For three days in June 1967, the Monterey County Fairgrounds held the festival that everything after would be measured against.

Monterey Pop was the first of its kind — the rock festival as the world would come to know it — organized by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, producer Lou Adler, and publicist Derek Taylor. Over June 16, 17, and 18, it introduced America to a run of performances that would become legend: the first major American appearances of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Who, the large-scale breakout of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Otis Redding playing to a vast, mostly white rock audience for the first time. Ravi Shankar played an entire Sunday afternoon. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Simon and Garfunkel, Country Joe and the Fish, the Butterfield Blues Band, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Quicksilver Messenger Service — the bill reads like a census of the moment. Roughly fifty-five thousand people came, with perhaps ninety thousand present at the peak, around midnight on the Sunday.

**The poster is stranger than its reputation.** Tom Wilkes designed it, and the central image is not a photograph of a band or a piece of psychedelic drawing at all. It is a photograph from about 1906 of Maud Allan as Salomé — the Canadian-born dancer whose *Vision of Salomé* toured Europe and Britain in the years before the First World War, performed in a costume she designed herself that was brief enough to scandalise audiences. Some people were reportedly so offended they saw the show twice, in order to get the details right for their letters to the editor.

Sixty years later her image sold the Summer of Love. It is a genuinely odd choice and a revealing one: the poster artists of 1966 and 1967 raided Victorian and Edwardian sources constantly — Mouse and Kelley's Zig-Zag man, Wilson's Beardsley-derived lettering, Singer's Michelangelo — and Monterey's defining artifact is a picture of a woman who had shocked Edwardian London.

It was printed on foil stock at Western Lithograph in Los Angeles, in two sizes. The large one, about 19 by 35 inches, was made for the street: posted around Monterey and the Bay Area, which is why most surviving copies carry tape marks and tack holes. The smaller, about 12¼ by 21⅜, carries Wilkes's credit in the upper right and a ticket outlet strip along the bottom. Foil is an unforgiving material and nearly every original that survives is creased.

If the Red Dog Saloon two years earlier was the seed, Monterey was the bloom — the moment the San Francisco underground walked out onto a national stage and the rest of the country leaned in to look.