Fall 2025

112 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 2 5 his own invention that are the best songs of their style since Woody Guthrie’s.” The 2024 film “A Complete Unknown” depicted the Dylan/Baez duo at the festi- val, albeit in a venue that through the magic of movies only vaguely resembled the his- toric arena made famous a few years later when the Monterey Pop Festival took place there. Fun fact: Two other seminal 1960s musicians would appear at both Folk and Pop Festivals. A pre-Big Brother and the Holding Company Janis Joplin was- n’t a featured performer but made a stir by singing at several of the informal “hootenannies” that sprang up around the oak-studded fairgrounds property. Future Grateful Dead founder and guitarist Jerry Garcia played banjo with bluegrass outfit The Wildwood Boys. According to jerrygarcia.com , he also entered an amateur banjo contest during the festival. He finished second. Several sources claim that Dylan and Baez became inseparable after that Monterey Folk Festival experience, seen canoodling under the spreading limbs of the bucolic fairground’s majestic oak trees. But before that fire was lit, they had actu- ally met earlier, in April 1961 at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village when Dylan opened for bluesman John Lee Hooker. Baez owned a hillside home in Carmel Valley around this time. She wrote in her memoir “And a Voice to Sing With” (in an odd switch of tenses in which the narrative becomes like a personal letter to Dylan) “We went to coffee houses on Cannery Row, drove up and down the Big Sur coast and bought an upright piano for $200.You stood at the big kitchen windows with your typewriter perched on the waist-high adobe structure and faced the hills.” She maintains that he wrote “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word” and Already a star, folk singer Joan Baez was an early booster of Dylan’s career. They became lovers and Dylan spent time exploring the Monterey Peninsula area and Big Sur with Baez from her Carmel area home. Dylan was nearly a complete unknown when he performed at the Monterey Folk Festival. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo