The concert was a catastrophe, but mostly a well-natured one. Attendees treated the setbacks as badges of honor, and mellow good cheer was the rule, on display everywhere. People let their toddlers run free in giant crowds, or took copious amounts of drugs procured from strangers, or arrived nine months pregnant and simply trusted in the goodwill of others. The fields were trampled, the second-cut hay all vanished by the end of the weekend, but even the locals were placid about the interruption to their lives. Residents who had not been able to buy food for days praised “the kids” for their enthusiasm and spirit. Woodstock was an act of learned naïveté, celebrated in part because so much went wrong, and so much more could have.
Everyone was taken aback by the sheer number of people gathering in relative peace. One concertgoer declared Woodstock to temporarily be the second-biggest city in the state of New York. Another, her grasp of math less assured, called it the third-largest city in the world. And the sheer numbers granted a collective force to the hopes and ambitions of the people in the crowd. Woodstock was more than just a concert for the musicians and attendees; it was a mass effort to change the world and reverse the course of a disastrous war in Vietnam. The U.S. Army sent in medical teams to assist the overworked doctors and nurses on site. As camouflage-colored helicopters hovered overhead, symbolically bringing the war home to upstate New York, an ebullient announcement came from the stage: “They’re with us, man. They’re not against us!” There was power in a crowd, a force and cohesion beyond words or demonstrations of intent. There was joy, too, in sharing a space with so many others, content in the knowledge that shared purpose had been transformed into physical contact.
The crowd had magical powers. “If you think really hard,” someone told the audience during the freak thunderstorm, “maybe we can stop this rain!” Even the hated war in Vietnam could be ended if only people wanted it enough. “Listen, people, I don’t know how you expect to ever stop the war if you can’t sing any better than that,” Country Joe McDonald chastised the crowd during his rendition of “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag.” “There’s about three hundred thousand of you fuckers out there. I want you to start singin’.” Woodstock sought to start a dialogue about the future of the country and open a space for American youth to have their say. These gatherings were a kind of secular ritual, a mass whose officiants donned guitars and held microphones and drumsticks instead of censers and holy water.
The musical performances themselves displayed a hodgepodge of styles, from Sha Na Na’s matching astronaut-leisure-suit outfits and coordinated dance moves to the Who’s rock-god heroics to Arlo Guthrie’s drug-mule blues. Joe Cocker’s sweaty, ecstatic, head-thrown-back rendition of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” a paean to comradeship, moved the crowd, as did Jimi Hendrix, wielding his white-on-white guitar like a feedback-drenched angel, looming over the audience as he wailed out the piercing opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Meanwhile, Jerry Garcia came off the stage at Woodstock, convinced he had blown the opportunity to impress the largest crowd he had ever faced. He was only mildly frustrated that his band, the Grateful Dead, had bungled their chances at a defining moment in their careers. This had been their opportunity, and they had not made the most of it. Perhaps it was the overwhelming infinitude of the crowd, stretching for what seemed like miles in upstate New York, or perhaps it was the inevitable nerves that arose from knowing so many eyes were on you. “We fucked up all the big ones,” Garcia would later note, with Woodstock joining Monterey, where the Dead had been sandwiched between the Who and Jimi Hendrix, in the pantheon of the band’s missed opportunities.
By the time the concert neared its end, the mishaps had mostly been forgotten, overwhelmed by the sheer relief of Woodstock having gone off without any major calamities—or so they believed. “It’s looking like there ain’t gonna be no fuckups,” singer John Sebastian shouted to the crowd, as surprised as he was pleased. “This is gonna work!” Sebastian suggested that everyone “just love everybody all around you, and clean up a little garbage on your way out, and everything gonna be all right!”
Woodstock had been close to a disaster, though: poorly planned, poorly executed, with little foresight and less on-the-ground leadership. The festival had been saved by the desire of its audience for a collective triumph, in which an overcrowded, drug-infested, occasionally unruly mass gathering became an instant cultural high point for a decade, and for an entire generation of American youth. A frosty New York Times editorial compared the pull Woodstock had on young men and women to “the impulses that drive the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea.” But other, hipper publications immediately understood the near-biblical import of Woodstock on youth culture. “They came to hear the music, and they stayed to dig the scene and the people and countryside,” critic Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone, raving about the sheer firepower of the musical lineup. “It’s like watching God perform the Creation. ‘And for my next number.’”
* * *
Earlier that same summer, the Rolling Stones had been preparing for a massive outdoor concert of their own. It would be the first live appearance for the wildly successful British rock group in more than two years, after being sidetracked by numerous arrests and drug problems. Much had changed for the Rolling Stones and the world of popular music in the time between the Stones’ last show and the one set to take place in London’s Hyde Park in July 1969. While “Like a Rolling Stone” and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and “Purple Haze” had each remade the landscape of rock, the Stones had matured from youthful blues enthusiasts armed with an impressive arsenal of Keith Richards’s killer riffs and Brian Jones’s ear for pop melodies to craftsmen capable of such sustained bursts of musical innovation as their most recent album, Beggars Banquet, which featured the indelible hits “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man.”
Mick Jagger had been a middle-class teenager in Dartford, Kent, with the disposable income to buy blues albums directly from the United States. He had sent in his orders to the Chess label in Chicago, home to Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters. He began with Waters’s epochal Live at Newport, then branched out to more esoteric fare. Jagger would carry three or four discs at a time under his arm around the school playground.
He met Brian Jones, another middle-class kid with a startling rebellious streak that scandalized the polite Jagger. Jones was a father at the age of sixteen, having impregnated a fourteen-year-old; by twenty, he had three children with three different women. He was, an onlooker from the era once noted, “a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness.” Jagger and Jones shared an abiding love for the Chicago blues, and when they decided to form a band, Jones named it after their mutual hero Waters’s song “Rollin’ Stone.” Jagger, still carrying his records under his arm, met his former childhood schoolmate Keith Richards on a train platform; they bonded over their mutual love for Waters and Chuck Berry, and formed a lifelong attachment. He, too, would join the band.
The Rolling Stones were, at first, Jones’s band; he was the front man, the preeminent figure, and the mastermind of the group. He was also, by a substantial measure, the most skilled musician in the group, which besides Jagger now also included Richards on guitar and pianist Ian Stewart. They played their first gig in July 1962, and bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts joined soon after.
Then the Beatles broke, and the Stones found a new manager named Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham promoted the Rolling Stones as the anti-Beatles, unkempt and quasi-criminal where their putative rivals were polite and fun-loving. It was ironic for a group primarily composed of art-school students, and doubly so given that the polished Beatles were the actual working-class heroes. Oldham placed deliberately inflammatory stories about the band in the London press, like the one in the Daily Express that wondered “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?” Oldham also booted Stewart from the band (he looked “too normal”) and shifted the foc
us of attention from Jones to Jagger.
The British Invasion revitalized rock in the early 1960s, its paragon acts catapulting to fame on the strength of deceptively simple two-minute numbers. The music was the expression of an attitude. The Rolling Stones were ritualistically contrasted with the Beatles, the London bad boys pitted against the genial, charming Liverpudlians. The Stones were thought of as crude, sex-obsessed, thuggish, their music dense and pitted where the Beatles’ was airy and harmonic. It was odd that so much intellectual energy was invested into defining, and contrasting, the two signature groups of the British Invasion when what united them both was a restless experimentalism and a desire to expand outward, from the simple to the complex.
The caricature did not match the Stones’ music, which grew increasingly subtle and varied over the course of the decade. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were guitar-slinging British rockers who had co-opted the blues, created and nurtured by African-Americans, and made it safe for screaming teenage girls. Over the course of six years, the Stones had grown from blues enthusiasts emulating their musical heroes to the creators of a sound all their own, mingling sex and politics, blues and country, Richards’s tossed-off electricity and Jagger’s erotic swagger.
Oldham locked Jagger and Richards in an apartment and refused to let them out until they had written a song together. The Stones’ early hits were mostly blues covers, thrilling in 1964 and mostly unexceptional thereafter, but Jagger and Richards soon discovered that they could write their own songs, indebted to the blues but possessed of their own rude, brutal force. Beyond the driving numbers like “Get Off of My Cloud” and the timeless “Satisfaction,” the Stones became, to their own surprise, masters of the blues ballad, penning songs like “Time Is on My Side” and “As Tears Go By” (originally written for Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull).
Jones was now a decidedly second-tier band member, but his musical daring gave the Rolling Stones the sonic filigree that would dot superb midperiod albums like 1966’s Aftermath: the sitar on “Paint It Black” and “Mother’s Little Helper,” the marimba on “Under My Thumb.”
Jones began taking acid and beating his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and slipping out of the orbit of the band, which increasingly belonged to Jagger and Richards. Richards looked like a recently exhumed Cro-Magnon and had a drug habit that would fell five NFL offensive linemen, but he proved himself a surprisingly limber songwriter with a gift for melody that even Jones could not match. And Jagger? Mick Jagger was simply a star. Andrew Oldham had known, even before the singer himself had, that this young man was born to stand in the heat of the spotlight. Here was the rare figure who would flourish there.
* * *
A band devoted to cranking out singles for a rabid audience of infatuated teenagers had grown into artists entering the most fruitful phase of their careers. Savvy lead singer Mick Jagger, on the cusp of turning twenty-six, had the brilliant idea of coming up with the money for the Hyde Park show by offering British television network Granada Television the opportunity to make a documentary film of the concert.
Hyde Park came at a hinge point in the Rolling Stones’ story: the band’s past tragically shucked off, and its future still unknowable. Brian Jones, the band’s cofounder, had died only three days prior to the show, drowned in his own swimming pool at the age of twenty-seven. Erratic personal behavior, drug addiction, alcoholism, and persistent run-ins with the law had led to Jones departing the band just a few weeks earlier, and now, shockingly and yet not at all surprisingly, he was dead.
The Hyde Park show’s organizer, Sam Cutler, took to the mic before the Stones started their set to tell the crowd they should feel proud. There were three hundred thousand people present, three times as many attendees as at a recent sold-out Wembley Stadium British Cup final, and “there’s not yet been one incident reported to the organizers. We managed to assure everyone that crowds that attend pop concerts attend because they want to listen to music.”
Jagger asked Cutler to prepare the audience for a somber moment midconcert, calming the deafening roar of the crowd so he could deliver his planned tribute to his former bandmate and comrade. Having quieted the crowd to his satisfaction, Jagger went on to read a portion of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais,” an elegy written for Shelley’s friend and fellow Romantic poet John Keats, dead at the age of twenty-five. “’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife. And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife,” Jagger read. “Fear and grief convulse us, and consume us day by day…”
After some polite applause, Jagger shouted “All right!” as if to call a halt to the depressing lesson. The Rolling Stones, young men in love with not just the sound of rock ’n’ roll but its embrace of youth and vigor, could face the idea of death for only so long before itching to return to life, and to music. Stones crew members released a horde of butterflies—many of them already dying or dead—from boxes poised at the edges of the stage.
Following the show, volunteers stuck around and cleaned up the park in exchange for the promise of a free Stones album. “On the whole they were a pretty well-behaved crowd,” a police officer told The Boston Globe. “They don’t give us the trouble soccer fans do.” A security force composed of self-declared Hells Angels—including a number of pensioners and, it seemed, at least one “Angel” who was a teenage boy with a stenciled-on leather jacket—had helped to protect the peace.
Cutler, the adopted son of working-class socialists who had discovered rock concert production through working with local jazz acts, was proud that such a large show, the biggest ever put on in Britain, had generated so few problems. He was exceptionally pleased, also, to be asked by the Rolling Stones to accompany them on their American tour. He would be their tour manager, in charge of seeing to the band’s day-to-day needs like an older brother looking after his scatterbrained siblings. If Richards needed a ride to the guitar shop, Cutler would find a car and drive him. If Jagger needed new clothes, Cutler would buy or borrow some for the next show. If the band wanted to visit a friend, Cutler would get them there.
The tour would be crucial for the band for two reasons. First, it would reintroduce the Rolling Stones to America, after—by the rock standards of the time—an uncommonly lengthy hiatus. Second, it would hopefully bring in some much-needed revenue. Reestablishing their prowess as a touring group, after the interruptions of the past three years, would be crucial to the long-term health of the band. The band was in the process of divorcing itself from its longtime manager Allen Klein, and its finances were wildly disorganized. In the months before the American tour, they had been reduced to begging Klein for money simply to pay the rent on their London office.
Hyde Park was a triumph of English politesse and sheer good fortune. Its success, along with that of the yet-larger Woodstock, encouraged the Rolling Stones to consider headlining a free show at the end of their upcoming American tour—an idea that San Francisco counterculture heroes the Grateful Dead had been contemplating for some time.
* * *
Dead manager Rock Scully had been invited to London by Sam Cutler to discuss the idea of a free show featuring the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane in Hyde Park. Cutler said the Rolling Stones would pay for the costs of the show. Scully later met with Keith Richards, trading talk of glittering potential concert locales: Golden Gate Park, Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal.
Between tugs from Keith Richards’s joint and snorts of Nembutal, Scully suggested that the band come to San Francisco at the end of their tour and join the Grateful Dead for a free concert in Golden Gate Park. The idea of a free San Francisco show in the vein of past impromptu Dead and Airplane gigs intrigued Cutler. He noted that the Stones had used the Hells Angels for their Hyde Park show, and Richards, enthusiastic about the experience, remarked that it had been “beautiful.”
The Dead were longtime fans of the Rolling Stones and were hoping to bring them to California as a treat for their local fans. Having the St
ones headline the Golden Gate Park show would transform a local festival into another Hyde Park, a Woodstock West. It would be legendary. The Stones expressed their tentative interest; details would follow later.
The Grateful Dead had always been masters at surprising a crowd. On their first East Coast trip, back in 1967, the New York City parks commissioner had unexpectedly approached them. Sure they were about to be busted for smoking joints in Central Park, or some other misdemeanor, the band were wary. But the commissioner had a request: there had been a protracted squabble over the band shell at Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan’s East Village, with African-Americans and Puerto Ricans from the neighborhood battling over its use. Would the Grateful Dead be willing to play a free show at the band shell?
Why the commissioner believed the arrival of an LSD-inhaling band of San Francisco hippies would still this particular dispute is lost to the mists of time, but the Dead dutifully played for the bickering Tompkins Square parkgoers, to the eternal appreciation of the New York City Parks Department, and the likely confusion of the crowd.
The truth was, the Dead liked an audience best of all. While groups like the Beatles discovered the glories of the recording studio, the Dead were at best reluctant to record their own music. “God,” guitarist Jerry Garcia once muttered, “we make shitty records.” The true magic was found up on a stage, surrounded by an audience willing to be moved: by the drugs, by the music, by the spectacle, by the moment. The band played the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, and were delighted to discover an audience that resembled a mirror. There were, as Scully later described it, “thirty thousand pot-smoking, headband-wearing acid-heads—an entire medium-sized town composed entirely of freaks!”
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 2