True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  They played a repeating twelve-bar pattern that stopped in half a minute. “Keep going,” Mick said, and it started again, a meditative walking-bass line, the Stones trying to orient themselves by playing an Elmore James/Jimmy Reed song they had played in damp London caverns. “The sun is shining on both sides of the street,” Mick sang. “I got a smile on my face for every little girl I meet.” The slow blues did seem to help things, a little. A huge Angel with long blond hair, brown suede vest, no shirt, blue jeans, was standing behind gentle Charlie, patting his foot, one giant hand resting on Charlie’s white pullover. The song ended without event and Mick said, “We all dressed up, we got no place to go,” which was all too true.

  “Stray Cat,” Keith said, but there was another flurry of fighting stage right, partly hidden from us by the PA scaffold, a tower of speakers.

  “Hey—heyheyhey look,” Mick said. Then to Keith or to no one he said, “Those scenes down there.”

  I leaned forward and spoke to the cowboy hat. “What’s happening, man,” I asked. “Why are they fighting?”

  Over his shoulder, out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “Some smart asshole, man, some wise guy wants to start trouble—and these guys are tired, man, they been here all night, some wise guy starts something they don’t like it—arhh, I can’t tell you what happened.” Taking a jug of acid-apple juice from his Angel friend, he drank till his eyes looked, as Wynonie Harris used to say, like two cherries in a glass of buttermilk. Me, I lay low.

  “Stray Cat” started, Mick sounding perfunctory, forgetting the words here and there, Keith playing madly.

  A girl down front was shaking with the music and crying as if her dream of life had ended. In the backstage aisle between the trucks, the Angels and their women were doing their stiff jerking dance. Most of the women were hard-looking tattooed types with shellacked hairdos, but one of them, no more than fourteen, with a dirty, pretty-baby face, wearing a black leather jacket, was moving the seat of her greasy jeans wildly, and I thought of the little guerrilla in Fort Collins and was glad she wasn’t in this crowd.

  The Angel standing with his hand on Charlie’s shoulder was being asked to step down off the stage by one of the New York heavies, a red-faced, red-haired, beefy man dressed in the light golf-jacket uniform. You could follow what they were saying by their gestures. The cop told the Angel to step down, the Angel shook his head, the cop told him again and pushed him a little. The cop had a cigarette in his mouth and the Angel took it out, just plucked it from between the cop’s lips like taking a rose from the mouth of the fair Carmen, causing the cop to regard the Angel with a sorrowful countenance. It was only when two more men in golf jackets turned around and faced the Angel with expressions equally dolorous that he went down the steps. He came back a minute later but stayed at the rear of the stage, dancing, twitching like a frog attached to electrodes.

  As “Stray Cat” ended, Mick said, “Ooh baby,” looking up as if for deliverance and finding a shapeless human mass reaching into the darkness as far as he could see. “Baby—all along a hillside—hey, everybody, ah—we gone do, we gone do, ah—what are we gonna do?”

  “Love in Vain,” Keith said. The slow elegant Robert Johnson line began, building slowly. “I followed her to the station with my suitcase in my hand—oh, it’s hard to tell, when all your love’s in vain.” The Stones had not forgotten how to play, but nobody seemed to be enjoying the music, at least nobody who could be seen in the lights that made the stage the glowing center of a world of night. Too many people were still too close together and the Angels were still surly. At stage right an Angel with a skinful of acid was writhing and wringing his hands in a pantomime of twisting Mick’s neck. At stage left Timothy Leary huddled with his wife and daughter, looking as if he’d taken better trips. The stage skirts were so crowded that Mick had only a limited area to work. He looked cramped, smaller than ever and cowed, frightened, but he kept on singing.

  Things were quiet during “Love in Vain” except for some heavy jostling down front, the prevailing mood of impending death, and the fear and anguish you could see in the faces. “Aw yeah,” Mick said as the song ended. “Hey, I think—I think, I think, that there was one good idea came out of that number, which was, that I really think the only way you’re gonna keep yourselves cool is to sit down. If you can make it I think you’ll find it’s better. So when you’re sitting com­fortably—now, boys and girls—” withdrawing the social contract—“Are you sitting comfortably? When, when we get to really like the end and we all want to go absolutely crazy and like jump on each other then we’ll stand up again, d’you know what I mean—but we can’t seem to keep it together, standing up—okay?”

  In the background Keith was tooling up the opening chords of “Under My Thumb.” A few people in front of the stage were sitting, going along with Mick, who for the first time in his life had asked an audience to sit down. The anarchist was telling people what to do. Then, just before he began to sing, he said, “But it ain’t a rule.”

  “Under My Thumb” started—“Hey! Hey! Under my thumb is a girl who once had me down—” and Mick had sung only the first line of the song when there was a sudden movement in the crowd at stage left. I looked away from Mick and saw, with that now-familiar instant space around him, bordered with falling bodies, a Beale Street nigger in a black hat, black shirt, iridescent blue-green suit, arms and legs stuck out at crazy angles, a nickle-plated revolver in his hand. The gun waved in the lights for a second, two, then he was hit, so hard, by so many Angels, that I didn’t see the first one—short, Mexican-looking, the one who led me onstage?—as he jumped. I saw him as he came down, burying a long knife in the black man’s back. Angels covered the black man like flies on a stinking carcass. The attack carried the victim behind the stack of speakers, and I never saw him again.

  The black man, Meredith Hunter, nicknamed Murdock, was eighteen years old. He had come to Altamont with his girlfriend, Patty Bredehoft, a blond Berkeley High School student, and another couple. They had arrived in Hunter’s car at about two o’clock in the afternoon, parked on the highway and walked over to hear the bands. Near the end of the day Patty Bredehoft and the other couple were back at the car when Hunter, who had been hanging around the stage area, came to get her to go hear the Rolling Stones. Later she told the Alameda County Grand Jury, “When we finally worked our way up to the front of the crowd and the Rolling Stones started playing, there was a lot of pushing and there were Angels on the stage. And Murdock kept trying to go farther up toward the front. I couldn’t keep up with him because I wasn’t strong so I sort of waited back, didn’t try to get as far as he did. He was as close as he could get, where there were some boxes with people standing on the boxes. I’d say there was about five people in between me and him, estimating, because the crowd was moving around, but I could see the upper part of his body.

  “I was getting pushed around, and as I glanced up there, I saw either he had hit Murdock or pushed him or something, but this Hell’s Angel who was standing, pushed him or knocked him back. It didn’t knock him down, but knocked him back over the stage, and as he started to come back forward towards the Hell’s Angel, another Hell’s Angel who was on the stage grabbed him around the neck. They were scuffling around. I’m not sure which Hell’s Angel it was, but I just remember he was scuffling around and there was a couple of people blocking my view of him because he was down on the ground. I couldn’t really see him. As the people backed away, Murdock came around by my side and pulled a gun out. Then they came toward—well, a group of Hell’s Angels—I’m not sure they were all Hell’s Angels, but I know most of them were—they came toward him and they reached for his arm and then they were all kicking and fighting and stuff, Murdock and the Hell’s Angels, and the fight more or less moved around towards where the scaffold was on the edge of the stage.

  “I followed them around and then I was standing there watching them fight, or watching whatever—I couldn’t really tell what was going on u
nderneath the scaffold, and the Hell’s Angel—I thought he was, was a Hell’s Angel, but I wasn’t quite sure because he had the jeans jacket on, but I couldn’t see the back to see if it had colors on. He was holding the gun in his hand, laying in the palm of his hand, to show it to me, and he said something like, ‘This is what we took from him. He was going to kill innocent people, so he deserved to be dead.’ ”

  A young man named Paul Cox, who had been standing beside Meredith Hunter before the violence started, talked to the grand jury and to Rolling Stone. “An Angel kept looking over at me and I tried to keep ignoring him and I didn’t want to look at him at all, because I was very scared of them and seeing what they were doing all day and because he kept trying to cause a fight or something and kept staring at us. He kept on looking over, and the next thing I know he’s hassling this Negro boy on the side of me. And I was trying not to look at him, and then he reached over and shook this boy by the side of the head, thinking it was fun, laughing, and I noticed something was going to happen so I kind of backed off.

  “The boy yanked away, and when he yanked away, next thing I know he was flying in the air, right on the ground, just like all the other people it happened to. He scrambled to his feet, and he’s backing up and he’s trying to run from the Angels, and all these Angels are—a couple jumped off the stage and a couple was running alongside the stage, and his girlfriend was screaming to him not to shoot, because he pulled out his gun. And when he pulled it out, he held it in the air and his girlfriend is like climbing on him and pushing him back and he’s trying to get away and these Angels are coming at him and he turns around and starts running. And then some Angel snuck up from right out of the crowd and leaped up and brought this knife down in his back. And then I saw him stab him again, and while he’s stabbing him, he’s running. This Negro boy is running into the crowd, and you could see him stiffen up when he’s being stabbed.

  “He came running toward me. I grabbed onto the scaffold, and he came running kind of toward me and fell down on his knees, and the Hell’s Angel grabbed onto both of his shoulders and started kicking him in the face about five times or so and then he fell down on his face. He let go and he fell down on his face. And then one of them kicked him on the side and he rolled over, and he muttered some words. He said, ‘I wasn’t going to shoot you.’ That was the last words he muttered.

  “If some other people would have jumped in I would have jumped in. But nobody jumped in and after he said, ‘I wasn’t going to shoot you,’ one of the Hell’s Angels said, ‘Why did you have a gun?’ He didn’t give him time to say anything. He grabbed one of those garbage cans, the cardboard ones with the metal rimming, and he smashed him over the head with it, and then he kicked the garbage can out of the way and started kicking his head in. Five of them started kicking his head in. Kicked him all over the place. And then the guy that started the whole thing stood on his head for a minute or so and then walked off. And then the one I was talking about, he wouldn’t let us touch him for about two or three minutes. Like, ‘Don’t touch him, he’s going to die anyway, let him die, he’s going to die.’

  “Chicks were just screaming. It was all confusion. I jumped down anyway to grab him and some other dude jumped down and grabbed him, and then the Hell’s Angel just stood over him for a little bit and then walked away. We turned him over and ripped off his shirt. We rubbed his back up and down to get the blood off so we could see, and there was a big hole in his spine and a big hole on the side and there was a big hole in his temple. A big open slice. You could see all the way in. You could see inside. You could see at least an inch down. And then there was a big hole right where there’s no ribs on his back—and then the side of his head was just sliced open—you couldn’t see so far in—it was bleeding quite heavily—but his back wasn’t bleeding too heavy after that—there—all of us were drenched in blood.

  “I picked up his legs and someone else . . . this guy said he was a doctor or something . . . I don’t know who he was . . . he picked up his arms and he said, ‘Got to get him some help because he’s going to die. We’ve got fifteen or twenty minutes, if we can get him some help. . . .’ And so we tried to carry him on the stage. Tell Mick Jagger to stop playing so we could get him on the stage and get some attention for him. No one told Jagger that, but someone was trying to tell him to stop and he kept leaning over and looking out at the crowd like he was paying attention and trying to figure out what was happening. He kept leaning over with his ear trying to hear what somebody was telling him, but he couldn’t hear. So they kept on playing and the Hell’s Angels wouldn’t let us through . . . get on the stage. They kept blocking us, saying go around, go through some other way. They knew he was going to die in a matter of minutes. They wanted him to die probably so he couldn’t talk. And so we carried . . . we turned around and went the other way. It took about fifteen minutes to get him behind the stage. We went around that whole thing and got behind where there was a Red Cross truck, something like that. And someone brought out a metal stretcher and laid him on that. Well, first we laid him on the ground. And then we felt his pulse and it was just barely doing it . . . real slow and real weak. His whole mouth and stuff is bashed up into his nose and stuff and he couldn’t breathe out of his nose. He was trying to breathe out of his mouth. There really wasn’t anything you could do. We carried him over to some station wagon and then whoever owned the car hopped in and some other people hopped in and I stayed there. I went over and they had this thing of coffee and I had it . . . poured it all over to wipe off all the blood.”

  The doctor who helped to carry Hunter backstage was Robert Hiatt, a medical resident at the Public Health Hospital in San Francisco. “He was limp in my hands and unconscious,” Hiatt said. “He was still breathing then, though quite shallowly, and he had a very weak pulse. It was obvious he wasn’t going to make it, but if anything could be done, he would have to get to a hospital quickly. He had very serious wounds.”

  Dr. Richard Baldwin, a general practitioner from Point Reyes who saw Hunter backstage, said, “He got a bad injury in that they got him in the back and it went in between the ribs and the side of the spine, and there’s nothing but big arteries in there, the aorta, the main artery in the body, and a couple kidney arteries. And if you hit one of those you’re dead. You’re dead in less than a minute and there’s nothing anyone can do. In other words, if you’re standing in front of the hospital or even if he was stabbed in an operating room, there’s nothing they could have done to save him. That’s one of those injuries that’s just irreparable.”

  When the trouble with the boy in the green suit started, the Stones had stopped playing. “Okay, man,” Keith said, “look, we’re splitting, if those cats, if you can’t—we’re splitting, if those people don’t stop beating everybody up in sight—I want ’em out of the way.”

  An Angel in front of the stage was trying to tell Keith something, but Keith wouldn’t listen. “I don’t like you to tell me—” he went on, but another Angel, onstage, stopped him. “Look, man,” the Angel said, “a guy’s got a gun out there, and he’s shootin’ at the stage—”

  “Got a gun,” someone else yelled.

  Mike Lang, one of the organizers of Woodstock, who had been helping with this concert, took the microphone. “People—hey people—c’mon let’s be cool—people, please—there’s no reason to hassle anybody, please don’t be mad at anybody—please relax and sit down. . . .”

  Sam, who’d been standing by with his hands jammed in his pockets, took over. “If you move back and sit down,” he said, “we can continue and we will continue. We need a doctor under the left-hand scaffold as soon as possible please.” He was listening to shouts from the front of the crowd. He listened to a girl for a few seconds and went on: “There’s a Red Cross building at the top of the stage and there’s been lots of lost childing, children, under the scaffold—if you’ve lost a child go and collect him or her there please—it’s a Red Cross van. . . .”

  After anoth
er pause during which no one onstage did anything but look anxiously around, Mick said, “It seems to be stuck down to me—will you listen to me for a minute—please listen to me just for one second a’right? First of all, everyone is gonna get to the side of the stage who’s on it now except for the Stones who are playing. Please, everyone—everyone, please, can you get to the side of the stage who’s not playing. Right? That’s a start. Now, the thing is, I can’t see what’s going on, who is doing wot, it’s just a scuffle. All I can ask you, San Francisco, is like the whole thing—this could be the most beautiful evening we’ve had this winter. We really—y’know, why, why—don’t let’s fuck it up, man, come on—let’s get it together—everyone—come on now—I can’t see you up on the hillsides, you’re probably very cool. Down here we’re not so cool, we’ve got a lot of hassles goin’ on. I just—every cat. . . .”

  There were shouts from the darkness. Mick peered out blindly past the stage lights and answered, “Yeah, I know, we can’t even see you but I know you’re where—you’re cool. We’re just trying to keep it together. I can’t do any more than ask you—beg you, just to keep it together. You can do it, it’s within your power—everyone—Hell’s Angels, everybody. Let’s just keep ourselves together.

  “You know,” Mick said with a sudden burst of passion, “if we are all one, let’s fucking well show we’re all one. Now there’s one thing we need—Sam, we need an ambulance—we need a doctor by that scaffold there, if there’s a doctor can he get to there. Okay, we’re gonna, we gonna do—I don’t know what the fuck we gonna do. Everyone just sit down. Keep cool. Let’s just relax, let’s get into a groove. Come on, we can get it together. Come on.”

  “Under My Thumb” was starting to churn again. The band sounded amazingly sharp. The crowd was more still. Without knowing exactly what, we all felt that something bad had happened. I assumed, and I was not given to flights of horrible imaginings, that the Angels had killed several people. Gram told me later that he saw Meredith Hunter lifted up, with a great spreading ketchup-colored stain on the back of his suit. Ronnie was running to the First Aid tent, outdistancing the Hell’s Angel who had been leading him. Hunter was there when Ronnie came up, calling for a doctor. A cop said, “You don’t have to scream for a doctor for this guy, he’s dead.”