ALTAMONT - WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

[Note: This is the full, unedited version of a story I wrote titled Deadly Day for the Stones, published in the Panorama section of The Canberra Times, on 5 December, 2009.  It is based on interviews I conducted with Sam Cutler, Road Manager for the Rolling Stones; Chip Monck, Stage Manager for The Rolling Stones; Rock Scully, Manager, Grateful Dead; Robert Altman, photographer; and Albert Maysles, documentary filmmaker.  Enjoy.]

Ooh, the storm is threatening my very life today

If I don’t get some shelter, I’m gonna fade away

A Hells Angel stands on the edge of the stage, chewing gum and looking Mick Jagger up and down with an unmistakable expression of contempt.  Next to the Angel, also on stage and just a metre or so from Jagger, is a longhaired bearded man acting out a murderous, psychedelic-fuelled pantomime.  Utterly oblivious to everything around him, the man grits his teeth in a look of agonised concentration and rolls his head slowly, bringing his hands up as fists before him as if he’s preparing to strangle somebody – or some thing. 

Mick Jagger hangs onto the microphone, looking anything but the cocky singer of the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band.  His performance, so joyful and exuberant on the preceding tour, seems forced, almost desperate.  At the centre of a maelstrom of chaos and violence that threatens to engulf the stage, Jagger’s misogynistic boast, Under my thumb, becomes something else entirely. 

“I pray that it’s alright,” he sings, more to himself than the 300,000-strong audience, before looking distractedly towards Keith Richards.  “I pray that it’s alright,” he sings again – a plea.     

But it was far from all right.  As the Stones finished the song, an 18-year-old African American, Meredith Hunter, was being stabbed and kicked to death by Hells Angels a few metres from the stage, the terrible climax to a concert characterised not by music, peace and love, but by chaos, bad trips, and unfettered violence.  ‘Woodstock West’, as the free concert had come to be known in the anticipation and hype beforehand, ended up bearing little resemblance to its East coast antecedent. 

In rock mythology, Woodstock and Altamont, held less than four months apart, are linked in an oppositional relationship.  If Woodstock was the dream, Altamont was the nightmare.  If Woodstock was the love-in, Altamont was the bad trip.  Woodstock represented all that was good about the Sixties; Altamont brought it all to a crashing halt. 

At Woodstock there was virtually no violence of any kind.  At Altamont, a group of thugs meted out savage beatings with lead-weighted pool cues, right in front of the stage, from the moment the music started.  Dozens of people were treated for injuries ranging from lacerations to broken bones, and one man – Hunter - was killed.    

At Woodstock, at least in the documentary it produced, people look stoned but happy, in control.  In Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers’ documentary of the 1969 Rolling Stones tour and the Altamont free concert, the drug effects are ugly.  The trippers are incoherent and pathetic.  Among the sequences captures in the documentary is one of a naked woman, completely smashed and off balance, obliviously smacking other festivalgoers in the face as she crashes, lemming-like, towards the stage – where she’s met with brutal force by the Hell’s Angels. 

Seven hundred people were treated for bad trips at Altamont; the doctors ran out of Thorazine, then the standard treatment for a psychotic reaction. 

So how did it all go so wrong?  How did what was supposed to be a beautiful occasion, a free concert to rival Woodstock, featuring the best of San Francisco’s bands and topped by the Rolling Stones at their peak, turn into something as hellish as Altamont? 

The popular version of the story narrows the blame down to what is seen as the monumentally stupid decision by the Rolling Stones, or more specifically the band’s 1969 tour manager, Sam Cutler, to hire the Hells Angels as security.  Payment: $500 worth of beer. 

Then, so the story goes, the Stones compounded their complicity.  In their arrogance they made the audience, which had already endured the savagery of the Angels all afternoon, wait two more hours for nightfall.  As the main attraction, the headline act, the band wanted to make the biggest possible impact. 

In the absence of any other information you watch the nightmarish scenes captured in Gimme Shelter and ask yourself, what were they thinking?  Beer and Hells Angels - for security? 

The real story, as much as there can ever be a ‘real’ story, is messier, and it requires disentangling fact from myth - and Altamont, which closed what rock critic Robert Christgau once described as “history's first mythic rock and roll tour”, certainly has its own mythology. 

The Altamont mythology, in turn, is entangled with the Stones’ own mythology.  Looking at the lovable old Stones now, it’s easy to forget that they were once the bad boys of rock’n’roll (no matter how contrived that image may have been).  Altamont fitted neatly into the image of sex, drugs, and general decadence the Stones had at that time.  Lyrically, the band reveled in people’s baser instincts; where The Beatles sang, ‘all you need is love’, Jagger took inspiration from the Boston Strangler. 

“Altamont, it could only happen to the Stones, man,” Keith Richards told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971.

“Let’s face it.  It wouldn’t have happened to the Bee Gees, and it wouldn’t have happened to Crosby, Stills and Nash.”

Except that it did happen to Crosby, Stills and Nash, who were also on the Altamont bill, but nobody remembers that.  Not even Keith Richards, who was there. 

During the backlash against the Stones that followed Altamont, some commentators framed the violence as a kind of karmic blowback for the nastiness lurking in the band’s music.  The Altamont/Stones mythology has it that the stabbing of Meredith Hunter was somehow brought on when the band played Sympathy for the Devil, in which Jagger explores the nature of evil through the ages, singing first-person as the prince of darkness.  Some saw the song as an invocation of evil, a kind of black magic spell, missing the everyman nature of evil in the final lines (I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedy’s?’/ When after all it was you and me). 

Hunter was actually killed later in the Stones’ set, during Under my Thumb (itself one of the Stones’ cruelest songs).  But even Jagger seems to have subsequently felt uncomfortable with Sympathy for the Devil, or at least its association with Altamont, “because it became so involved with [the concert] — sort of journalistically and so on,” as he told Rolling Stone in 1975.  The Stones didn’t play it for several years afterwards.   

A strange incident at Altamont, captured in Gimme Shelter, played straight into the karmic angle.  Just after Jagger got off the helicopter at Altamont, a man ran up to him yelling ‘I hate you!’ and punched him in the face, before being pulled away by security. 

And while we can never know, some at Altamont contend that Meredith Hunter intended to shoot Jagger, or somebody in the Stones.

The karmic explanation for Altamont was also given weight by one of the key players in the story, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia.  The Dead were scheduled to play just before the Stones, after Crosby, Stills and Nash, but pulled out on the day when they learned of the violence.  Having avoided playing the concert, Garcia felt distanced enough from any responsibility in 1972 to suggest the Stones had somehow brought the violence on themselves.

“It was the music that generated it.  I think the music knew; it was known in the music.  I realised when the Rolling Stones were playing at the crowd and the fighting was going on, and the Rolling Stones were playing Sympathy for the Devil, that I should have known,” he said. 

“You know, you can’t put that out without it turning up on you somewhere.”

It’s a quintessentially hippie explanation, and one wonders what Garcia thought would have happened at Altamont if the Dead had played.  Their music would have pacified the Angels, presumably.  It’s ironic, too, because those looking for a more convincing explanation for Altamont have to start not with the Stones, but the Dead themselves, the band which more than any other defined the counterculture’s communal ideals.

The Dead had actually lived at Haight-Ashbury, along with Janis Joplin and The Jefferson Airplane, before the San Francisco intersection became a byword for flower power.  In their first incarnation as The Warlocks, the Dead took part in Ken Kesey’s legendary ‘acid tests’, and as the Grateful Dead they were fond of playing long improvisations while high.  They were the hippie prototype, and they helped define the scene that became a magnet for baby boomers all over America in 1967.

The Dead also became famous for their free concerts in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.  Rock Scully, the band’s manager for 20 years, remembers that the band often did the concerts as a kind of social work.  “For us it seemed really important to get kids off the street and into the park, and provide some entertainment,” he says.  But without permits from the San Francisco Parks Department, a problem particularly during 1966, the Dead had to find their own source of electricity. 

"Sometimes that took the form of a generator, sometimes it took the form of an extension chord from somebody’s washing machine outlet from an apartment across the street, dropped down from the trees to our amplifiers,” Scully says. 

“The big concerts we did in the park, we were familiar with individual Hells Angels that at some point seemed to be a temporary deterrent for people messing with the plug.  The one thing we didn’t want to do was be unplugged - the band really hated that.”

Scully, as an authority on free concerts, was invited to London in 1967 to explore the idea of putting one on in Hyde Park with San Francisco’s bands.  While there, he was introduced to the Stones and Sam Cutler, the band’s newly appointed tour manager, by a mutual friend.   It was at Keith Richards’ house in Cheney Walk that Scully first pitched the idea of Stones doing a free concert in California.  As Cutler recalls in his book, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, “no-one seemed too enthusiastic as far as I could tell”. 

The Stones were probably preoccupied with their own upcoming free concert at Hyde Park, which would be a way of introducing Brian Jones’ replacement, Mick Taylor.  Jones died three days before the concert and Jagger decided to make the Hyde Park concert a kind of memorial, a wake. 

Although the Stones were musically shaky, The Hyde Park concert was counted a huge success.  The weather was perfect, the massive crowd was peaceful, and thousands even stayed behind to clean up the litter.  The footage shot on the day, released as Stones in the Park, attests to a very relaxed atmosphere and stoned smiles all round.   

By the stage at Hyde Park were what Cutler describes as a “bunch of risible wannabe bikers” who called themselves Hells Angels, with hand-embroidered ‘Hells Angels’ signs on their back.  The Stones’ security head at the concert, Tom Keylock, had briefed them on how to control over-excited girls wanting to get too close to Jagger.  As it turned out, the ersatz Angels didn’t have to do anything but enjoy the show – while sipping free cups of tea. 

This footnote to the Hyde Park concert has led to suggestions that the Stones, and Cutler, had a naive conception of what ‘real’ Hells Angels were like.  It’s a suggestion Cutler testily refutes. 

“The idea that the Stones were this kind of naïve bunch of English fuckwits is actually insulting,” he says. 

“That’s another canard foisted on the world by the press.  I never had any illusions about who the Hells Angels were.  I’ve always thought of them as being really heavy, really scary guys that you definitely didn’t want to piss off, in any way, shape or form.”

But Scully, who saw the harmless British ‘Hells Angels’ at Hyde Park with his own eyes, remembers explaining to the Stones that Californian bikers were a different breed.  The ‘real’ Hells Angels, he told them, “weren’t people you could hire to do security”.  He told them the Dead had only ever used a handful of individuals – “people like Pete Knell and a few others” – and that that was why not even a punch had ever been thrown.   

In 1971, Keith Richards gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine in which he talked at length about Altamont.  He sounded less certain about the nature of California’s Hells Angels than Cutler insists was the case.  “I didn’t know what kind of people they were,” he said.  “I’d heard about the Angels, but I haven’t lived in California and San Jose, I have no contact with these people”. 

The free concert that became Altamont was announced during the Stones’ US tour in November 1969.  At that time the Stones were really hitting their stride.  They had just released Let it Bleed, the second of a consecutive run of four brilliant albums that justified Cutler’s famous concert introduction, ‘the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world’.  They were in the process of recording Sticky Fingers.  In Mick Taylor the band had found not just a solution to the liability Brian Jones had become, but also a superb, agile blues guitarist and the perfect foil for Richard’s chunky riffing. 

The tour was a vastly different experience for the Stones than their previous US visit three years earlier.  Instead of the mass of hysterical, screaming girls who had drowned out the music on their previous US tour, the new audiences actually came to listen.  The band couldn’t just race through a half-hour set; they had to play. 

Staging, lighting and PA systems had all evolved, too.  “Before, their might just be one speaker hanging on a wall for the voice,” Richards said in a 1980s interview. 

“They didn’t worry about [amplifying] the band.  The girls screamed, we played full blast, and then ran away.  The ’69 tour was like school, learning how to play on stage again.”

Jagger, too, remembered the tour as a vast improvement on the earlier excursions.  “The whole thing became much more professional.  We had lights and our own crew … It’s much easier if you play the same kind of place, on the same stage, in the same configuration.  It becomes like your second home,” he said in a documentary interview. 

Mick Jagger first hinted at a free concert at a press conference in Los Angeles, the second stop of the US tour.  Cutler remembers that Jagger had been stung by accusations in the press, particularly San Francisco Chronicle journalist Ralph J Gleason, that the Stones were fleecing fans through high ticket prices.  “The Stones bought into the idea that by playing for free they would be giving something back to their exploited fans,” Cutler writes in his book. 

But as the tour progressed, it must also have occurred to Jagger that a free concert could be the crowning glory.  What better way to finish the best tour the band had ever done than with a free concert at San Francisco?  The Maysles brothers captured the formal announcement, at a press conference, for Gimme Shelter. 

“We’re doing a free concert in San Francisco on December 6,” Jagger told the media throng, clearly enjoying the moment. 

“It’s not going to be at Golden Gate Park, unfortunately, but somewhere adjacent to it, which is a bit larger.  It’s creating a sort of microcosmic society which sets an example for the rest of America as to how one can behave in large gatherings.”

The Maysles brothers, who by 1969 were already known and respected for their fly-on-the-wall, ‘direct cinema’ documentaries, had come on board late in the tour.  They first met the Stones at the Plaza Hotel in New York on November 25, where they discussed the possibility of a film.  After catching them the next night at Baltimore - Albert had never seen them live - they knew they were onto something.  “The Stones really were at their peak,” Albert says now (David died in 1987).  They also had a hunch they would get more than just a concert film, without knowing exactly what that would be. 

Although the Stones put up money for the film, and would have to sign a release before it went to cinemas, the Maysles demanded – and got – full artistic control. 

“There was absolutely no pressure,” Albert says.  “We made the film exactly as we thought it should be made and we made no changes. We never did discuss the film [with the Stones] but my relations with them have been excellent and still are.”

With the date set for the free concert, Cutler and Scully somehow had to make it happen.  Among the furious activity that followed was a brief, seemingly innocuous meeting between Cutler, Scully and Pete Knell, one of Scully’s friends in the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels.  According to Cutler, during the meeting Knell made one thing very plain: the Angels didn’t do security.  “We ain’t no cops,” Knell said, emphatically.  “We don’t need cops, we have our own,” Cutler told him. 

A simple deal was made.  The Angels would hang around the generators, like they had at the Dead’s Golden Gate Park concerts, in exchange for $500 worth of beer. 

“They’d just hang out and no-one would fuck with them, so the power supply was secure,” Cutler says.  “The bands – all of the bands – were supposed to pay that money.  The person who paid it was me, and I never got it back, to this fucking day.”

For Scully and the Dead, getting the Angels involved in the concert was just one part of a plan to bring all kinds of different people together over music.  “What we were trying to do was not just notify the Hells Angels about having beer, we were talking about getting the Latino gangs to come out and provide ethnic food, and same with the Chinese gangs, who were warring in the northeast area of San Francisco,” Scully says. 

“We were still young and idealistic.  We probably could have if we’d kept it under wraps, and kept our date in the park.  But that failed.”

The date in Golden Gate Park was off even before the free concert could be announced (the Parks Department had refused to issue permits), but an alternative site was found at Sears Point Raceway, about 80km north of San Francisco.  The site, owned by Filmways Inc., a television and film production company, seemed ideal.  There was enough space for 100,000 cars, and off to one side of the racetrack was a large natural amphitheatre. 

“It was just perfect,” Scully recalls.  “We leveled off a hill that could seat 50 to 100,000 people, at almost eye-level, with a nice little valley between a stage on top of a hill.  It put a perfect distance to the crowd.”

The particular geography of the Sears Point site explains one of the glaring problems at Altamont: a stage low enough to fall onto.  Chip Monck, whose CV for stage management includes some of the biggest festivals and tours in rock history, was stage manager for the Stones’ 69 tour.  Speaking with the same reassuringly paternal voice that made him famous for the brown acid warning at Woodstock, he explains why the stage was built so low. 

“The stage was one metre high – 39 inches for us - and it was on the top of a hill, so all the audience pressure was back upon them.  Therefore, a low stage like that was quite acceptable.  A practically non-existent barrier would have been quite sufficient,” Monck says.   

But with just days to show time, a new venue had to be found.  Filmways had got wind of the documentary and, being a film production company, saw dollar signs.  The Stones refused to acquiesce to their demand for a cut of the film’s profits, so Filmways pulled out.  That was it; they had to find somewhere else.  With just two days until showtime the Stones took up an offer from businessman Dick Carter, who wanted the publicity, to use the Altamont Speedway, in the desert east of San Francisco. 

Scully had flown out to Altamont in a helicopter with Michael Laing, the man behind Woodstock, to inspect the site.  “There were smashed cars, old tyres, broken glass and all kinds of horrible stuff,” he says.  “It looked like a war zone.”  But with 300,000 people heading to San Francisco from all over America, and less than 48 hours until the first band was due to start playing, they had little choice.   

In a Herculean effort the stage crews for the bands that would be playing, along with hundreds of volunteers, moved the whole festival infrastructure ninety-odd miles to Altamont.  They worked under floodlights all through Friday night, encouraged at times by Keith Richards, who wanted to hang out before the show, to have it ready for the concert. 

Monck’s stage, just a metre high, would now be in a completely different setting.  At Altamont, the crowd would pour down a slope, putting the pressure onto the stage rather than away from it.  

“We weren’t working with scaffolding, we were working in an older fashion with parallels,” Monck explains.  “You could probably have put another stage below it … but nobody had one.  We did the best we could.”

Scully says the stage was so low, “at the bottom of a gully, if [the Angels] hadn’t ended up there, that whole crowd could have easily passed out, and rolled down onto the stage.  There was no barrier.  This is what we had, a stage that was sitting on top of a mountain just a few hours previously.”

Monck had other problems besides the stage.  “We asked for eight union operators for the follow spots, and they never showed up,” he says.  “So the follow spots, about $8000 a piece, were sitting there.  The kids were getting cold, so they burned the boxes and left the follow spots in the mud.”

This explains the odd lighting on the Stones seen in Gimme Shelter.  There was no front lighting, just 48,000 watts of white lighting from the back of the stage.  “The audience was fairly well lit from the back light, and in some strange way the light managed to get around enough to light the face of the performers,” Monck says.  “Perhaps it was just bouncing off the audience.” 

It also meant the Stones, the only band to play after dark at Altamont, could see the audience much more clearly than they would otherwise have been able to. 

                                                                                                 

Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away

The violence first erupted almost as soon at first band, Santana, began playing.  In most accounts, the worst offenders were not the Hells Angels – although they were certainly involved – but the prospective Hells Angels, or ‘prospects’.  They can be seen clearly in Gimme Shelter: a small group of maybe four or five men in street clothes and sunglasses, brutally beating people at the slightest provocation with the lead-weighted fat end of their pool cues. 

“They were all prospects, who took it as an opportunity to hang out and bust heads.  There are guys who love doing that – even in Australia,” Cutler says.   

Photographer Robert Altman, who was in the audience throughout the concert, has a similar recollection.  “I didn’t know the inner working of the Hells Angels, but I saw that a number of them were looking for trouble,” he says.  “Some were being braggarts on the stage … In trying to make names for themselves, they would take any incident and magnify it.  It just got out of hand.” 

Altman, like probably most of the other 300,000 people there, was expecting peace and love.  He had passed on an opportunity to go to Woodstock because it would have involved traveling all the way across the States.  “I felt I’d made a huge mistake, and I was not going to make that mistake again,” he says.

Altman was so confident he would be covering Woodstock West that, despite being on assignment for three companies, including Rolling Stone magazine, he dropped acid early in the day. 

“But instead of peace and love, exactly the opposite happened.  It got paranoid and violent, interspersed with great music.  I was astounded, just like everyone else, that it was so bad,” he says. 

The Angels’ part in the savagery that took place at Altamont is less clear-cut than the mythology would have it.  They certainly didn’t treat anybody with kid gloves.  Gimme Shelter shows the Angels unceremoniously pushing people off the stage, into audience members holding their hands up, palms forward as protection and supplication.  Most of the Angels had been drinking all day in the sun.  There are accounts, uncorroborated by the documentary, of Angels tossing full cans of beer high into the air towards the audience. 

It was a Hells Angel, not a prospect, who knocked out Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane.  The incident is part of a sequence in the documentary that gives the first real sense of the festival spiraling out of control.  The band is half way through The Other Side of This Life, in a solid groove, when a melee breaks out that spills first off, then back onto the stage, knocking over microphones.  Singer Grace Slick tries to calm things down – “Easy, easy” – before Balin jumps into the crowd to break up a fight, where an Angel wearing a raccoon-skin hat knocks him out cold. 

Cutler recalls that he jumped off the stage and walked warily over to the Angel, hoping to cool things down.  The Angel, friendly enough to Cutler, introduced himself as ‘Animal’ and told him to call him by his nickname, Mule. 

“I said to Mule, ‘If you start knocking the musicians out, we ain’t going to have any music.’  Everyone agreed on that,” Cutler says. 

“So he went over to Marty with me, to say “No hard feelings, man, but you did say ‘fuck you’.”  Marty came round, saw Mule, said ‘Fuck you’, and Mule knocked him out again!”

When Cutler asked Mule if he could do something about the prospects, Mule said the motorcycle club had no control over them.  Anyway, he wasn’t interested.  “Man, I came here for a good time,” Mule told him.  “These people are fucked up, man.  They’ve been taking too many reds and wine and there ain’t no stopping them.” 

There are moments in Gimme Shelter that suggest how different the festival could have been in different circumstances.  One of them is the Flying Burrito Brothers’ performance of Six Days on the Road, featuring a happy Gram Parson at the microphone.  Altman remembers looking at his contact sheets after the concert and noting that Parsons was the only performer he caught smiling.  “All the others – Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills and Nash - had grim faces,” he recalls.   

To Parson’s up-tempo country rock soundtrack, balloons rise into the air, people blow bubbles, and smiling men and women dance with abandon.  The exuberance and the release are palpable, and for a couple of minutes it could be Woodstock.  Then as the song ends, the pool cues come out, and the moment is gone.   

A glimpse into the mentality of at least one of the Angels at Altamont comes from Sonny Barger, who can be heard near the start of Gimme Shelter, phoning into the post mortem of the concert San Francisco’s KSAN-FM radio held the next day.  Barger was the founding member of the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels, and has written four books.  In Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and The Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, he writes of his contempt for the Stones (“sissy, marble-mouthed prima donnas”) and his approach to crowd control. 

“A big fat girl was trying to get up on the stage. She was topless and probably very fucked up on drugs. Some of the Angels tried to stop her, and it looked to me like they were trying to get her off the stage without hurting her. Keith Richards leaned over to me and said, ‘Man, I’m sure it doesn’t take three or four great big Hell’s Angels to get that bird off the stage’. I just walked over to the edge of the stage and kicked her in the head.”

Barger exemplifies the culture clash that took place at Altamont.  The Angels, some of them Vietnam veterans, had no time for hippies.  “I ain’t no peace creep,” Barger said on KSAN-FM, spitting out the words.  Barger, in fact, had made headlines in 1965 when he and some other Angels broke up an anti-Vietnam demonstration in Berkeley, California.

“They didn’t cotton well to the hippie culture,” Altman says of the Angels.  “Drugged-up people got up into their faces, and a couple of bikes got knocked over, and the Hell’s Angels got violent.”

The hippies, face-to-face with the brutality of the Angels, responded the only way they knew how.  After almost every scuffle caught on film, there are people holding up a peace sign. 

Some of the Angels seemed to take their role as security seriously.  In some of the later footage there is an Angel with glasses sitting stoically by the foldback speakers on the edge of stage, looking like he’d rather be just about anywhere else.  And it’s a very sober looking Angel - the one who gives Jagger the up-and-down look of contempt (“that’s the former president of the San Francisco Hells Angels,” Cutler says) - who yanks the psychotic-looking bearded man off the stage. 

It was Sonny Barger who, speaking on KSAN the day after the concert, first explained to a mystified public how the Angels became stage security.  “They told me, if I could sit on the stage so nobody could climb over me, you know, I could drink beer until the show was over,” he said.  

Barger’s account of Altamont needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  He claims, for example, to have held a gun against Keith Richards on stage, telling him to ‘Keep playing, or you’re dead’ – a claim nobody, least of all Richards, has ever substantiated. 

But what about his account of the security arrangement?  Hadn’t Cutler ‘hired’ the Angels for no other reason than to secure the power supply?

Cutler’s book paints a scene of rapidly disintegrating control, against a shrinking security contingent.  The Stones’ own security, made up of off-duty New York cops, numbered about five.  Monck says “there couldn’t possibly have been more than six; there were probably three”.  Cutler says that early in the afternoon they made it plain to him that they weren’t about to risk their lives trying to deal with ‘those crazy biker dudes’.  Their job was to protect the Stones, nothing else.   

There were uniformed police at Altamont, too, but only a handful on or near the stage.  Police are almost entirely absent from any of the documentary footage, except for two who can be seen on stage during the Stones’ performance.  In Cutler’s account, most of the few police allocated to the festival were busy with traffic control, trying to keep the road clear for emergency vehicles.  One policeman who was backstage told Cutler he had been trying to call for backup for an hour.  “We don’t have enough manpower to deal with these punks.  These guys are psychos,” he told Cutler.   

Altman, trying not freak out on his LSD trip while doing his job as a photographer, remembers warily keeping an eye on the guys with the pool cues.  “I distinctly remember, and I was a little bit high, that it was this bad wave that kept circling out, like ripples in a pond.  It just spread out,” he says. 

Scully says contributing to the violence was the fact that for most of the day the Angels were leaderless.  “The Angels’ leaders were all having an argument in Oakland about whose turf it was, and who should be in charge,” he says.  “Meanwhile all the prospects, who weren’t fully Hells Angels, were fully out of control with pool cues.”  Maysles says the Angels’ “normal commander in chief was not available and his substitute was inexperienced”.

By the time the actual Angels ‘officers’ did arrive, Scully says, the situation was already out of control.  “The Angels simply took care of things the only way they knew how.”  The “full-on” Angels’ dramatic arrival late in the day, in which they cut a swathe through the enormous crowd with their motorbikes, is caught on film - as is the tension when one of the motorbikes, parked in front of 300,000 people by the stage, gets knocked over by the crowd. 

The crowd, too, was part of the problem.  “They were part of the melee,” Altman remembers.  Many in the audience were tripping, drunk, or stoned, and certainly some look out of control in Gimme Shelter.  Scully says most of the festivalgoers “were somebody’s dependents,” with no experience of psychedelics.  “They were also drinking cheap red wine and swallowing barbiturates,” he says.  Cutler remembers being told the night before the concert that acid tabs were being given away for free. 

Cutler and Monck, who don’t much like each other, make an interesting contrast in their approach to stage announcements.  Monck says his famous warning at Woodstock about the brown acid, captured in the documentary of the festival, was very carefully thought out.  “It’s probably one of the most difficult announcements you can make.  How do you present, to people who may have taken it, that this is not a grand idea?” he says.  His choice of words was hard to fault. 

At Altamont, Cutler made almost all of the stage announcements.  In Gimme Shelter, a man at the foot of the stage asks Cutler to warn people about the bad acid circulating through the crowd, because people are “really freaking out”.  Cutler’s response is, “Tough shit”.  Then, softening – and perhaps remembering that there’s a camera behind him - he explains that he doesn’t want to “lay a succession of bummers on the crowd”.  But the bummers come, anyway: calls for doctors, for people to get off the scaffolding, for people to get off the stage, for people to stop fighting. 

Monck, who blames the whole Altamont debacle on Cutler and Scully’s decision to hire the Hell’s Angels for beer, feels Cutler handled his responsibility as MC with little regard for the audience’s welfare.   

“If you had the ego that required you to be up front, to say ‘The greatest rock’n’roll band in the world’, you did that because you wanted visibility …  The safety and caring and arrangement of everything else around you, on behalf of the acts that had given you their presence, almost always fell short,” he says.

At some point during the day, Cutler seems to have asked the Angels to become stage security.  As tour manager, he had sized up the way the festival was likely to go, particularly in light of the inadequacy of the tiny stage as a barrier to the crowd and to the prospects, and made a decision to use them.  It’s an uncomfortable point for Cutler.  In his book, written expressly to “set the record straight” on Altamont, the direction he gave the Angels is nowhere to be found. 

Did he tell them to guard the stage?

Cutler pauses before answering.  “I was talking with them, because I was interested in the security of my band - everyone’s security, for that matter,” he says slowly.

“In the midst of chaos … In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  They were the only people who were strong and together.  [They had to guard the stage] because it was descending into absolute chaos.  Who was going to stop it?”

Scully says the situation, from the organisers’ point of view, was desperate.  “Practicality had gone out the window.  There wasn’t much to be done except hold the fort, and plead with the crowd not to try to roll onto the stage, plead with the Angels to be good”. 

It was Scully who persuaded the Grateful Dead, scheduled to play before the Stones, not to perform - not that they needed much convincing.  Gimme Shelter captures the moment when the Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, having just arrived at Altamont by helicopter, learn how badly wrong the festival has turned out from Santana’s drummer.  “Hell’s Angels are beating on musicians?” Lesh asks, incredulous, after being told about the Jefferson Airplane incident.  “That doesn’t seem right, man.” 

“I encouraged everybody to just give up and get the Stones on stage as quickly as possible,” Scully says.  “It was getting worse, it was a terrible thing.  It was gonna get dark, and we had no lighting, and people were going to be stumbling around in the dark.  We really couldn’t go on.”

But Scully’s attempt to fast track the festival, to get the misery over with, was for naught.  It would be two hours from when Crosby, Still and Nash finished their set to when the Stones came on. 

The mythology of Altamont has it that the Stones deliberately chose to keep the crowd waiting, while more drugs and alcohol were consumed and the violence got correspondingly worse, so they could play after dark.  In their arrogance, the story goes, the Stones insisted on playing at night for a heightened effect and to increase the audience’s anticipation.  It’s certainly plausible; they were known for going on late on the 1969 tour. 

The real story is more banal: Billy Wyman was shopping in San Francisco, and nobody could contact him.  “This was before mobile phones,” Cutler reminds us.   

The Stones themselves didn’t want to hang around any longer than they had to.  Keith Richards later told Rolling Stone, “Oh man, I’d been there 24 hours, I couldn’t wait to get out of that place”.  Writer Stanley Booth, who was on tour with the Stones and subsequently wrote Dance with the Devil about the experience, also corroborates the Wyman story.  “In fact, they had intended to go on at sundown … As soon as Wyman managed to arrive, the Stones went on,” he wrote in an essay for the re-release of Gimme Shelter.

Before they went on stage, the Stones seem to have had little idea of what, or how bad, the situation had become.  They had pretty much been confined throughout the afternoon to their backstage caravan by the crowd and the chaos, and Cutler had avoided giving them the grim details.  They may not even have known that the Angels were on stage.  In a December 12 article by Ralph J Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Stones’ manager Ronnie Schneider is quoted as saying he didn’t know the Angels would be on stage, and that Jagger had exclaimed “What are they doing here?” when he saw them.

The Stones found themselves on a tiny stage, so littered with Hells Angels, members of the audience, stage hands and various other people that they could barely move.  The documentary captures scenes, with the camera looking down from behind the stage, in which Jagger and Richards look like they’re about to be swallowed up by the writhing mass of people.  In a comic moment, a large Alsatian dog walks across the front of the stage as Jagger sings. 

As seen in the documentary, the scene before the Stones as they play Sympathy for the Devil is more like a violent demonstration than a concert audience.   A scuffle brakes out near the front, Angels pour off the stage into the audience in front of Jagger, and the whole crowd reels back a good six or seven metres, like the sea parting.   Jagger stops the band to plead with the crowd as, one by one, people tentatively move back towards the stage. 

“Sisters, brothers,” he calls out, his voice breaking.  “Come ON now.  That means everybody - just COOL OUT.   Everybody be cool now.” 

Then, as meek as a kitten, “Awright? 

The Stones start the song gain, playing as if their lives depended on it – which is probably how they felt.  Jagger dances vigorously around the stage, looking out at the audience and nodding yes, yes, half smiling, beseeching the crowd to have a good time with him.  Then another fight starts and Jagger, who seems able to see it clearly, stops dancing and watches, horrified.  For a full 30 seconds he is transfixed, while people at the front of the stage shake their heads, no, no, before he seems to remember what he’s supposed to be doing and starts dancing again.

After the song ends, Meredith Hunter briefly appears in the film for the first time, standing about a metre from the stage.  Jagger is again imploring the audience to “keep it together”.  Hunter is striking in a black hat and an iridescent green jacket.  High on methamphetamines, his tongue darts in and out a couple of times during the few seconds the camera is on him. 

It happens as the last chord of Under My Thumb fades out.  A girl screams and the crowd parts as Hunter lurches forward, off balance, a long-barreled pistol in his left hand.  As Hunter regains his balance, an Angel expertly parries the gun away with his left arm just before bringing a knife down into Hunter’s back.  The Angel pushes Hunter from behind, towards the side of the stage, stabbing him once more before they both disappear into the darkness. 

Exactly what happened between Hunter and the Angels before the stabbing is not entirely clear.  Early reports framed Hunter as a victim of the Angels, but the Angel who stabbed him, Alan Passaro, was subsequently acquitted of murder on the grounds of self defence.  The other Angels who are alleged to have helped kill Hunter by kicking him were never identified. 

Scully, who saw the incident clearly from his truck by the stage, recalls being alarmed by Hunter.  “There was no doubt in my mind that he intended to do terrible harm to Mick or somebody in the Rolling Stones, or somebody on that stage.  He had a gun, and it was loaded, and fortunately he got stopped,” he says. 

“I saw what he was looking at, that he was crazy, he was on drugs – methamphetamines – and he had murderous intent.  He had a powerful pistol in his hand.”

Cutler didn’t see the stabbing, but has a similar view.  “In the final analysis, there’s a black guy, armed with a gun, who came there and got off two shots.  What was he doing with a gun?  You pays your money and you takes your choice,” he says.

Due to the way its edited, for dramatic power, Gimme Shelter gives the impression that the Stones’ set finished at that point, but in fact Hunter’s killing actually occurred only about half way through.  The band, unaware than anyone had been killed, played another eight songs, including the first ever performance of Brown Sugar, before running for the helicopter that flew them back to San Francisco.  The film captures the band, along with Cutler and Booth, piling onto the helicopter, desperate to get out of there. 

Booth later wrote that Hunter’s killing provided a ‘psychic release’ for the pent-up tensions of the day, after which the violence dissipated and the Stones played the show of their lives.  Cutler doesn’t remember it that way.  “If anything, after Hunter was killed, it was even heavier,” he says.  “There’s no way it stopped after that.”   

Chip Monck, of all people, may have had the very last violent encounter with the Angels at Altamont.  After the music finished, and after three days of non-stop work, all he wanted to do was fall asleep under the stage with his wife.  But the Angels had taken a shine to the Stones’ stage rug. 

“The rug was rolled up after the concert and put on the top of the pickup truck, which went from the roof down to the tailgate, with chopper [motorbikes] on both sides,” Monck says.

"I grabbed the rug, which was the stage floor, and suddenly there’s a chopper on the ground.  We had a 15 minute discussion, and then they got tired of listening to me and ‘whap!’”

Monck lost several teeth, courtesy of an Angels’ pool cue.   

Forty years after the concert, how do the architects of Altamont look back on their parts?  Monck felt guilty enough by association to have visited Meredith Hunter's mother about eight months afterwards to apologise over a cup of tea.  It was awkward, he says, “but nobody else gave a fuck, so …”

Scully insists that if the concert had been held in Golden Gate Park, as originally planned, it would have turned out OK - but he doesn't let himself off the hook.  “I'm a little more Buddhist in my take on it these days.  I got blamed a lot in the local press, so I didn't want to cast blame any further.  I took what I got.”

Cutler is still defensive.  He resents being singled out by history to take responsibility for what he argues, reasonably enough, was as much a Grateful Dead production as it was the Stones’. As for his own part, he says, “I personally never felt I'd done anything wrong.  I'd never beaten anybody up or killed anybody.  In a karmic sense I didn't feel any blame attached to me.  I still don’t.”


In the end, what did it mean?  Altamont has come to represent the end of the Sixties counterculture - although it wasn’t regarded that way at the time, just as a concert gone terribly wrong.  It’s timing, of course, in the last month of 1969, makes it just about irresistible to writers as the perfect full stop to the hippie culture, which had seemed to reach its zenith at Woodstock. 

But Woodstock had lots of bad trips too; they just didn’t make it into the film.  There were far more brutal moments than Altamont to come for the baby boomers – the Kent State shootings in 1970, for example.  There were other music festivals marred by violence, just as there continued to be peaceful festivals at which most people had a great time. 

But at Altamont, the expectations were different; they were fuelled by Woodstock.  It was going to be Woodstock West, no question – just better, perhaps.  That the ugly violence happened at the very place the hippies regarded, at that time, as their own piece of paradise, the free concert, was profoundly shocking to many.  Altman attests to that. 

The free concerts that ultimately led to Altamont, those by the Grateful Dead in Golden Gate Park, seem to have been wonderful occasions, marked by a sense of shared identity and community.  Woodstock, especially, had come to represent the miraculous manifestation of an ideal: that of the music festival as the microcosm of a wider, peaceful and communal society – a mirage that seduced even hard-ass Mick Jagger.  Altamont made that idea look as naïve as it patently was. 

Altamont also perhaps shredded the counterculture myth of the power of music.  Music had been the soundtrack to the revolution.  Music was going to change the world.  But at Altamont, music was useless in the face of the Angels, as useless as the peace signs flashed at the Angels by the terrified audience.  Music, in fact, had helped create the problem.

At the same time, the music - by the Stones, at least – was as good as it gets.  At Altamont, the Stones gave the performance of their lives, instinctively playing at their best because music was all they had in the face of a situation they couldn’t control.  The music was so good that, even for those caught in the maelstrom in front of the stage, it could still be a magical thing.  The terrible contradiction of the Stones’ performance at Altamont is captured in one of the most poignant images of the film: a beautiful young blonde woman looking up sadly at the Stones from the foot of the stage, tears running down her cheeks, nodding along with the beat anyway. 

In spite of everything, the Stones still rocked.  

The place of music at Altamont was different from its place at Woodstock, too.  At Woodstock, the music was almost a distraction from the main event.  People went for the music, to be sure, but the festival itself, the event - a generation reveling in its own youthful beauty, sexuality, energy, creativity, and a sense of endless possibilities – was, in the end, what the experience was really all about.  At Altamont, whatever ‘good vibes’ there were, were quickly burnt off by the Angels.  There was nothing left but the music. 

At Altamont, people turned up expecting a love-in, but got exactly the opposite.  It’s that contrast, between the idealistic expectations of the festivalgoers and the wanton violence of thugs armed with weighted pool cues, which makes Altamont so dramatic, so terrible, and so pivotal.  That the moment was captured in the most powerful documentary to come out of rock’n’roll makes it all the more compelling.