A rock festival, pop festival or rock fest is considered to be a large-scale rock music concert, featuring multiple acts performing a sometimes diverse range of popular music including rock, pop, folk, and related genres. As originally conceived in the late 1960s, rock festivals were held outdoors, often in open rural areas or open-air sports arenas, fairgrounds and parks, typically lasted two or more days, featured long rosters of musical performers, and attracted very large crowds. However, as soon as they became popular, promoters took considerable license with the terms “rock festival” and "pop festival", and some events advertised as such took place in indoor arenas on a single evening featuring only a handful of acts.

By no means the first outdoor music festivals, rock festivals nevertheless took on a unique identity and attracted significant media attention when they first appeared. Preceded by several precursor events in the San Francisco area, it is generally acknowledged that the first two rock festivals were staged in northern California on consecutive weekends in the summer of 1967: the KFRC Fantasy Fair & Magic Mountain Music Festival on Mount Tamalpais (June 10-11) and the Monterey International Pop Festival (June 16-18). The concept caught fire and spread quickly, not only across America but the world.

The Monterey International Pop Music Festival was a three-day concert event held June 16 to June 18, 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. Monterey was the first widely promoted and heavily attended rock festival, attracting an estimated 55,000 total attendees with up to 90,000 people present at the event's peak at midnight on Sunday.

The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large scale public performance of Janis Joplin, and the introduction to a large, predominantly white audience of Otis Redding.

The Monterey Pop Festival embodied the themes of California as a focal point for the counterculture and is generally regarded as one of the beginnings of the "Summer of Love" in 1967, along with the smaller Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival held at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County a week earlier. Monterey became the template for future music festivals, notably the Woodstock Festival two years later.

Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and songwriter from Port Arthur, Texas. As a youth Joplin was ridiculed by her fellow students due to her unconventional appearance and personal beliefs. She later sang about her experience at school through her song "Ego Rock". Early in her life, Joplin cultivated a rebellious and unconventional lifestyle, becoming a beatnik poet. She began her singing career as a folk and blues singer in San Francisco, playing clubs and bars with her guitar and auto-harp.

Joplin first rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of the psychedelic-acid rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later as a solo artist with her more soulful and bluesy backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band. She was one of the more popular acts at the Monterey Pop Festival and later became one of the major attractions to the Woodstock festival and the Festival Express train tour.

Janis Joplin only charted five singles in her life but her hits and other popular songs from throughout her short four year career include "Down On Me", "Bye, Bye Baby", "Coo Coo", "Summertime", "Piece of My Heart", "Turtle Blues", "Ball 'n' Chain", "Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)", "Maybe", "To Love Somebody", "Kozmic Blues", "Work Me, Lord", "Move Over", "Cry Baby", "A Woman Left Lonely" "Get It While You Can", "My Baby", "Trust Me", "Mercedes Benz", "One Night Stand", "Raise Your Hand" and her only number one hit, "Me and Bobby McGee".