They played at Monterey for the International Pop Festival, surrounded by amateur guitar pickers and ebullient children and Sioux-style tepees, and all the hassle of fending off scheming L.A. wheeler-dealers was instantly justified. Woodstock had not been the first major gig the Dead had blown. They had always bombed these shows, but the kids who increasingly flocked to their shows never truly minded. Everyone knew the Grateful Dead were not like other bands. They were not to be judged solely on the basis of their musicianship, or even their ability to remain sober for long enough to play their instruments, but on the entirety of the spectacle that inevitably accompanied them everywhere they set up the elaborate gear that had been purchased for them by friend and LSD wizard Owsley Stanley. This was a traveling carnival, and the Grateful Dead were merely the ebullient impresarios.
And the freaks were suddenly everywhere. Many of the fans who had traveled to Monterey for the festival wound up in San Francisco after the show, homeless and hungry, their thirst for the hippie scene trumping all other needs. The radical activists of the Diggers, local anarchists with a theatrical flair, were rummaging the city for day-old bread and wilting lettuce to serve cheese sandwiches and lettuce soup to the hippies-to-be. The Dead sought to chip in, too. They ran extension cords into fans’ apartments in order to play impromptu shows in Panhandle Park. They showed up unexpectedly on Haight Street, setting up their amplifiers, rocking the crowd that showed up, and then inviting them to walk over to Golden Gate Park and enjoy the setting sun. The Grateful Dead trusted their audiences to appreciate the delicate, ephemeral pleasures on offer, and the audience trusted the Dead to provide a warm, intimate, and safe environment.
Scully had first met the band in 1965 while promoting another band’s concert. Owsley Stanley had invited him to the Fillmore to check out a show, and after meeting them, Stanley prodded him into taking a job as the Grateful Dead’s manager. The Dead saw themselves as “lysergic storm troopers,” exuberantly promoting a new life of psychedelic-drug experimentation that they viewed as far more radical than anything being peddled by the soapbox preachers in nearby Berkeley. Musically, the Dead were a bevy of mismatched parts: Jerry Garcia, product of the folkie coffeehouse scene in Palo Alto; electronic-music student Phil Lesh; impassioned blues fan Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, whose father had been a DJ for an African-American R&B station; and Bob Weir, who had once been Garcia’s guitar student. They were a blues group whose players pulled in mutually exclusive directions, crafting a sound not entirely formed. They were the promise of a future utopia whose present had not yet fully congealed.
* * *
The American tour would be the Rolling Stones’ own show. The band would book the venues, hire the opening acts, and (they hoped) collect the revenue. Part of the attraction of working without Klein, in addition to the surer stream of money, was the ability to book their own opening acts, bringing in some of the African-American performers who were their idols and inspirations.
Integration was a matter of musical and ethical principle for the Rolling Stones, who understood the depth of their debt to the blues and sought to repay it in whatever fashion they could. This meant bringing along Jagger and Richards’s teenage idol Chuck Berry to school youthful audiences blissfully unaware that rock ’n’ roll hadn’t been invented in Liverpool, or the Haight. It would even mean insisting that the students at Auburn University, only integrated five years prior, watch a dazzling African-American performer like Berry open for the band.
The Rolling Stones decamped for Los Angeles in the summer of 1969 with the vague plans for the free San Francisco show still hovering in the distance, a capstone to what they hoped would be a successful American tour. Jagger, Richards, Cutler, and the newest Stone, guitarist Mick Taylor, lived together at the Laurel Canyon home they rented from Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, in an atmosphere of casual chaos, rampant drug use, and unexpected guest visitors. Walking into the house, visitors might find Little Richard had dropped by, playing the keyboards for a hushed audience of rock stars and hangers-on. Unsatisfied with the studio at Stills’s house, the band practiced on the Warner Bros. soundstage in Burbank, on a set being used for Sydney Pollack’s Depression-era dance-marathon drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? A large sign hung ominously over the band’s heads: “HOW LONG WILL THEY LAST?”
Scully and Emmett Grogan of the Diggers trekked south from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to discuss the details of the free show. The Diggers were perambulatory dramatists, the sidewalks of San Francisco their stages for such provocations as passing out free marijuana in the Haight-Ashbury, burning dollar bills, and holding a funeral ceremony for “the death of money and the birth of free.” They opened free stores and medical clinics, seeking, in the description of Digger Peter Coyote, to imagine a world they would like to live in.
The Diggers were, as Todd Gitlin would later call them, “anarchists of the deed,” and they hoped to channel that spirit for the concert. They had been approached to help put on a party for the Stones, and said they would be happy to have a blowout bash as long as a bunch of British rock stars were not the cause of the celebration. Instead, they suggested erecting a half dozen or so stages and passing out redwood seeds and bolts of silk. It would be a local party with an ecologically minded, planetary frame of reference.
When Scully and Grogan arrived, Gram Parsons of the country-rock group Flying Burrito Brothers, who were opening for the Stones on a number of dates during the American tour, was tearing up the house in search of a misplaced baggie of hashish. Keith Richards, Parsons’s druggie pal, instantly accused Scully and Grogan of having pilfered Parsons’s stash. The meeting was postponed.
Being relative newcomers to the ways of the Bay, the Rolling Stones turned to the Grateful Dead for guidance about planning the show. The idea being batted around was to ape the vibe of the Dead’s free shows, with everything from its location to its security staff matching the already established tradition of free shows in Golden Gate Park.
The Grateful Dead were to be cohosts and guiding spirits for the free show. They believed that this free concert would work best as a surprise for fans. No advance warning, no tickets—just the rumor mill and the drift of Keith Richards’s guitar over the rooftops of the Haight. The Dead had always employed the Hells Angels as their security force. They recommend hiring the Angels for this free show, and the Stones, having worked with what they believed was a British offshoot of the motorcycle club at Hyde Park, gladly assented.
The Golden Gate Park event would be a relatively intimate affair, with fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand people in attendance, and the music bookended by theatrical performers and other acts. The show presented an opportunity to bring San Francisco’s then-warring clans—bikers, Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and others—together. The Stones would help to pay for the beer and concessions, and headline the show. Music would help to heal a fractured community. Initial reports singled out The Band and Ali Akbar Khan as potential acts, and mentioned that the radical San Francisco Mime Troupe were asked to perform. The Mime Troupe, affiliated with Grogan’s Diggers, agreed to appear, on condition that the concert’s proceeds be directed toward the defense fund for the violent political activists the Weathermen.
Jagger would later acquire a reputation as a micromanager, but at this early stage in the life of the Rolling Stones, he was inclined to leave the details to others. Chip Monck, a former Connecticut prep school boy who had run away with the circus as a teenager and discovered the magic of dramatic lighting, had just finished staging the triumphant show at Woodstock when he was summoned to meet the Rolling Stones in Los Angeles. Monck visited the band at Stills’s house, taking in the wall of mirrors reflecting the view of the city below, and invited Jagger to join him in the backyard to escape the ceaseless musical, alcoholic, and narcotic racket indoors. He had set out his carefully drawn-up staging and lighting plans for the tour poolside for Jagger’s perusal, but after fifteen minutes or so, Jagger’s eyes began t
o glaze over. “Oh, fuck it. Just do it, will you?” Jagger said, and marched back inside. The details of the Stones’ tour—and, more important, of the free concert to come—were too grubby to be of much concern to the band.
The San Francisco show stayed a secret—and mostly on the back burner during the tour, which passed in a blur of interchangeable locations, double shows, late-night food crawls in shuttered towns, and charter flights, booked when the forever-tardy band failed to arrive on time for yet another commercial flight.
The Rolling Stones were a circus, and they attracted other performers, some legends in their own right and some merely in their own minds. Governor Claude Kirk of Florida crashed their Palm Beach show, set to take place in front of forty thousand exuberant fans, and threatened the Stones: “You can’t play anywhere in this state or Palm Beach County.” He eventually skulked away, and the concert went on as scheduled. Abbie Hoffman, founder of the leftist-anarchist japesters the Yippies, caught the band in Chicago and saw affinities between his work and that of the Stones: “Your thing is sex, mine’s violence.”
Encountering the band’s new manager (and their former manager Allen Klein’s nephew) Ronnie Schneider, Hoffman asked him for some money for his upcoming trial, to no avail. Jimi Hendrix stopped by the dressing room and borrowed Mick Taylor’s guitar, turning it upside down to accommodate his left-handedness. Cutler had to offer a recalcitrant Janis Joplin a bump of cocaine to get her to clear the dressing room before one show. Groupies were omnipresent, and persistent. One, nicknamed the Butter Queen, poured hot butter on a roadie’s penis and then licked it off as the Stones’ crew watched.
The Rolling Stones’ return to America was a successful reunion with the fans who had waited impatiently for years to see their idols in the flesh, but it also prompted accusations of price gouging. Rock journalists like the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ralph J. Gleason claimed that the Stones were ripping off their dedicated followers with inflated ticket prices for their tour dates. Gleason called for the band to give back to their loyal Bay Area audience with a free show, not knowing that they were already in talks to host one. The planned concert at Golden Gate Park would be an ideal opportunity to demonstrate their hippie-culture bona fides and undercut the growing criticism in the press.
A late November cover story in Rolling Stone proclaimed “IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN!” even though Jagger himself was notably more circumspect. “It depends on whether we can get a place,” he told the counterculture’s newspaper of record. “There are so many obstacles put in front of us. It’s gotten so fucking complicated.” Jagger’s longtime assistant Jo Bergman remained confident, her spine stiffened by the Stones’ traditional modus operandi: “It’s going to happen. We’ve always done everything at the end, at the last minute, and it works.” Chip Monck, still anxiously awaiting final word on a site, said that he could set up anywhere, as long as he had three days, with a full crew pulling triple shifts, to get organized.
The Rolling Stones’ plans to participate attracted local stars interested in sharing the spotlight. The Mime Troupe and The Band had fallen out of consideration, but David Crosby heard about the show and suggested Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for the bill. Local groups like Santana and Jefferson Airplane wanted in, also.
* * *
In the fall of 1969, the Rolling Stones reached out to acclaimed cinematographer Haskell Wexler with a job offer. They were about to tour the United States, and were looking for a battle-tested filmmaker to shoot some footage at their concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York. There was no larger project yet; the band merely looked to preserve their New York performances for potential future use. Wexler mulled taking the job, but couldn’t free himself up. Instead, he called Albert and David Maysles from San Francisco and said that the band would be at the Plaza Hotel the next day. Would they be interested in meeting Mick Jagger?
The Maysles brothers were the acclaimed filmmakers (along with codirector Charlotte Zwerin) behind 1968’s critically acclaimed documentary Salesman, which tagged along with a quartet of itinerant Bible salesmen on a jaunt down to Florida. The film gave viewers the privileged sense of lurking unobserved as ordinary American men went about their daily business.
Work was work, and both men were intrigued by the Rolling Stones, so they dutifully made their way to the Plaza, and agreed to take the job. The band gave the Maysles brothers $14,000 to cover the expenses of the shoot. They rushed to Baltimore to take in that night’s show, and were both impressed with the band’s star power and musical skill. The filmmakers recorded the Stones’ show at Madison Square Garden, which went off without a hitch. The diminutive Al perched on sound recordist Stan Goldstein’s shoulders to shoot much of the concert.
The Maysles brothers were taken with the band, with David in particular enamored of Mick Jagger’s panache and raw magnetism, and they asked for permission to follow the band to Muscle Shoals studios in Alabama, where they were recording their new album Sticky Fingers. They also made plans to be in California in early December for the proposed free concert, now only a few weeks away. The Stones advanced them a further $120,000 for the concert shoot, which granted the band a 50 percent share of any profits that might accrue if a film were made.
There was no deal yet between the filmmakers and the band, nor had they officially agreed to allow their images to be used, but the Stones were already thinking of re-creating the Hyde Park arrangement. While free concerts might be free for the audience, they cost money for the promoters putting it on. Hyde Park, which had been amply covered by the payment from Granada Television, had given the band an idea for how to pay for the San Francisco show: hire a film crew to record the proceedings and sell the film rights.
The Rolling Stones were the furthest thing imaginable from Bible salesmen—even the film’s wisecracking, sardonic variety of Bible salesmen—but they had summoned the Maysles brothers in the hopes of similarly capturing lightning in a bottle. For all the millions of fans, in the United States and overseas, who could not be present in San Francisco, a documentary could serve as the next best thing, a virtual front-row-center seat to the other concert of the year.
The San Francisco show was to be a capstone to a successful return American engagement, and a generous gift for fans. The peacefulness and good cheer of Hyde Park, and the enormous success of Woodstock, encouraged the Stones, the Grateful Dead, and the other bands involved to believe that a shared desire for the success of such mass gatherings would prevent any and all outbursts of bad behavior. Planners no longer had to worry about worst-case scenarios, because outdoor festivals like Woodstock were more than just concerts. They were gatherings of like-minded young men and women intent on changing the world, and who would come to such an event to disrupt the good vibes?
A substantial and noticeable police and security presence was simply unnecessary in the new order. There would be no uniformed officers near the stage when the Rolling Stones played on their American tour, leading one usher at the Forum, in Los Angeles, to wonder, “What happens when twenty thousand kids rush the stage?” Practical realities like bathrooms and medical personnel could be addressed at a later stage, if at all. Mass concerts would turn out well because they always had in the past. There was a new paradigm now, one that required none of the careful attention that might be expected for any gathering of hundreds of thousands of people. Blind optimism was the new faith of the counterculture, but belief sometimes ran headlong into a wall of uncompromising reality.
While the Stones were on tour, the Grateful Dead were camped at Alembic Sound in Marin County, where the Dead’s rehearsal space and offices were located. The band and its staff had been placed in charge of the planning for the concert by default, and the mood was spiky, nettled. The Grateful Dead and their advisers were simultaneously the servants of another, more famous band, and the default organizers of a concert whose most important details they did not actually control. Emmett Grogan placed a tongue-in-cheek notice on the bulletin board at Alembic adv
ertising the “First Annual Charlie Manson Death Festival.” Grogan was joshing, but there was already a sense that this concert would not be the magical-mystical union of souls that others imagined.
“Curiously,” Rolling Stone later observed, “while the Stones concert was the only topic of conversation (among our people) for days beforehand, there was precious little about it in the news media.” While local newspapers and magazines remained mostly mum about the Stones show, local radio stations (our media, in Rolling Stone’s description) were abuzz during the month of November with talk of a giant concert. FM stations competed to offer the most up-to-the-moment rumors about the show. The free concert became the topic of conversation in the Bay Area, with talk of where it might take place and who would be there butting up against the fervently held hopes that San Francisco would get to host its own Woodstock.
The location of the Rolling Stones’ free concert, according to an agreement with the city’s parks department, would be kept secret until twenty-four hours before the show to prevent any chaotic scenes caused by early arrivals. And the announcement of the headlining act was also to be kept under wraps. But word of the Rolling Stones as headliners, smuggled into the press by unknown sources, helped to scuttle the deal.
Ronnie Schneider had ceased all communications with his uncle Allen Klein after going to work full time for the Rolling Stones in August, but Klein may still have been leaking information about the proposed Golden Gate Park show to the media. And the inconsistent, hot-and-cold Jagger was mostly uninterested in the details of the San Francisco concert, content to leave the planning to underlings like Cutler. As word of the location spread, the informal arrangement between the concert planners and the city of San Francisco crumbled in the light of day. The concert was scheduled to take place in less than one week.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 3