There have been 20 live event professionals who have received the industry’s highest honor, and arguably the most colorful character in this cast of colorful characters is one Edward Herbert Beresford Monck – a.k.a. Chip Monck. Chip celebrated his birthday Friday, March 5, turning 82. The Parnelli Board of Advisors sent their best wishes and eternal gratitude for all this prolific pioneer has done for the industry.
When reached in his native Australia, typical of Chip, his thoughts were of the present and future, not the past. “Isn’t it great? Everywhere you look there’s another opportunity that one can apply the same intelligence, care, and re-tool,” he wrote in an email. “Define or create the need. It’s the same as we’ve always done, but now it’s UV-C disinfection, W/Osram tubes [etc.]. The opportunities sit in little piles, begging for order/arrangement.”
Called “the grandfather of rock and roll production,” he was part of almost every major pop-cultural event from the 1960s on. The short list includes The Village Gate in the early ’60s with folk musicians like Peter Paul and Mary and comedians like Bill Cosby; Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan went electric; Altamont, loosing teeth at the hand of a Hells Angel’s pool cue as the Angel tried to make off with the trademark stage carpet (which he had co-designed); the Stones historic early tours; Bangladesh; Rumble in the Jungle; a Tony nomination for his work on The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Bette Midler’s Divine Madness Tour; Vegas; the Los Angeles Olympics; and Pope John Paul’s historic mass at Dodger Stadium to just name a few.
You can read the PLSN article on Chip here. Also, go here, and scroll through to the second page and watch the short documentary we did on him for the Third Annual Parnelli Awards in 2003. And of course, he pops up in our Keep the Torch List: 20 Years of the Parnelli Awards, an 18-minute look back at the awards we did in lieu of getting to be together this year.
While he has been on so many important tours and shows, he is forever cemented in pop culture for his work at Woodstock where he went from being the LD to being a reluctant Master of Ceremonies; from the article:
As the sun was getting out of bed on August 15, 1969, sharing itself with Max’s farm, it dawned on the organizers that they forgot a detail: there was no master of ceremonies. Co-producer Michael Lang perused the mélange of musicians, roadies, technicians, and hangers-on before pointing the fateful finger at LD Chip Monck. The masters of ceremonies needed to be larger than life, be able to calm, be able to excite, be a babysitter, and be a cop. For those who have seen the documentary, apparently the shirt was optional.
“I was petrified,” Monck says. “But I got to the point where I was practically paternal in some periods of dire emergency: ‘Shut the f*** down—do you have any idea what you’re doing?’” So there he is, in the Woodstock documentary, making the infamous announcement:
“The warning that I’ve received, you might take it with however many grains of salt you wish, that the brown acid that is circulating around is not specifically too good. It is suggested that you stay away from that. But it’s your own trip, be my guest. But please be advised that there’s a warning, okay?”
“In 1978 I had the immense pleasure of working with Chip on Bette Midler’s European tour,” says Parnelli Awards Chairman Marshall Bissett. “Every day was an intense lesson in stagecraft and theatre history. His encyclopedic knowledge of stage mechanics and electrics earned him the respect of local technical directors in every city we played. His talent for calling follow spots while running manual lighting consoles was unmatched. For an encore, he could recite the three-letter code for every airport in the world.”
