Aquarius Wept [Altamont]

Aquarius Wept

http://www.esquire.com/features/altamont-1969-aquarius-wept-0870

August 12, 2009

And flights of Angels sang Meredith Hunter to his rest. After
Woodstock and love came Altamont and disaster, and after Altamont
came its definitive history in the pages of Esquire (now available
for the first time online).

By Ralph J. Gleason
Originally published in the August 1970 issue

Everybody had heard of The Rolling Stones, but until the day they
played a free concert at the drag strip, nobody but hard-core
auto-racing fans in Northern California had ever heard of Altamont.
Even the press, trying to sort out what happened there that day, was
unable to figure out whether Altamont was in Livermore or Tracy, the
two nearest suburban towns.

Altamont is just a name on a map, a former flag stop on the Western
Pacific Railroad, with a garage (W.J. Armstrong, Summit Garage,
Altamont, California) and an abandoned church, and it's miles from
the Altamont Raceway where the concert was held. The Raceway is in
the crotch of the hills at the southeast end of the Livermore Valley,
on the south side of the eight-lane freeway Interstate 580, about
fifty miles east of Oakland. The day The Rolling Stones played there,
the name became etched in the minds of millions of people who love
pop music and who hate it as well. If the name "Woodstock" has come
to denote the flowering of one phase of the youth culture, "Altamont"
has come to mean the end of it.

It was the largest gathering of people in modern California history.
As many as 300,00 may have been in attendance. And what happened was
that a man was killed there, knifed and beaten to death within twenty
feet of Mick Jagger as he was singing Under My Thumb. The victim was
Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old black man, and his attackers
were Hell's Angels, the outlaw motorcycle gang. The murder took place
within the bright circle of light illuminating the performance area
and before the cameras of the Maysles brothers, who were making a
documentary film. The film shows clearly that Hunter had a gun in his
hand before he was stabbed. The film also reveals the knife. Alan
Passaro, twenty-five years old, has now been indicted by the Alameda
County Grand Jury. Dozens of others in the audience were beaten and
maimed by Hell's Angels using pool cues for weapons, a girl suffered
a near-fatal skull fracture from a full beer can thrown by someone in
the crowd, performers were knocked senseless or harassed by Angels in
several brawls, two young people afterward were killed by a
hit-and-run driver while they were sitting by a campfire, and a
fourth was drowned in a ditch. No one but the lunatic fringe of the
underground press has yet suggested that Meredith Hunter's murder and
the other accidents were anything but results of irrational
spontaneous violence, but one of the producers of the documentary
film, an associate of the Maysles, commented excitedly after seeing
the initial rushes, "We've got an In Cold Blood that wasn't staged."

Altamont has become the most significant act ever to be associated
with rock music. Its repercussions have resulted in at least four
California county ordinances banning large gatherings unless special
and prohibitive measures are taken, and there are two bills in the
California legislature proposing the same thing. The murder occurred
in the early dusk on December 6, 1969. At the end of February, 1970,
there had yet to be an arrest. Since Altamont lies in an
unincorporated area, the County Sheriff has jurisdiction, and the
Alameda County Sheriff's office put two men on the case. They
interviewed dozens of people, subpoenaed the Maysles' film (and
refused to show it to newsmen) and gathered together hundreds of
photographs taken at the event. Yet even though the murder took place
in full view of hundreds of people and was photographed and filmed,
the Sheriff's office was slow in making an arrest. Critics of the
Alameda County Sheriff's Department claim that a détente exists
between the Angels and most of the police departments of the East Bay
(Oakland and Alameda County). They point to the occasion when Hell's
Angels interfered in an anti-draft march in 1965 at the city line
between Berkeley and Oakland. The Oakland police at that time allowed
the Angels through their lines to attack the marchers (the Berkeley
police defended the marchers, one Berkeley officer suffering a broken
leg in the melee). That story's follow-up ­ how the Hell's Angels
were then turned on to LSD by Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey and how
they later became the guardians of the children at the Great Human Be
In in Golden Gate Park ­ is part of the San Francisco rock mythology
which ended abruptly at Altamont.

Ralph "Sonny" Barger, chief of the Bay Area Angels, he who had sat
with Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg in the front row of the Bob Dylan
concert in Berkeley, he who had danced to the rock bands at a hundred
dances in the Avalon, the Fillmore and California Hall, went on KSAN,
San Francisco's underground FM station, the night after the Altamont
murder and said, "We were told if we showed up, we could sit on the
stage and drink some beer that the Stones' managers had brought us,
you know. And I'm bum kicked about the whole thing. I didn't like
what happened there. We were told we were supposed to sit on the
stage and keep people off, and a little back, if we could. We parked
where we were told we were supposed to park. Mostly, a little bit to
the side of the stage so that people who were there didn't have to
move back too far.

"Personally, I was there to sit on the stage and listen and drink
this beer that we were promised. I didn't go there to fight. I went
there to have a good time and sit on the stage. Finally, the Stones
come out and they start playing. Everybody's having a good, good
time. All of a sudden, someone down in front, where this one bike,
right directly in front, was, is yelling. I myself jumped down there
and the wiring has shorted out somewhere. The bike had caught fire.
The people were packed right up to the stage. So I told them to back
up so we can get this fire out. Nobody'd back up. Some other Angels
caught what was happening and came off the stage, and when they did,
people started backing up.

"Now I ain't saying anything about no Angel hit anybody. I know some
of them hit people. But they moved them people back out of the way of
the bike. And we got the fire put out. In the process, you know what,
some people got hit. And you know what? Some of them people were like
maybe them Friday-nighters that got that front row, I don't know, but
they didn't want to give up that spot even to put that fire out. And
when they come back fightin', they got thumped. And a lot of time
there was six or seven Angels on one guy, and a lot of times there
wasn't. After that happened, we got the fire out. And everything was
cool. The people moved back in again."

Barger claimed people started knocking over the Angels' bikes. "Now I
don't know if you think we pay fifty dollars for them things, or
steal them, or pay a lot for them, or what. But most people that's
got a good Harley chopper got a few grand invested in it. Ain't
nobody gonna kick my motorcycle. And they might think because they're
in a crowd of 300,000 people that they can do it and get away with
it. But when you're standing there looking at something that's your
life, and everything you got is invested in that thing, and you love
that thing better than you love anything in the world, and you see a
guy kick it, you know who he is. And if you got to go through fifty
people to get to him, you're gonna get to him.

"We moved them people to save that bike. And, after that, they tried
to destroy our bikes, and we're not gonna stand for it. And that made
it personal...You know what? I'm a violent cat when I got to be. But
I don't really want to be. But there ain't nobody gonna take anything
I got and try to destroy it. Mick Jagger, he put it all on the Angels.

"Look, I ain't no cop. I ain't never going to ever pretend to be a
cop. I didn't go there to police nothing. They told me if I could sit
on the edge of the stage so nobody would climb over me, I could drink
beer until the show was over. That's what I went there to do...I'm no
peace creep, by any sense of the word, and if a cat don't want to
fight with me, don't want to hassle with me, I want to be his friend.
If he don't want to be my friend, then out of sight, don't even talk
to me. But if he don't want to be my friend and he's gonna get in my
face, I'm gonna hurt him, or he's gonna hurt me. And you know what?
It doesn't really matter if he hurts me, because I've been hurt
before. And I've been hurt by experts. Over the years, though, I've
learned how to get up and do it again."

The Angels haven't done any talking since, and they specifically
won't talk to the press. The underground, which means non-Angels who
are close to Angels, says that even within the Angels' community
there have been repercussions. Some officers of the San Francisco
club, for instance, are said to have dropped out, and other Angels,
faced with a new kind of crisis, have left. One Angel, Terry the
Tramp, who was close to the rock bands (he was one of the investors
in the Carousel Ballroom which The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson
Airplane operated for a brief time before Bill Graham, the
ever-expanding entrepreneur of San Francisco's rock, took it over),
committed suicide in mid-February with an overdose of sleeping pills,
driven by the murder, his friends say, to emotional collapse. When
the Angels confiscated the luxurious carpet on which Jagger had
performed, Terry the Tramp returned it.

It is clear, too, that the tight group loyalty among the Angels and
their fans has begun to erode. Passaro's identification proves that.
The sequence from the film showing the knife-wielding Angel was blown
up and prints were shown to Angels and witnesses. For almost three
months no one would admit knowing who it was who held the knife, but
finally someone talked. Police at the time of the indictment would
not say who had made the identification. Passaro, who has a police
record for theft dating back to 1963, was, ironically, already in
jail when indicted. He had been arrested in San Jose in July, 1969,
for the sale of marijuana and for theft, had pleaded guilty to the
former, but sentencing was held up to await disposition of the
latter. He had been free on bail at the time of the Altamont killing.
Between the killing and his indictment, he had pleaded guilty on the
theft charge and was sent to jail. He was the only Angel indicted,
although there is the strong possibility other indictments will
follow, now that the identification block has been broken. The
Maysles' film clearly shows Angels stomping Hunter after the
stabbing, and police feel that identification of them may now be
relatively easy.

Whatever they say now, the significant thing about the Alameda County
Sheriffs on the evening of December 6, 1969, when the huge crowd
gathered at Altamont, is that they were not there. Only two
eyewitnesses have ever mentioned seeing any uniformed police officers
anywhere that night, and the Sheriff says he had no plainclothesmen
at the event. Bill Belmont, who was equipment manager for The Rolling
Stones' coast-to-coast tour and who was on the Altamont site for more
than twenty-four hours before the show began, says there simply were
no police, at least not before the show began, when he went looking
for some. "We had to get an emergency highway-patrol permit to bring
in a crane to lift the big light towers into place and I jumped into
my Rover and went looking for a cop and I couldn't find one. I
eventually ran out of gas!"

Although there were no police at the concert site, there were
security guards. One group consisted of half-a-dozen or so
short-haired musclemen wearing golf jackets. These had flown out the
night before from New York. And there were guards to protect the
Altamont grounds. The rest of the security force consisted of Hell's
Angels. They sat on the stage, lined the area in front of it, and
controlled access to the backstage area. At nine the morning of the
concert (which began close to noon) drunken Hell's Angels were
brawling and cavorting and throwing full beer cans, according to Ron
Schneider, the New York personal manager who had arranged The Rolling
Stones' coast-to-coast concert tour and was functioning as the
Stones' business manager. "I was terrified," Schneider said after the
concert. "There was even a fight between the Frisco Angels and the
Angels from San Jose. We were petrified to death. Even our own people
were getting beat. We couldn't control anyone."

When The Rolling Stones decided to return to active touring and,
especially, to return to the U.S., the idea of a free concert in San
Francisco was already implanted. Mick Jagger facetiously said at one
press conference that he was all for a free tour, but the other guys
needed the money! Guitarist Keith Richards, in London before the tour
and later, emphasized his desire to appear free in one or preferable
more concerts. What actually happened was that the Stones' management
put together a tour which, far from being free, was one of the
highest-priced in the history of U.S. concert tours as well as being
one of the most successful and profitable (the Stones reputedly made
four hundred thousand dollars).

As the story began to break in the various rock-oriented underground
papers and in the overground columns, it developed that the Stones'
management had, in the Stones' name, made exorbitant demands on
promoters all over the country and even inserted clauses in the
contract saying that there could be no student discount for tickets.
One of the most unusual parts of the contract was the demand that the
concert promoter in each individual area put up the entire guarantee
upon signing the contract, rather than half on signing and half the
night of the concert, as is customary. This meant that promoters had
to tie up thirty, forty, and sometimes fifty thousand dollars for
weeks in advance. Michael Lydon in Ramparts claims that the money was
then leased out in short-term notes for eight and a half percent, but
no one will admit it now.

Jagger held a press conference when he arrived in Los Angeles and was
asked about the prices. He shrugged of the question saying, "We can't
set the price of tickets, I don't know how much people can afford."
But later, those who were in the inner circle say, he was furious,
just as he became furious when anyone spoke of his $250,000 London
house or the royalties from his records and songs. Actually, the
contract with the promoters said ticket prices were subject to
approval by "the artist."

One reason the Stones and Jagger were very sensitive about money was
that they had been adopted by the New Left as musical revolutionary
spokesmen, supplanting even Dylan and certainly taking over from The
Beatles. (John Lennon had said, "If you go carryin' pictures of
Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.") Jagger
had sung about the "songs of marchin', chargin' feet," in Street
Fighting Man and the Stones had long been the symbol of hard-edge
battle against pretense and straight-world hypocrisy. "Please allow
me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste..." Jagger sang
in Sympathy for the Devil.

So it is not surprising that there were increased rumblings about the
Stones' ticket prices and about the ethics of the extraordinary
profits from their tour. Emissaries kept trying to reach the Stones
to ask them to play free. Actually, Jagger and his associates were
discussing the idea of a free concert in Los Angeles and San
Francisco. Rock Scully, once the manager of The Grateful Dead but now
free-lancing as a proselyter for the San Francisco hip scene, made
contact with Sam Cutler, then Mick Jagger's confidant and chief of
staff for the commercial tour. Scully, Emmett Grogan and other San
Franciscans even approached the Stones midway in the tour for money
for other free concerts not involving the Stones.

Finally, Sam Cutler made a trip to San Francisco to scout out the
terrain. It was all supposed to be hush-hush; the affair was to be
spontaneous and as intimate as possible. Scully proposed that the
Stones merely show up on a weekend night and play a set at the
Fillmore Ballroom with no advance notice. ("What a trip!" he said
excitedly.) Scully and Grogan contacted the San Francisco City Parks
& Recreation office concerning the possibility of allowing free music
in Golden State Park on a weekend in December (after the Stones' tour
was over) without saying what they had in mind. Nothing was decided,
because the Parks people were leery of commitment.

As the tour ground to a close, the San Francisco contingent plotted
the logistics of the magic event. Emmett Grogan and Scully had it all
worked out. Grogan's solution to the first problem raised by the
Stones ­ how to keep the musicians from being mobbed and possibly
hurt by their audience ­ was to involve the Hell's Angels. "We'll
have a hundred Hell's Angels on their Hogs escort the Stones into
Golden Gate Park. Nobody'll come near the Angels, man. They won't
dare," Grogan said.

Although by this time the Angels seemed like a normal part of the San
Francisco scene, they had never before been put into such a position
of authority, a position where authority was loosely defined, and in
the exercise of which they were to get a truckload of free beer. On a
radio broadcast the night after the concert, the secretary of the
Frisco Angels, a motorcyclist called Pete, said on the air that Sam
Cutler had approached the Frisco Angels about two weeks before the
December 6 date and asked them to be a kind of security force. "We
were asked to do this thing and we did it. If we say we're going to
do something, we do it. Cutler, he was real sincere, and he offered
us $500 worth of beer to do this thing...when people ask us to do
something, if we decide to do it, it's done. No matter how far we
have got to go to do it."

By the time the Stones' tour ended it was obvious that Golden Gate
Park was out. The story of the possible free concert had been broken
in the Los Angeles Free Press by John Carpenter who got it from
Stanley Booth, a Memphis rock writer who was on the Stones' tour
doing a book about them. Booth, and then Jo Bergman, Mick Jagger's
personal assistant, said it was all set. The story appeared in the
L.A. Free Press and then the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The City Parks & Recreation people denied any plans for Golden Gate
Park. Instead, they suggested the possibility of one of the unused
Federal forts in the San Francisco area, Fort Funston, for instance.
Then the Stones' regular business managers came into the picture and
promised the local planners they would get some other site. The first
one they picked was the Sears Point Raceway, and auto-racing track
well-known in Northern California. It had a natural amphitheatre,
good fencing for crowd control, and isolation from areas the crowd
might damage. The management of Sears Point accepted the free-concert
idea, pending approval of the three cities near the site, Vallejo,
Napa, and Novato.

By noon on Thursday, December 4, a stage had been built and huge
towers for the lights were being erected. "We only had $2500 from the
Stones," Rock Scully says (Bill Belmont says $15,000), "the rest was
all donated. People just gave us things." Chip Monck, who had staged
the Stones' concerts and the Woodstock Festival, put together the
huge structure with a volunteer crew. Then everything went wrong

There had been some indication of crossed wires a few days before
when the question of the film rights to the event was brought out. In
New York, a spokesman from the Stones' businesses office said that
the money from the film would go to one charity. In San Francisco the
organizers spoke of Vietnam orphans, or war relief. Finally there was
talk, mostly from New York, of using the money to buy a piece of land
where concerts could be held free anytime. Jagger, it developed,
would not get involved in the Vietnam situation. "That's yours," he
is reported to have said to some of the Americans talking to him.
Next it turned out that Sears Point was owned by Filmways, the
holding company which also operated Concert Associates in Los
Angeles. Concert Associates had booked the Stones in Los Angeles, the
group had reneged on an arrangement to play a second concert there,
and the feeling between them was hostile.

Filmways representatives flew up from Los Angeles and met with the
Stones' business agent Ron Schneider and others and were said to have
abrogated the original agreement to allow the concert to take place
at Sears Point. "The Filmways people demanded a huge liability
insurance and $100,00 rent, or distribution rights to the film," Ron
Schneider said. "All they were interested in was the money." No
agreement was possible. And so late Thursday afternoon, at a press
conference in the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco, it was announced
that the Sears Point concert was canceled and that an alternate site
would be sought.

By this time, the operator of the Altamont drag strip, Dick Carter,
had entered the scene. Carter's Altamont was a fairly new enterprise
and, in another of the bizarre coincidences of this entire affair,
had been selected by James Wynn, a student at Stanford, as a
requirement for a course in Small Business Administration, to see how
Wynn could further the racetrack's business. They had talked about
having small rock concerts at Altamont before the Stones came to San
Francisco, and when Wynn heard that the Sears Point concert had been
canceled, he called Carter, who in turn called concert headquarters.
Melvin Belli then learned of the offer and contacted Carter, who
said: "Use Altamont and use it free. There's no way we'll lose money.
The added publicity, all over the Bay Area, is enough alone to
compensate for the canceling of our regular program. And, anyway, we
stand to make a lot of money on our own concessions. We're stocking
up good for the expected throng of kids."

Chip Monck went out to Altamont late Thursday night, returned and
agreed rather reluctantly that it would do. Early the next day trucks
and helicopters carried all the stage equipment from Sears Point at
the top of the Bay down through the East Bay cities and fifty miles
on out to the rolling hills of Altamont. "When I got there in the
morning, Friday, I took one look at it and said, I think it was to a
radio crew from a Sacramento station, that it wouldn't do," Rock
Scully recalls. "It was terrible. It was just a drag strip. There
were junk cars and wrecks and broken glass all over. I said we'd have
thousands of people with their feet cut from the broken glass alone."

But the magic of the idea of a free Rolling Stones concert had taken
hold too deeply for it to be stopped now. Even the previous night,
when Sears Point was canceled, the throng had been gathering.
Long-haired kids walked out along the country roads to Sears Point.
Volunteer workers were arriving and offering their services. When the
deal was made for Altamont, the two top-40 radio stations, KFRC and
KYA, told their listeners about it minute by minute. Local television
plugged the concert on Friday as did the afternoon San Francisco
Examiner and the suburban afternoon papers. Saturday's San Francisco
Chronicle put the new on the front page, and the rush was on.

People started arriving before dark on Friday night, Bill Belmont
says. "We announced to everybody that the gates wouldn't open until
the next morning, but they came anyway." Helicopters buzzed around
the site like bees, bringing in people. Mick Jagger got to San
Francisco that evening, went on the air from his hotel and then drove
to Altamont in a rented limousine with his managers. They ran out of gas.

At the site "it was like a Boy Scout Jamboree," Belmont says. "People
had little official pink cards, cut in half, as identification. We
had a tent and the Dead's family was cooking. We fed the crew great.
Ribs. Open fires. Mick and Keith walked in after their limo ran out
of gas. Keith stayed all night. He didn't worry. There was no
security at all then. They had a great time and everybody else did that night."

Some people drove on to Tracy or back toward the hills, to Livermore
or Pleasanton, to stay overnight in motel in order to get a good
start for the site in the morning. Hundreds of other just camped out
wherever they were.

The media was set to see Altamont in a sunny light, a sort of reprise
of Woodstock's good vibes. But good vibes were scarce on Saturday,
December 6. Bill Thompson, manager of the Jefferson Airplane, and
Chet Helms, of the Family Dog, described Altamont ­ the motorcycle
racetrack and Demolition Derby site ­ as a permanent holding ground
for tense vibrations. One of the underground weeklies pointed out
that the moon was in Scorpio and it was a heavy day! The Stones
arrived by helicopter and walked, flanked by their mysterious New
York musicians guards, through the crowd, when a long-haired youth
ran at Jagger screaming, "I'm gonna kill you! I hate you!" He slugged
Jagger in the face. Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an
ill omen for the day. The truth was that the kind of time one had at
Altamont depended upon where one sat. If you got there early and sat
down near the stage, you saw the concentration of Hell's Angels, saw
them beating people, and had a nasty feeling from the beginning.
"That was an ugly crowd," Rock Scully says. "When you'd get up to go
to the john, you'd get karate chopped on the legs as you stepped
through the crowd." Even the Hell's Angels complained that the crowd
was ugly enough to make uncomplimentary remarks about Hell's Angels.
When the last Angel contingent came riding through about
midafternoon, a girl in the crowd said something with an edge to it.
One of the Angels stopped his bike, turned to the girl riding behind
him and said, "You gonna let he say that about a Hell's Angel?" The
Angel's girl got off the bike and belted the girl who had made the
remark, then remounted and rode down to the stage.

"The people who weren't near the stage had a good time," Bill Belmont
says, but that wasn't always true either. Barry Olivier and his wife
and son, for instance, had gotten there midmorning, driving on a back
road after staying overnight in a motel to get an early start. "The
drive in was the most interesting part of the day, in some ways.
Hundreds were walking, I'm sure they didn't know how far it was. Many
others were parking along the road, and in a few places we had to
squeeze between parked cars, almost scraping on one side or the
other. They were parked one deep on one side and two deep on the
other, on a very narrow road to start with. There were some waits,
perhaps up to twenty minutes in a single spot at one time. Many were
hitching and other jumping on top of car hoods or even tops.

"A big manned balloon was just being inflated as we came over a rise
and saw the crowd. It was smaller than I thought it would be and the
people seemed less in a mood of anticipation than I had expected they
would. We walked down toward the denser part of the crowd before
determining to go up to the rear, where we could sit down easily and
spread out without being crowded. People back there did seem more
relaxed, and we spread our blankets and paraphernalia and sat down.
It was about ten or fifteen feet between small groups and individuals
at the back, perhaps 250 yards from the stage ­ which we had a hard
time making out at first, even with good binoculars brought along for
the purpose.

"Just about fifteen minutes after we got settled in our spot at the
back, the music began. Immediately the sound problem struck me as
overwhelming ­ that was the single most important factor in keeping
us from really enjoying the day. You just couldn't hear the music ­
although you could understand the announcements. I hoped they would
get it fixed, but they didn't while we were there. Another very
negative element was the announcer (Sam Cutler, I discovered later).
He spoke very condescendingly to all of us in the gathering and he
was negative from the outset. Instead of talking with us as though we
were in this together and would help each other, he talked at us, as
though we were some kind of unmanageable beings which were as likely
to cause trouble as not.

"Right away everyone became aware that trouble was breaking out
around the stage, as the music stopped repeatedly during Santana's
opening part, and then again during the Airplane's ­ although back
where we were it was not apparent how bad the vibes were down there.

"We walked around some and dug the people, some of whom were very
interesting, some very bummed out, most were extremely neutral ­ just
kind of waiting for the show. Shortly after we had sat down, a heavy
nude guy came walking down from behind us and of course right on down
toward the stage. He was the only nude we saw all day ­ and that also
surprised me. I though there would be more people sans clothes. The
motorcyclists were riding quite near people, coming as close to us as
one foot away ­ just to show their prowess and skill, I figured. The
constant buzzing of helicopters plus the light aircraft (I counted as
many as seven planes and helicopters over us at one time) made the
experience seem unpleasant, too. At first it was kind of exciting,
but after a couple of hours it got to be a drag."

At about three p.m., the Oliviers left. Curiously enough, many others
were leaving at this point too, although the Stones had yet to go on.
Elsewhere in the crowd at the back, Sister Mary Korte, the poet, felt
the bad vibrations from people near her, but many others had a great
time. The only real problem back on the hill was when someone stepped
on you or your food.

At the stage site, things became increasingly chaotic. People tried
to climb onto the stage. A hysterical, topless girl, huge breasts
flapping, tried to get onstage and the Angels pulled her down.
"Angels were throwing people off the stage all afternoon," Belmont
says. "I was terrified." Several times the musicians tried to calm
down the crowd. "Every time the bands played a violent song there was
trouble," poet John Thomson said. "Only the Flying Burritos played
without any trouble at all. There was trouble when Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young sang It's Been a Long Time Coming, and when the Airplane
sang The Other Side of This Life. Marty Balin, the Airplane's lead
singer, jumped offstage into a group of Angels and tried to stop them
from beating up a young black man. He was joined by Airplane manager
Bill Thompson, Belmont, and several others. One of the Angels decked
Balin and when Thompson asked, "What did you do that for?" replied,
"He spoke disrespectful to a brother Angel." Paul Kantner, still
onstage, asked, "What's going on? They're beating up on my lead singer!"

It has never been established whether or not this black man was the
one later killed. In any case, the incident was typical. Somebody
would move, yell or take some action that would draw a stream of
Angels offstage like a swarm of bees into a struggling mass.

Denise Jewkes, a singer and guitarist with the Ace of Cups ("An All
Lady Band," their business card reads), walked down near the stage to
join some musician friends. Suddenly a can of beer thrown by someone
(Hell's Angels played catch with full beer cans all afternoon) hit
her above the eye. Bloody and dazed, she wandered around trying to
find out how to get to the Red Cross tent. She saw Jagger and the
Stones go onstage, but she was too hurt to listen. Finally she found
a doctor who saw she was seriously injured and managed to send her to
the Livermore hospital where, she says, dozens of young people,
bum-tripped, beaten, or cut, were gathered.

The medical facilities for the huge crowd were clearly inadequate
despite heroic efforts of a volunteer crew for the Medical Committee
for Human Rights. "We had less than twenty-four hours to plan a
medical presence there," said Dr. Richard Fine, acting assistant
medical director of the San Francisco General Hospital outpatient
department. "We mustered nine physicians including several
psychiatrists, twelve registered nurses, and some forty medics. We
were terribly undersupplied. We got four vans there with medical
supplies and almost immediately had to send out for more. There was
an amazing lack of concern by the kids for their own health. Pregnant
women, some overdue, walked miles getting into the place." Dr. Fine
charged "totally irresponsible management" and called the event "a
reprehensible act by The Rolling Stones, the various managers and
promoters." No children were born there, he said, despite the claims
by those in charge that three babies arrived. "They were just trying
to balance off the deaths that occurred."

Late in the afternoon, as the sun began to dip back of the range of
hills that lies between the Livermore Valley area and the San
Francisco Bay, it got cold, but most of the crowd was determined to
wait for The Rolling Stones. There was a long wait, almost three
quarters of an hour, before the Stones went on. It was just like one
of their regular concerts across the country where, in every
auditorium from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Auburn, Alabama, they had
titillated the audience with a long wait, a dramatic tease to bring
the crowd to a fever pitch before they appeared. Just before the
group went on, photographer Jim Marshall, standing alongside Sam
Cutler, heard him say to an Angel, "Just do what you have to do, and
don't let anybody get near the Stones." This corroborates the story
the Angels told on the radio later ­ Cutler and the Stones were
worried that screaming teeny-boppers would tear them apart. They came
on in a burst of energy, surrounded by Angels and their own New York
guards. The crowd roared.

It was becoming dark and the lights illuminated the stage and an area
around it. A black man suddenly was involved in a scuffle with an
Angel, then a stream of Angels flew off the stage, clustered around
him. There was a flash, he waved in the air, ran away from the stage
and fell to the ground, Angels on top of him.

Mick Jagger was singing. The music stopped as the fighting erupted
and Keith Richard put down his guitar and yelled, "If you don't cool
it, we're not going to play." Jagger said, "Brothers and sisters,
come on now...everybody just cool out, everybody! Come on now." He
leaned over the side of the stage, "Are you all right?" he asked. The
Stones started again and then again stopped. "Why are we fighting?"
Jagger cried. They played and they begged the crowd to control
itself. "We need a doctor and an ambulance," Jagger said, as he urged
the crowd to let the medics through.

The Stones continued their set with the audience screaming and
shouting and the Angels faithfully following their orders. As the
group went into their final numbers, and the film crews ground away,
Meredith Hunter lay unconscious and dying. Robert Hiatt, a medic
resident at the San Francisco Public Health Hospital, had carried
Hunter backstage. "He had serious wounds," Hiatt said. "It was
obvious he wasn't going to make it." Dr. Richard Baldwin, a volunteer
in charge of the medical facilities, said, "There's nothing they
could have done to save him." Around eleven that night, Hunter's body
was delivered to the coroner's office. The autopsy the following day
showed that everybody knew: he had been stabbed and beaten to death.

The Sunday Examiner/Chronicle covered the story as if it were another
Woodstock gathering of peace and love and grass. Television did the
same all that night, playing down the death and the violence. The
Examiner crew had to get back to write their stories before the
Stones went on and they had been programmed to see it as "300,000 Say
It With Music." The Monday morning Chronicle, on the other hand, had
plenty of time to assimilate what had happened and they ran the
pictures of the Angels wielding pool cues and long stories about the
violence, the beer, and the drugs.

Jagger, who was visibly shaken when he left Altamont, was reached
later that evening at the Huntington Hotel. "I know San Francisco by
reputation. It was supposed to be lovely here ­ not uptight. What
happened? What's gone wrong? If Jesus had been there, He would have
been crucified."

The aftermath of Altamont is still evolving, after months. "Altamont
socked it to a lot of people," Rock Scully said. And Bill Thompson,
the Airplane's manager, remarked that "a lot of personal
relationships were burned behind Altamont." The event challenged the
basic "do-your-own-thing" ethic on which the whole of San Francisco
music and hip culture had been based. "It wasn't just the Angels. It
was everybody," one young lady said later. "There was no love, no
joy. In twenty-four hours we created all the problem of our society
in one place: congestion, violence, dehumanization. Is this what we want?"

The Alameda Board of Supervisors began an investigation, not of the
lack of police surveillance nor of the murder, but of the possibility
that the use permit on which the Altamont strip operated should be
revoked. Eventually it was not revoked, but explicitly made invalid
for rock concerts and huge gatherings. The Alameda Sheriff's
Department began its investigation. Immediately after the event Ron
Schneider claimed that the Stones had a $5,000,000
liability-insurance policy, but no one has been able to make any
contact with the musicians to collect for hospital bills or damages.
A group of Alameda County ranchers filed a $900,00 damage suit
against the Altamont Raceway, The Rolling Stones, and practically
everybody else.

Jagger and The Rolling Stones surfaced in London a few days after the
concert. Jagger remained silent, but Mick Taylor (the new Rolling
Stone) told the press he had been terrified, and Keith Richard was
quoted as saying it was, on the whole, a good concert.

Nobody ever did quarrel with the music the Stones played at Altamont.
Let it bleed is the title of their most recent album and it fitted
the occasion. They played like men possessed. Two months later Tom De
Vries, who had covered the event with a cameraman for local
educational TV, said it had taken him until just then to realize
that, despite all the carnage he had witnessed, The Rolling Stones
were the best goddamned band he had ever heard.

Underneath the speculation and the comparisons to Woodstock there
lies the feeling that Altamont was a bummer from the beginning. It
was conceived in error and organized in haste. Bill Graham blames
Chip Monck for building the stage so low people could get on it from
the audience. Timothy Leary notes that power-mad and ego-mad people
gravitated to the stage and that the microphone was not utilized for
community needs, as it had been at Woodstock, but to lecture and to
scold. Leary also points out the difference in drugs between Altamont
and Woodstock; at Altamont, there was alcohol, speed, and heroin, and
Jagger himself was drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels onstage.

Out at the site, the Altamont Raceway looks abandoned. There is no
trace of The Rolling Stones concert. Across the street, there are
some new no trespassing signs, and at the nearest crossroads café,
about a half mile on the other side of the freeway, the bartender, a
short man with a pencil-thin moustache, says he doesn't remember
anything about it at all. In fact, he says, "I wasn't even here
then." In back of him there is a fly-specked sign which reads: "Try
this pot, it's loaded with sausages steamed in beer." In the corner
the jukebox stands. There are over a hundred records on it. None are
by The Rolling Stones.

"There are some things which aren't true even if they did happen,"
Ken Kesey once said. Altamont is like that.

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