It began, as reveries tend to begin for me these days, with a lazy afternoon and a pair of headphones. I had put on audio from the Monterey International Pop Festival of June 1967, and within the hour I was doing something I’ve never done before: deeply missing music I had essentially never heard.
A poster for the digitally remastered documentary The Beatles at Shea Stadium, originally released in 1966.
Next year will mark 60 years since those three days in California. Sixty years since a 24-year-old man walked onto a fairground stage; made the electric guitar do things it had no business doing; and then, as if to underline the point with an exclamation mark, set the instrument on fire. Jimi Hendrix would be gone in three years, dead at 27 from an accidental overdose. He had been a recording artist for barely four years. What those four years contained is still not fully reckoned with.
Listening to the surviving audio — which is extraordinary even in its imperfections, filtered through 58 years of degradation and digital restoration — I found myself aching to have been there. Not as nostalgia, really. As something sharper. The warm California evening of June 18, 1967, had already delivered Otis Redding in a lime-green suit, his voice not a voice so much as a physical phenomenon, climbing from tenderness to gospel urgency to something close to ecstasy in the space of a single song. Redding would be dead in six months, at 26, killed when his plane crashed into a Wisconsin lake. That knowledge, from this distance, is almost unbearable.
And then Hendrix. Opening with Killing Floor, he served notice that this was not going to be entertainment in the conventional sense. His guitar amp’s feedback became a melody. The hand-painted Fender Stratocaster bent sound into shapes that had no names yet. Mouths in the audience gaped. At the end, he knelt before his amplifier, poured lighter fluid on the guitar, and set it alight. The crowd, which had been screaming, went momentarily silent in the face of something that felt not like a performance so much as ritual.
To have stood in the fairground at that moment… what would it have meant?
Permit oneself the fantasy and it is hard to stop. My mind began drifting through the decades, assembling a list of concerts I would have given anything to attend; gigs that now live only in grainy photographs and footage, fragmentary recordings, and the fading testimony of those who were lucky enough to be present.
New York’s Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965: The Beatles play to 55,600 people and nobody, not even the band, can hear anything over the collective hysteria. The footage shows four young men from Liverpool looking at each other and laughing, playing to a wall of sound that was not music but pure communal longing made audible. There is something both magnificent and heartbreaking about it.
Woodstock, August 1969: Not the romanticised myth but the actual event — half a million people, collapsing infrastructure, extraordinary music. Sly and the Family Stone at 3 am, turning exhausted, mud-caked strangers into a single dancing organism. Jefferson Airplane in the strange, grey dawn. A generation briefly organised around something that, at the time, it could not quite name.
Barton Hall, Cornell University, May 8, 1977: The Grateful Dead, on a night when everything connected with a grace that was inexplicable and unrepeatable. By the informal consensus of Deadheads — the kind who have spent decades amid bootleg cassettes and trading networks — this is considered the greatest rock concert ever performed. About 8,000 people were there. Everyone else has spent the years since wishing they had been.
Closer to home, Ravi Shankar at All India Radio’s Delhi studios in the late 1950s, when his mastery of the sitar was luminous and searching.Ustad Bismillah Khan at a Varanasi ghat as evening fell along the Ganga, the shehnai rising over the sound of the river, the kind of performance that existed only for the people present and then dissolved into the atmosphere.
These are periods for which the archive is thinner, the recording technology either absent or inadequate, and the fading testimony of witnesses all that remains. The argument for somehow recovering or recreating them is now strong.
Which brings me to the question that my drifting mind kept circling back to: Could it be? Could technology actually put us there?
The honest answer is, not yet. But the distance between “not yet” and “yes” is shrinking. AI-enhanced audio restoration has already done extraordinary things with degraded recordings. The surviving Monterey audio is partly the product of algorithms that have learned to reconstruct frequencies that time ate away. Visual restoration tools are turning cracked and overexposed 8mm footage into something one can actually watch. Research into holographic projection is advancing steadily.
The fuller vision of the dream — an immersive reconstruction that puts the viewer in the Monterey fairground, feeling the sun on their skin, and the press of the crowd and its buzz — remains some distance away. But it isn’t science-fiction anymore. Museums are building immersive historical environments. Archives are collaborating with AI researchers on reconstruction projects. The direction that this technology can take is clear.
When that technology matures, it will offer a kind of twisted time travel: Standing in that fairground, we will be heavy with the knowledge that the man kneeling before his burning guitar will be dead in three years. We will know just how singular this event is, because we know it will not come again.
I am moved by the thought of what this might be like: to sit cross-legged at a Varanasi ghat as the shehnai rises over the river, feeling a pang not of exclusion any more, but of an understanding of just how ephemeral the moment is.
I find I am willing to wait for the technology that might make this possible. And willing to believe that it is coming.
(To reach out, email sanjoy.narayan@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
