In the summer of 1967, Jimi Hendrix was a man entering orbit.
His show-stealing appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June – where he set his guitar ablaze, hammered out feedback sculpted like molten glass, and delivered a performance that felt part ritual, part riot – instantly established Hendrix as rock’s new supernatural force.
He returned to the United States already a sensation in Britain, but Monterey made him a headline-grabbing, culture-rearranging phenomenon in his home country. Critics hailed him as the future of rock; musicians whispered that a new guitar language had arrived. Hendrix, still only a few months removed from obscurity, suddenly possessed a momentum that seemed unstoppable.
Beatlemania in miniature
Meanwhile, The Monkees were riding their own rocket, but on a completely different trajectory. Their TV show had made them America’s most visible pop property: cheerful, hyperactive, and tailor-made for the teen audience that fuelled the late-Sixties’ bubblegum boom. By mid-1967, their fandom resembled Beatlemania in miniature.
Stadiums swelled with shrieking preteens waving signs for Davy Jones. Their albums sold in massive quantities. And although the group often faced criticism for being ‘manufactured’, the Monkees themselves – particularly Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork – were pushing hard for musical credibility and greater artistic control. They loved rock, admired emerging experimental musicians, and wanted to move beyond their TV-show caricature.
That tension between artistic aspiration and mass-market pop machinery is part of what makes the Hendrix-Monkees pairing such a compelling cultural oddity. It was as if two different visions of 1967 collided: the psychedelic underground and the bubblegum mainstream, both booming, both youth-driven, but almost comically incompatible.
But why are we even talking about Hendrix and The Monkees in the same article?
‘We all thought he was extraordinary’
Because, that summer of 1967, these two seeming musical opposites – the feedback-drenched wild man of psychedelia, and the clean-cut teenybop quartet – set out on an unlikely (and short-lived tour together.
The seeds of this bizarre collaboration were sown through a mixture of genuine respect and hard-nosed music-biz strategy. On the one hand, several of the Monkees were already Hendrix fans. Peter Tork, a folk music veteran, had been aware of him from his Greenwich Village days; Mike Nesmith, who had serious rock ambitions, admired Hendrix’s musical daring.
As Nesmith later recalled, ‘We all thought Jimi was extraordinary. We just loved the guy.’ Micky Dolenz, the most effusive of the group, had seen Hendrix perform in New York and was stunned. ‘He was amazing – just unbelievable,’ Dolenz said years later. ‘I told everyone we had to get him on the tour.’
A shot at America’s biggest crowds
Dolenz’s enthusiasm set the wheels in motion. Word reached Hendrix’s manager, Mike Jeffery, who saw a practical advantage. The Monkees were selling out giant venues to tens of thousands of young fans. Hendrix, despite the Monterey buzz, was still playing smaller clubs – and was relatively unknown to the much bigger, more lucrative mass pop audience.
The exposure was irresistible in Jeffery’s eyes. Yes, Hendrix’s music bore no resemblance to the Monkees’ sunny TV pop, but a rising artist simply couldn’t buy an audience that size. Jeffery pitched it as a foot-in-the-door opportunity: a chance to place Hendrix before the biggest crowds in America.
Hendrix’s own feelings were more complicated. He reportedly thought the Monkees were ‘OK for kids,’ and, personally, he liked them. ‘They’re not my bag,’ he said diplomatically, ‘but they’re good at what they do.’ He was flattered that the clean-living four-piece admired his music, and he enjoyed their company. Dolenz remembered Hendrix as ‘funny, sweet, humble – just a good guy to hang with.’
Still, Hendrix was well aware that the pairing made little musical sense. His audience – older, countercultural, acid-tinged – would not be the one screaming for the Monkees. But he trusted Jeffery, and he was eager to keep the Monterey wave rolling. So in July 1967, this strange collaboration clicked into gear. The Jimi Hendrix Experience joined The Monkees on their U.S. tour.
Disaster from the first night
The mismatch was glaring, almost from the get-go. The first show took place in Jacksonville, Florida on July 8, 1967, and the atmosphere was pure Monkeemania: signs, fan clubs, parents shepherding 12-year-olds in homemade Davy Jones T-shirts. When Hendrix walked on stage in his flamboyant psychedelic gear, the temperature changed – but not in the way his manager had hoped.
Eyewitnesses recall a palpable confusion. Kids expecting a colourful, high-octane and, crucially, brief pop singalong were confronted with a barrage of wah-wah distortion, sexually charged lyrics, and blistering improvisations that stretched far beyond radio-friendly attention spans.
Hendrix would launch into the likes of ‘Purple Haze’ only to be drowned out by chants of ‘We want the Monkees! We want the Monkees!’ One young fan later admitted, ‘I had no idea what he was doing. It sounded like noise to me.’ Another recalled that the audience ‘sat there, puzzled… nobody knew how to react.’
The kids didn’t know what hit them
Peter Tork, watching from the side of the stage, found the mismatch surreal. ‘You’ve got this guy summoning demons from the guitar,’ he said, ‘and a sea of 12-year-old girls waiting for Davy to sing “I Wanna Be Free”.’ Micky Dolenz put it even more bluntly: ‘The poor guy. The kids didn’t know what hit them.’
Hendrix was ignored, talked over, shouted at, occasionally heckled, and frequently met with blank confusion. The girls screamed all right – just not for him. Some nights, they screamed through his set, impatient for it to end. One fan recalled her mother whispering, ‘This boy is very talented, but this is not what we came for.’
Onstage, Hendrix tried to lean into humour and provocation. At one show, after another wave of shrieks for the Monkees erupted, he reportedly muttered into the mic, ‘Thank you very much, and goodnight,’ then flipped the audience the finger before walking off early. His distinctive drawn-out guitar solos, which had proved so mesmerizing in a club or festival context, became endurance tests for a preteen crowd accustomed to two-minute TV-show singles.
The tour was ‘killing’ Hendrix
Backstage, Hendrix’s backing band the Experience grew demoralized. Bassist Noel Redding later said, ‘It was ridiculous. We’d finish our set and walk off to silence.’ Chas Chandler, Hendrix’s mentor and former manager of The Animals, was furious, insisting that the whole idea had been a mistake. Even Hendrix, normally serene about adversity, admitted to friends that the tour was ‘killing’ him. The environment simply wasn’t built for the kind of musical communion he thrived on.
Within days, journalists began to notice the absurdity. One review dryly observed, ‘Jimi Hendrix is light years away from The Monkees’ audience’. ‘Hendrix is too real for this crowd,’ another noted. The coverage was sympathetic but underscored the obvious: Hendrix didn’t need Monkeemania anymore. He had Monterey, word-of-mouth buzz, and a growing countercultural following. He belonged in rock clubs and festivals, not bubblegum stampedes.
A rapid collapse
Hendrix bowed out of the tour after just six shows. The official story, publicized at the time, was that the Daughters of the American Revolution had protested against his ‘lewd’ stage act and demanded his removal. It was a face-saving fiction. The truth was simpler: the mismatch was untenable, and Hendrix had enough momentum to walk away. ‘It wasn’t working,’ Dolenz later said with gentle understatement. ‘The kids just didn’t get it.’
The separation was amicable. The Monkees were genuinely fond of Hendrix and mortified that their audience hadn’t embraced him. ‘We loved Jimi,’ Nesmith insisted. ‘We never wanted him to leave. We wanted him to blow the minds of our fans.’ Hendrix, for his part, bore no ill will. He knew the band respected what he was doing, and he enjoyed their company. The Monkees, he noted stolidly, ‘are not bad for what they do.’
So very 1967
Looking back, the Hendrix-Monkees pairing reads like a metaphor for the year it happened. 1967 was a moment of dramatic cultural divergence: psychedelic rock exploding in every direction, youth culture fragmenting into tribes, and pop music transforming faster than audiences could keep up. The Monkees represented mainstream American pop at its most innocent; Hendrix represented the counterculture’s volcanic creative energy. Their brief tour together was a crossroads where those two worlds met – and immediately repelled each other.
And yet, for all its absurdity, the story remains oddly touching. It speaks to the open-hearted curiosity of the period, the chaotic experimentation, and the way artists were reaching across boundaries, even when the results didn’t make commercial or aesthetic sense. It’s also a striking reminder that Hendrix, now considered guitar royalty, once played to crowds who simply didn’t understand him.
The tour ended quickly, but this brief, uncomfortable, culturally revealing collision has lived on for decades – one of the most improbable and unforgettable chapters in rock history.
1967: six defining albums
The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The definitive psychedelic masterpiece. The Beatles abandoned the stage for the studio, using orchestras and tape loops to create a colourful, conceptual world that fundamentally changed how music was produced and perceived.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced
Hendrix reinvented the electric guitar here, blending blues with cosmic feedback. It was a sonic explosion that introduced a new vocabulary of distortion, wah-wah, and raw, virtuosic physical power.
The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico
The dark antithesis to the Summer of Love. Lou Reed’s gritty tales of street life and drug use, backed by Cale’s avant-garde drones, provided the foundational blueprint for all alternative rock.
The Doors – The Doors
The opening salvo from The Doors is a moody, cinematic fusion of jazz, blues, and poetic dread. Jim Morrison’s shamanic vocals and Ray Manzarek’s hypnotic organ transformed the L.A. scene into something dangerous, theatrical, and deeply unsettling.
Pink Floyd – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
The ultimate document of British psychedelia. Guided by Syd Barrett’s whimsical yet fractured vision, Pink Floyd's debut moves from childlike space-fantasies to terrifying, improvisational noise, defining the London underground sound.
Love – Forever Changes
A lush, acoustic-driven portrait of paranoia. Behind the beautiful orchestral arrangements lies Arthur Lee’s lyrical anxiety, capturing the exact moment the hippie dream began to feel fragile and hauntingly uncertain.
Pics Getty Images
