Side story about Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar, me and my aunt Jean at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival
We moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1965 from a little town near Sacramento where I had grown up. One of the people that my Aunt Jean met within a year or two of us all moving down there was Alla Rakha, the tabla player who played with Ravi Shankar. They dated for three years in the late 60s. He had a wife in India, but I was told that it was okay for him to have a second wife because he was Muslim (they never actually married). Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha would be on tour six for months of the year in the United States, based out of Los Angeles. So I got to go to a lot of Ravi Shankar concerts.
The 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival was by far the most memorable Ravi Shankar concert I got to attend. I was only 14 but I remember a few things very clearly. When Janis Joplin sang the last few lines of Ball and Chain, I was standing on my chair to get a better look and I had tears in my eyes. I was not the only one.
One of the absolutely most precious memories of my entire life occurred at the end of the Sunday afternoon performance by Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha. After they had thoroughly blown everybody’s mind with a several hour-long performance, I went up on the stage with my aunt. I was asked to carry one of the tabla drums that had been put into a bag off that stage, back around behind the stage, to the parking lot and to put it into the trunk of their car. You can get some idea of why this was such a special memory if you listen to this almost 19 minute clip of the very best of Ravi Shankar at Monterey in 1967. The last five minutes in particular are extraordinary. Ravi and Alla Rakha do a back and forth, call and response between the tabla and the sitar that just gets faster and faster and faster. This clip has been viewed over 2 million times, which is about 100 times the number of us in attendance that afternoon.
Note: At 6 minutes and 30 seconds into this clip you get a look at Jimi Hendrix grooving to this Indian music. Just after that is a long close up of Mike Bloomfield who played guitar with the The Electric Flag. He is looking higher than a kite (there was a lot of pure LSD handed out free that afternoon).