The line of fans awaiting entry stretched over one hill, and down the next, rise after rise covered with anxious, exuberant concertgoers. To some, they already looked like refugees: tired, bedraggled, and trudging toward a final destination they could only hope was akin to paradise.
One instantly recognizable man carried a sack over his shoulders, like a hippie Johnny Appleseed. He would reach into his sack as each fan passed his way, and hand them a fistful of pills. The concertgoers swallowed the mystery pills without finding out what they were, trusting a stranger not to take advantage of their innocent hunger for temporary release from their bodies.
Streams of people poured in through every possible entrance to the speedway, some by car, and others on foot. People abandoned their cars at any wide spot in the highway, sensing that they could get no closer. The new 580 freeway leading from just north of San Francisco to the eastern reaches of Alameda County, still not fully open to the public, became a massive parking lot, with parked cars filling each of its four lanes for miles. Helicopters flying over the site could make out an endless line of cars stopped on the side of the freeway, beginning as far as eight miles away. Each parked car led to dozens of imitators, with drivers sure that others knew something they didn’t. Fans parked miles away and trekked on foot through the brisk Saturday morning air, in search of rock ’n’ roll utopia. The California Highway Patrol, in a vengeful mood at the incursion of so many hippies, lurked just behind them, ready to begin towing fans’ improperly parked cars.
Locals from the nearby town of Livermore drifted over in pickup trucks, promising to usher fans directly to the concert over secret back roads for $5 a pop. Some fans walked along the nearby railroad tracks, sure they would lead to the speedway. Instead, their route took them through the Altamont Pass and beyond it, stranding them on the far side of the speedway. “For once, we’re just gonna let it happen,” said one of the concert organizers, making his peace with the total lack of coordination over the parking. “If for no other reason, for experimental purposes.”
Only the night before, the concert had still felt like a privately shared secret. Only the diehards, the professionals, and the true believers had trekked east to Livermore on Friday. Now it was Saturday, and everyone knew that there would soon be hundreds of thousands of people here.
* * *
The country was experiencing, as Morris Dickstein would later characterize it, a new great awakening. After a long era of spiritual lassitude, of emotional frostbite, a new generation was awaking to the glories of the transcendent. New sects formed daily, each professing a direct link to the ineffable. But their devoted followers were found in no church, took no officially sanctioned communion.
A generation of young American men and women had grown up in unparalleled, unprecedented affluence, the beneficiaries of a generation that had overcome a depression and defeated the Nazis—and were disappointed in their patrimony. The older generation, having experienced chaos, wanted nothing but order; their children, having had their fill of order, craved a taste of chaos.
In the mid-1960s, the demographic bulge of postwar children known as the Baby Boomers began to come of age. The youth of America saw themselves as the avant-garde of a coming revolution. No more of the stultifying political consensus of their childhoods. No more of the polite lies of craven art. Everything would have to be reassessed, rethought, remodeled. Nothing was exempt. The model of a middle-class American life—birth, education, employment, marriage, child-rearing, retirement, death—was being rejected by a new generation who demanded something else, something new.
The burgeoning culture of youth loosely split into two overlapping communities. For one, the horrors of racism and the hated Vietnam War demanded an immediate about-face in American politics. They formed groups that argued for a more inclusive, more tolerant, less imperially minded United States, and they agitated fiercely for those ideals. They held conferences and marches and sit-ins and protests.
For the other, a better world was to come from within, not without. The solutions were not to be unearthed in any state capitol or judicial chamber, but inside the self. They discovered marijuana and LSD, found Eastern religions, worshipped in the new youth cathedral of rock ’n’ roll. Music was the sound of self-expression, of a generation hungering for experience.
The two wings of youth culture frequently collaborated, their overlapping interests and membership prompting a shared set of ideals and interests, and a shared language. The hippies attended antiwar protests, and the politicos smoked joints and listened to Jefferson Airplane. But the new youth culture was less a unified opposition than a mass of splinter groups ultimately selling conflicting visions of the world. The competition was more than a duel between competing philosophies; it was an argument about how to change the world.
The counterculture was about many disparate, often contradictory things—rock music, copious drugs, political change, newfound sexual freedoms—but it was also about the magic of physical proximity. A rock concert, like a demonstration or an acid test, was an excuse to stand together, to crowd shoulder to shoulder, to be near other young men and women who believed in the destiny of their culture to change the world.
These gatherings were substitute church services for a new generation uninterested in what they saw as the stale truths of tradition. From Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, where the Kool-Aid was spiked with LSD, to the massive antiwar teach-in at UC Berkeley, to the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park, to the March on Washington and the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to the concerts at Golden Gate Park and Monterey and Woodstock, young people spilled out of doors to express their profound belief in one thing above all: each other.
Each concert—each gathering—was bigger than its predecessor, and each one was a further step along the path to eventual triumph. Everyone knew it. No one wanted to miss a moment. Whether a political rally or an outdoor concert, each new feat offered further proof that there was strength in numbers. Each event was a reminder that the youth of America were not alone, that others were breaking free of the chains of family and obligation and custom that had once bound them. “The utopian meanings might be disputed,” wrote Todd Gitlin, one of the fans on his way to the concert that morning, “but it was hard to miss the fact that the young everywhere seemed to be deserting their scripts.”
They were not in agreement about what ills needed most immediate mending, or how best to achieve their goals, but there was a shared trust in the wisdom of crowds. Individuals gathered together, whether for a worthy cause or merely for the cause of pleasure, and in so doing they created temporary communities of immense power. This was the heart of the counterculture, the soul of the 1960s. People, together, could move mountains.
The very size of the crowd was a message to be delivered. Altamont was to be universal and parochial, all at once. Everyone gathered once more as a demonstration of the raw power of the counterculture, its steady, unstoppable blossoming. This was happening everywhere, all at once, an ongoing celebration of youth of which this was to be the latest and most glittering demonstration.
* * *
The sparsely decorated speedway offered little in the way of ornamentation. A few banners and pennants had been hastily hung up, and a giant plastic dome had been erected by some fans, who invited their fellow concertgoers to step inside their homemade bubble.
Cameramen working for the Maysles brothers were out around dawn to catch the first rays of the morning sun, and the first stirrings of the Woodstock Nation. Young men were slumped over on their way to the porta-potties, and couples wandered about, looking to scrounge up some breakfast. Concertgoers who had planned ahead and packed well broke out picnic baskets while others played catch. Revelers wandered the grounds with sacks of wine already bursting loose from bags, and an endless stream of concertgoers streamed over the hill, in search of a spot to sit and see the bands.
So much of one’s experience of Altamont would be geographic, dependent
on the conditions on the freeway at the moment of approach to the speedway, or the exact location in the crowd where you wearily plopped down with your supplies for the day. As with any concert of this scope, most of the audience was too far away from the stage to see any of the unrest taking place, nor could they hear many of the announcements being broadcast over the loudspeakers. It would be clear to many that something was off with the concert, given the perpetual interruptions to the show and the thin sound that hardly carried to the farthest reaches of the speedway, but most fans could grasp little more.
Altamont was a story of two concerts. The first, disorganized and haphazard, was nonetheless mostly peaceable. The second was not. The outer circle had little idea of the wildly differing experiences of the inner circle, and would not learn more about that other concert until after they had returned home. The fundamental distinction was this: the fans close enough to the stage to interact with the Hells Angels, or watch their interactions with others, attended a very different show, with very different implications and consequences, than those who maintained some distance from the Angels.
All it took was two hundred feet. The length of one city block. In the normal course of urban life, alert pedestrians would easily be able to spot a disturbance taking place on the next block. But the overwhelming crowding near the stage meant that even two hundred feet was enough to render much of the day’s unrest invisible. And the fans yet further back, sitting on the gentle slopes of the speedway, or far off in the distance, could make out nothing beyond a handful of indistinguishable blips. The outer circle comprised the overwhelming majority of the fans in attendance at Altamont, but their perspective was distinctly limited. They could only see what happened directly in front of them.
Balloons rising above the Altamont crowd. (Courtesy of Jay Siegel)
The first stream of rock ’n’ roll migrants made their way inside, and began unfurling blankets and setting up picnic baskets. Everyone was hungry for adventure, hungry for experience, and sure that they were shortly to witness history in the making.
For many fans, a dazzling multiplicity of stories, of overlapping beliefs and ideals and fixations, all fruitfully commingled. Coffee-can lids were being repurposed as Frisbees. Babies were being born, couples were forming and congealing, and donations were being solicited for the Black Panther defense fund by a bubbly blonde Doris Day lookalike, who told onlookers that “after all, they’re just Negroes, you know.”
Many of the fans wound up settling in for the day in resting places remote from the stage and enjoyed themselves thoroughly. There was sunshine and companionship and good cheer and alcohol and marijuana and other stimulants. There were few serviceable bathrooms and little food available for purchase, but the promised mellow vibes were genuine, for at least some of the attendees. Their pleasure, though, was predicated on their ignorance of events taking place elsewhere at the speedway.
Joan Churchill joined them, relieved to at last be able to find some comfort and get to her job filming the free Rolling Stones show. The sun shined, people smiled, and the unpleasant night was forgotten, an affordable down payment on what would undoubtedly be a memorable day.
Churchill had been up the entire night of December 5. She had shivered through the frigid December night, alone and abandoned outside the Rolling Stones’ concert site. The Maysles brothers had assured her that after her work documenting the stage’s construction was completed, she would be ushered into a secure area to sleep. The security guards standing watch near the stage chuckled at her when she approached expecting to be let in: “Nobody gets in here until eight o’clock tomorrow morning.” Churchill had neglected to bring warm clothing, food, or drink. She spent a sleepless night outdoors, cold, hungry, and thirsty.
That morning, Churchill found some of her colleagues, who suggested she head all the way to the other side of the raceway and film fans arriving in their cars and walking toward the site. Her camera bag slung over her shoulder, she made her way through the never-ending mass of attendees along with cinematographer Baird Bryant and sound operator Peter Pilafian, taking in the sheer enormity of the scene before her. There had never been anything like this before in the Bay Area. Even the Human Be-In of January 1967, where tens of thousands of young hippies had crammed into Golden Gate Park to listen to the likes of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (along with scheduled performers Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead), had been pitifully small in comparison.
Churchill, still hungry and thirsty after her sleepless night outside the concert gates, accepted anything and everything proffered by the outstretched arms of anonymous fans while she trekked to her new vantage point. She stopped in at the equipment tent with Bryant and Pilafian, and a longhaired, shirtless hippie in cutoff jeans offered a slug from an open bottle of wine. Churchill and her colleagues happily drank. Everyone was so jolly, the sun was shining at last, and excitement was in the air. Everything was free, and everything was joyous. A society could be constructed out of mutual pleasure and kindness.
After pushing her way through the swarming crowds to the other side of the speedway, Churchill finally found an optimal spot for shooting near one of the Altamont entrances, and set up her camera. She pulled out her Spectra light meter to assess the quality of the light, and was taken aback to discover rainbows shooting out of its aperture. “I’ve been dosed,” she muttered to herself. Churchill had had some experience with psychedelics in the past, enough to know it was something she did not want to try again. And now here she was, having been hired for one of the most important professional gigs of her career, facing a lengthy, disorienting trip she had no interest in taking. She had been dosed with LSD. There was no way of knowing just who the culprit had been, but word spread throughout the day of wine spiked with acid.
Churchill panicked, acutely aware that her fragile consciousness would soon be swarmed by hallucinations and visions. She expended the last of her waning energy making her way back to the stage, where she hoped she might find some of her colleagues setting up to shoot the bands. Churchill frantically searched the stage and located her boyfriend and fellow cinematographer, Eric Saarinen, at stage right. She lurched toward him. He was standing on the ground near the corner of the stage, and she crawled under the stage platform, gratefully clinging to his legs as wave after wave of drug-fueled paranoia began to wash over her. Churchill would have an accidental, unwanted front-row seat for much of the pandemonium that would follow.
* * *
The music had only just begun, as Santana warmed up the crowd with a zippy rendition of “Evil Ways,” but some concertgoers had begun to sense something notably off in Altamont’s atmosphere. An ugly feeling hung in the air, born, perhaps, of the copious drugs, and a desire to imitate the magic of Woodstock with all too much precision. If the media narrative of Woodstock had been about taking your clothes off and dancing, then attendees at Altamont would also take their clothes off and dance.
Sometime that morning, one of the Maysles cinematographers filmed an enormous bubble drifting through the crowd, skirting numerous daunting impediments to its survival. The bubble stopped in midair, betraying all the laws of physics, and temporarily stood still, beautiful but terribly fragile.
For those fans positioned an impossible distance from the stage, the musical element of the day was chaotic and inconsistent. The music was so far away as to be rendered almost irrelevant. The show, such as it was, was an afterthought. Many fans could barely make out the music, and were either frustrated by the poor sound or doing their best to enjoy a day of community and communion in its absence.
For the outer circle, the concert did not offer much in the way of actual songs. In its absence, much of the crowd found solace, or entertainment, in drugs. Altamont was, as much as anything else, a clash of differing drugs. Many of the hippies in the crowd were on LSD, which, when taken in moderate doses, could soften edges and give users a warm glow of love and community. LSD transported its users to a sweeter, more vibrant world of
imagination, with every sensation heightened, intense, beautiful. But the concertgoers hardly limited themselves to LSD. “Hashish, LSD, psilocybin,” a dealer called out to the crowd, offering his wares to all passersby. Two men in dirty serapes wore cowboy hats with small white cards advertising their merchandise: “Acid $2.”
A shirtless African-American man put on an impromptu medicine show for a cheering crowd: “I have in my hands one little purple tab of 100 percent pure LSD. Who wants this cosmic jewel?” This was not exclusively a peace-and-love crowd, and the concert was shaping up to be a full-on bacchanalia. The outer circle of Altamont, blissfully unaware of the violence within, was still wracked by the chaos caused by rampant drug use. Whether because of bad acid, individual excess, or some combination, fans overindulged, and reaped the consequences. There was a lack of control on display, and a desire to lose control, and the two in conjunction made for a concert often marked—even for those at the edges of the speedway—by bedlam.
The audience had proven itself incapable of looking after itself. Where had the forethought been when planning for attending the show? Couples at the show with their babies, taking acid. Pregnant women rendered totally immobile by the crush of people. There was such a thing as too much trust, and too many of the people at Altamont seemed to exhibit a blind faith in the goodwill of others and the organizational abilities of the behind-the-scenes impresarios of rock ’n’ roll. Community, for many of the people in attendance, meant a casual assumption that all would be orderly, all would come together, all would be harmonious.
During the afternoon, as Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young took the stage in the far-off distance to little enthusiasm or awareness from the fans in the outer circle, reports of LSD overdoses were widespread, with people regularly approaching the stage to plead with concert organizers to warn people away from the acid. One man came forward hoping to track down a man who had gotten separated from his wife and child while on an acid trip. A Hells Angel had stepped on the child, and there was serious, if momentary, concern for the child’s life.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 10