by Peter Coyote
He was cooking in the ship’s galley the day the captain sent his eggs back for the third time. Bill heaved the plate of food in the captain’s face and was fired on the spot. He took his hundred-dollar discharge pay and flew to California.
Bill gravitated to the bohemian haven of San Francisco’s North Beach in the late 1950s. He was parking cars for twenty-four dollars a week, so broke that he was picking cigarettes off the sidewalk. In a bar one day, a guy named Roy Miller noticed his pack with all the different brands of butts in it and asked, “You into making some money?” Bill answered affirmatively, and Roy asked if he could get a gun. Bill could not but managed a butcher knife and with it the two robbed a Safeway for $3,400. Bill was exhilarated by the experience, “hooked on the rush,” as he put it. Walking down Market Street afterward, the wind kept whipping his long hair into his face, so he bought a celebratory Panama hat. That hat became his trademark, Roy followed suit, and before long, he and Roy became known as the Panama Hat Bandits.
High style was a pronounced trait of Bill’s personality, which was generously endowed with charisma. He resembled the actor-director John Cassavetes, but his face was, if anything, more masculine, less softened by conflicting sensibilities. He was cocksure and apparently fearless. His fidelity to his impulses was so absolute that for people like myself, awash in ambiguities, he was a beacon of certainty and personal power.
“We’d dress up on weekends,” Bill remembers, “and rob those Tahitian Hut tonga-wonga bars. It was a great life.” Until one day four guys entered the motorcycle shop where he worked. Bill looked up, read the vibes, and thought to himself, “Flash, I’m dead.” He assumed that the men were Italians who owned the tonga-wonga bars. Luckily, he was wrong. They were cops.
Because Bill was only twenty at the time, he was sent to the Youth Authority at Tracy while Roy did time at San Quentin. While Bill was incarcerated he took an aircraft mechanics course and became certified. When friends inquired about prison, he shrugged it off: “I did a hundred sit-ups a night, a hundred push-ups, and jerked off the rest of the time.”
When he was tripping on speed, Bill could keep you spellbound, examining the cosmic potentialities of a small stone he’d found somewhere or reviewing his last act of lovemaking in staggering detail, explaining precisely what had occurred in the minds and bodies of both participants. His was egotism at its most innocent, assuming that his personal explorations had universal resonances. He regarded these explorations as his work.
When he was released from Tracy, Bill went to work in the prop shop at Pan Am. By 1962, he had married Richard Marley’s sister and had two boys. His life appeared stable and normal, but this was an illusion. His family and personal plans were about to be disrupted by the social seizures and generational conflict of the decade.
East-West House was a San Francisco writer’s cooperative hangout. Marley brought Bill there one day and introduced him to poet Lenore Kandel. Bill fell in love immediately, went home, got his clothes, said good-bye to his wife and children, and left.
“It was the only honest thing to do,” he says flatly. I ask him if he has seen his children since, and he just shrugs. It makes me sad to think of that broken family. I wonder how different Bill’s life might have been if he had stayed with them. Where he lives now, in a tiny room in a decrepit old boarding-house, there are no children’s drawings, no photographs of him with a woman and children, no tarnished trophies and yellowed high school yearbooks. If he misses such things or regrets his choices, he will never say. Like a wolf who has chewed off a paw to escape a trap, only he knows how much the paw is missed.
It was fitting that Bill and Lenore Kandel should have fallen in love. They were extraordinarily beautiful people intimately tuned to their bodies. Their skin looked as if it would taste delicious. Bill was fire and lava, given to volcanic explosions and sudden insights that rocked him like seismic tremors. Lenore was a giggling dakini (one of the feminine consorts of the Buddha). Her psychic center of gravity appeared to be located in the earth’s core; nothing perturbed her rock-steady equilibrium. Already an established poet, she was also an accomplished belly dancer who earned pocket money making beaded jewelry for a foreign import store.
Their bed filled almost a whole room and was an epicurean marvel. Both sides were lined with boxes of cookies: Oreos, pecan sandies, and various whipped-cream and chocolate confections. There were dirty books, scented oils, and things to drink. It was a bed you could live in for days, and they often did. Their coupling seemed like a universal principle, a melding of dark and light forces. They moved into a flat on Chestnut Street that they inherited from a friend. Bill went to work on the waterfront, Lenore modeled for the Art Institute, and the world appeared to be in order.
In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, promising to punish the mouthy students acting up in Berkeley and to fry the inmates on San Quentin’s death row. His victory signaled a sea change in the social climate, and about a week later, the Psychedelic Shop was raided by the police, who seized copies of Lenore’s erotic poems, The Love Book. These graphic paeans to monogamous love and sex had been published before, and since you could walk to any street corner and buy hard-core pornography or open a men’s magazine for steamier stuff, our community perceived this as Reagan’s attack on the psychedelic culture.
Lenore and her book became the center of a very public pornography trial. I had not yet met her, but I felt that she should be invited to attend the initial Artists’ Liberation Front meeting, so I found her phone number and invited her. When she and Bill appeared, they galvanized everyone’s attention in the packed room. They were dressed, respectively, in bright red and cobalt-blue leather Levis, radiating the charisma and self-assurance of natural leaders. Their style was effortless, authentic, royal. You could imagine them at ease in a French café or at an embassy ball; they would know people who were never bored or plagued with self-doubts. You felt yourself sinking a bit in your own estimation by comparison.
They certainly raised the mark by which I measured myself, and I was not the only one to notice them. “Emmett and I pinned each other right away,” Bill laughs, “recognized each other as rivals, right off.” They began to hang around together, and through Emmett, Bill and Lenore gravitated into the Digger orbit.
Sweet William loved the Diggers. “They were a challenge. It was somethin’ I didn’t understand,” he says. “Everybody was winging it.” He rose to the challenge, assuming roles with the Free Food deliveries, the truck repairs, and guarding our treasury and its record, the Free Bank book, with characteristic dedication. The Diggers respected Bill’s fearlessness and dignity similarly. He was too proud to lie. He was indisputably somebody. I felt that way about many of my friends then; though their fame was strictly local, they had an authority that rested on character and ability rather than on wealth or social status. One of the defining attributes of the sixties was the collective impulse to reveal yourself candidly and publicly, confessing your inner visions as your daily life. It was as if the participants at a costume ball suddenly found the event too silly and simultaneously dropped their masks. Farm boys from Nebraska were writing poems, preppy girls from Grosse Point were throwing the Tarot and studying herbs. Kids with no idea of who they wanted to become could idle on the teeming streets among people who would not judge them for their confusion. Personal style counted more than a pedigree, and even within this community of dedicated life actors, Bill was a star.
In retrospect, it appears inevitable that Bill would have joined the Hell’s Angels. His masculinity was so pronounced and his sense of honor so demanding as to require constant testing. One day he and Emmett were leaving an event at the University of California extension on Laguna Street and they noticed a chopped Harley Davidson parked by the curb. Emmett and Bill said, “That’s my bike” simultaneously.
“I just kept saying, ‘Bike, bike, bike,’ everywhere—everywhere,” Bill remembers. “Everywhere I went, whoever I ran into. Lenore did
some kind of spell. Took some blood out of my finger. I don’t know what the fuck she did with it, but the next day, you had some inheritance for me, and Jon and Sarah Glazer had an aunt who died, and they gave me money.”
The bike that Emmett and Bill saw belonged to Pete Knell. During negotiations, they liked each other, and Pete offered to be Bill’s sponsor if he wanted to join the Angels. When Bill returned to Peter Berg’s and announced his decision to do that, Emmett spat, “What a waste!” dismissively. At the time I thought he was jealous. I did not realize that he had made a prophecy.
Bill “prospected” with the Angels for seven months, a period of apprenticeship during which he spent time with each member of the San Francisco chapter in order to win approval. He was tested in every way imaginable. Two votes against him were enough to keep him out of the club, and every member had his own criteria for passing or failing a prospect. Failure could be costly. Shortly after being turned down for the third time, Gordon Westerfelt, a dapper, handsome man with the cocky swagger of a World War II ace pilot, was slipping the key into his apartment lock one night when someone stepped from the shadows and punched his brains into jelly with a small-caliber bullet. His bike and personal possessions, including his girlfriend, subsequently circulated through the club. My mentor at that time, an Angel named Moose who had “adopted” me as a personal friend, told me shortly afterward that he was putting out a reward for the killer. Since I was not an Angel and he did not have to tell me the truth, and since he knew that I knew this, I have no way of knowing whether this was a rumor he wanted disseminated.
Twenty odd years later, when I ask Bill about Gordon’s death, he shrugs and asks me who I thought might have done it. I tell him that I suspected that perhaps he or Moose might have had something to do with it. He looks away, and I remind him that something changed his fate dramatically, something had unaccountably punctured his impenetrable good fortune, and that I had never understood how he had moved so abruptly from the realms of the charmed to the luckless. By way of explanation to myself, I had imagined an act with terrible karmic consequences.
He looks at me levelly, without blinking, and I feel as if I am in an empty room in an abandoned house. A door creaks open and then closes. I can almost hear the rustle of something moving behind the walls. Bill takes a drag on his Camel and changes the subject.
“Everyone had their fears and fantasies about the Angels,” he says, referring again to his probation period years ago. “But as long as you approached individuals and were all the way honest, you were okay. The testing is about honesty—what you are and what you’re really about.”
One night, during his prospecting, Bill and some friends were drinking in a bar when an Angel commanded Bill to punch a guy at the end of the bar for no reason. Bill turned to him and said, “Anybody who tells me to go punch somebody gets punched in the face.” This was the candor and intuitiveness that ushered him, member by member, through the portals that closed civilian life behind him forever. Bill entered the realms of hell, and Lenore followed willingly. Their bright jeans were replaced by black leathers now, and they raced together through the streets on Bill’s barking machine like two close-coupled feral dogs.
The Angels’ scene made no allowances for females or poets. One night Lenore was accidentally smashed in the face by a thrown glass beer pitcher. Another time, she crashed on the bike, injuring some vertebrae and leaving her in chronic pain. Walking was almost impossible for her, her hands and feet trembled, and she became nearly a total recluse. Eventually she bailed out.
“Lenore was a good, loyal woman with me. She did the best she could,” Bill says gravely. Our community was shocked when they broke up. When I heard the news, I had an eerie presentiment that the balance in Bill’s life had tipped into darkness.
There was a gathering dusk in the streets as well. By the early seventies, the Haight was tattered and worn, the original careless exuberance shadowed. The perfect expression of the change was a murderous rock-and-roll concert remembered by the name of the site at which it took place: Altamont.
The Rolling Stones were coming to town, and the Grateful Dead management wanted to throw a party in honor of their high-status rock star friends. Emissaries from the Dead requested the Diggers’ help in creating the event. Both Peter Berg and I suggested events framed by multiple bonfires, each of which would be the locus of music and activity, rather than a central stage. This would ensure a collaborative frame of reference and minimize divisions between the community and its entertainers, a point we both stressed. Before the hype and marketing concerns of the music business dominated the culture, bands understood that they were of the community in which they performed and responded appropriately to that reality, rather than as objects of veneration acting out for faceless nobodies.
Our ideas did not seem elevated enough for Sam Cutler, the neurasthenic Englishman working in some managerial capacity for the Dead, so he approached Pete Knell and the Hell’s Angels and told him that the Stones “wanted to do something for the people.”
Sweet William was in the room when this conversation occurred, and he remembers Pete’s response: “Tell ’em to come. We’ll pick ’em up at the airport, bring ’em to the Panhandle, and let ’em do a free concert.” Pete went on to guarantee that the equipment would be set up and ready for them and that all they would have to bring would be their guitars. The Hell’s Angels knew what “free” meant too.
Sam asked Pete how much the club would want to serve as “security” at the event, and Pete told him, “We don’t police things. We’re not a security force. We go to concerts to enjoy ourselves and have fun.”
“Well, what about helping people out—you know, giving directions and things?” Cutler queried, angling to have the Angels attached to the event in some official capacity. When Pete agreed that they could do that, Cutler returned to the question of price, and Pete said, “We like beer.”
“How does a hundred cases sound?” Cutler responded, and a deal was struck. The Angels intended to give the beer away and felt that this would be good for their club’s image.
Weeks went by while site after site was investigated and rejected before they settled on Altamont, farm country in the rolling hills between Oakland and the Central Valley. In Bill’s words, it was “a goddamn, fucking, bereft pasture. In the middle of nothin’. Couple of barbed-wire fences. Cow shit. Not even a barn.” This was the environment in which the Rolling Stones’ “gift” would be tendered and received.
Bill remembers his shock on arriving at the site on the day of the concert. A stage with three stories of scaffolding had been erected, festooned with mammoth speakers, lights, and equipment. The place was teeming with people from the lip of the stage to the horizon, a churning, roiling sea. “With my misguided sense of responsibility,” Bill says, “I was crazy trying to look after people . . . see that this one didn’t get crushed or that that one knew where to go.”
He looked down from the stage to check his bike and was amazed to see someone sitting on it. “I couldn’t believe it,” Bill says. “I told him to get off the bike, and he wouldn’t. I said it again, and he wouldn’t. I grabbed him so hard I heard every bone in his body snap. I was so angry I would’ve ripped his fuckin’ head off and thrown it in the pasture. The bike fell over and I went crazy. I started stompin’ him. I didn’t even want his ghost around.” This was how the party began.
From the beginning of the event, people insisted on “crashing” the stage. They were not used to “free” events being hierarchical and proprietary and could not understand why there were off-limits at a free concert or why guards were required, and it rankled them. The event so resembled a massive commercial concert that perhaps the audience became confused and felt as if they had been demoted to nonentities and wanted to get closer to the heat and glow of the luminaries. They had, in fact, been unwittingly enlisted as extras in a commercial film and should have been paid. The concert was not free at all but had merely waived admission. Its
real organizing principle was a merchandising event to create a live album and film—and a dynastic marriage between the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones’ families.
Whatever the reason, the crowd was whipping itself into froth; somehow it fell to the Angels to protect the stage and keep it clear enough so that the concert could continue. “We did it ’cause it had to be done,” says Bill. The Oakland Angels arrived. Unlike their party-hard San Francisco brothers, this chapter had the reputation of heavyweight gangsters with a penchant for violence. Moving slowly and precariously through the crowd on their roaring, spitting bikes, creating a cacophony that overwhelmed the music, they edged up to the stage. Bill pulled the Angels’ national president Sonny Barger up next to him. A warm-up band was playing. “I feel this shudder next to me,” Bill says. “I look over and it’s Sonny. He turns to me and says, ‘We’re keeping this stage? Do you realize that if all these people had their minds together they could crush this whole thing?’ ”
Sonny’s perception of reality broke through Bill’s preoccupations, and he too realized that their pitifully small cadre of Angels had been slicked into the role of defending the stage against hundreds of thousands of unruly people.
The crowd was impatient for the Stones, and its surges forward were becoming wilder and harder to control. Even from among so many, Bill singled out Meredith Hunter. “I shoved Meredith Hunter off that stage myself three times,” he says. “Big tall fucker. Three times I had my hands on that guy. I shoved his fucking ass back. I told him. I tumbled him off the stage three times. How clear do I have to be?”