton John and '70s rockers Three Dog Night, with whom he toured as official photographer. He has so many photos of Hendrix he's planning a whole book of them, due out next year. The story of Monterey was one of his first, but far from his last.

Now, he's started on a new adventure. After a long career as a photographer and an even longer one in the restaurant business, last year Caraeff got what he calls a “health wake-up call” and decided to make a change. He sold his house in Santa Monica and all his stuff, and he hit the road for what he calls his “bucket list trip,” living and traveling full time in his Volkswagen camper, "Moonbeam."

It's tight quarters, but with all the comforts of home. Moonbeam is tricked out with a rug from Nepal, solar lights and a kitchen rack with 21 different spice jars. Caraeff even has a satellite phone. There are no rock 'n' roll photos on the walls. “Photos of my grandkids,” he offered with a smile.

But the musicians he photographed are always with him, in the music he plays on the road. “It's like the soundtrack to my life.”

And when he turns on the radio, it’s 1967 all over again: The Hombres' "Let it All Hang Out" comes over the speakers, and Caraeff starts singing along. He's heading up the coast on another summer road trip. He said he plans to drive right past Monterey -- and keep on going.