Sam Cutler, guarding the stage from unwanted mood-killers, was having none of it: “We’re not making any personal announcements; we’ve told people where lost and found is, we’ve told people where the Red Cross is. There will be no personal announcements. I don’t care if you die; there’s not going to be an announcement.” Cutler was ghoulishly intent on preserving the fragile good cheer. As he told another potential complainant, “If you lay successive numbers of bummers on this crowd, by the time six o’clock comes around, they are going to be in a real mood. I’m not prepared to lay bum trips on 150,000 people.”
* * *
Terrified, Joan Churchill reeled from her own blind faith in strangers and horrified by what had been done to her. She looked down at her hands, and believed she could see the veins under her skin, pumping blood through her body. The veins would then turn into colors, pinwheeling into the sky. She was panicked and exhausted, bearing down on the shredded remains of her tranquility in a desperate effort to tamp down the hallucinations. She wanted to stay as calm as possible and keep away the LSD-infused demons nipping at her heels.
LSD had turned the concert into an assault of aural and corporeal terrors, some real and some imagined. Were the sights all around her the hallucinations of an acid trip, or real? Churchill squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to block out the exterior world and grit her way through this nightmare, but every time she opened them, the vision of some new assault gripped her afresh. Even with her eyes closed, the tattoo of clomping feet onstage, directly above her head, drummed into her brain. And when she opened her eyes, it looked like the end of the world. It seemed wisest to close her eyes again, grip her boyfriend’s hand, and wish for time to pass more quickly.
Some of the acid making its way through the crowd was tainted, and many attendees were soon suffering from the same private torments as Joan Churchill. They writhed in agony on the speedway ground, or were led by concerned friends to the medical tent for treatment. They lay down, helplessly flailing their arms in the air, clearly going through the horrors of a bad trip. One acid casualty’s bad trip had him dreaming of an impending Armageddon: “We are all going to die, we are all going to die, right here, right here, we’ve been tricked!” And there was a noticeable lack of compassion toward those suffering concertgoers. One woman, writhing in the dirt, was absentmindedly kicked and stepped on by oblivious attendees insistent that she was “working out her trip.” Dozens of LSD cases crouched underneath the stage, their eyes flashing white in the darkness. It seemed like every few feet, someone was handing out chocolate laced with acid, or coffee with LSD already stirred in like so many packets of Sweet’N Low. Nothing was to be trusted.
Churchill would not be the day’s only acid casualty. Who would dose other unsuspecting concertgoers with LSD? The impulse was perverse, and yet of a piece with the drug culture of the late 1960s. The lowered inhibitions of Altamont, and the sense of a shared, quasi-magical communal experience, encouraged a small handful of concertgoers to violate others’ personal and mental space, with terrifying, if mostly temporary, results. Much of the dialogue around psychedelics revolved around their mind-expanding properties. Acid would make you a better, kinder, more empathetic person, so true believers in the magic of psychedelics might have believed themselves to be doing others a favor by sharing their bounty.
The visual evidence assembled by the Maysleses’ crews often indicated otherwise, with drug-addled concertgoers invading others’ personal space, harassing and assaulting bystanders in their blissed-out states. The cameras would record LSD takers roaring incoherently, clawing at their friends’ faces, and flopping bonelessly on the ground.
When the acid cases began to reach the medical tent, up on a rise west of the stage, they were mostly cared for by Dr. Frank Schoenfeld, volunteering at Altamont for the day. Schoenfeld, still a medical resident, had made a name for himself in the Bay Area by working at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, where he had ministered to all manner of drug-related casualties. Schoenfeld and his colleagues were taken aback by the sheer number of cases that came their way, with a trickle at the very beginning of the day turning into a gusher by midafternoon. Concertgoers were indiscriminately taking drugs that had been given to them by unknown others. They did not know what they had taken, nor were they sure how much they had consumed. Schoenfeld and the other doctors in the medical tent grew increasingly concerned, unsure what drugs were being used at the concert, or what their potency might be. Moreover, many patients reported having taken cocktails of drugs, mixing psychedelics with marijuana or amphetamines, or drinking wine on top of a tab of LSD. The baking heat of the midday sun likely also played a role in the condition of many visitors to the medical tent.
The initial plan was to screen arrivals, rapidly assess their condition, and determine a course of treatment. Others would make their way to a tent just off the stage, where individuals incapable of reaching the medical tent could be brought. As the day progressed, and his caseload got bigger, Schoenfeld realized that he was wasting too much of his time hiking down to the secondary tent and seeing individual patients, and the plan was abandoned. There was more than enough work here.
By the end of the day, Schoenfeld and his fellow residents had seen upward of two hundred cases. Where earlier in the day most of the patients were treated with a few moments of personal attention and a gentle tug in the direction of reality, the new wave of casualties required more forceful intervention. One young man came in terrified, entirely unaware of where he was, deeply paranoid and combative. Another—Schoenfeld thought he might have been a teacher—said he had taken as many as six good-sized doses of LSD, and was crawling in the dirt, entirely unreachable by the medical staff. A rapid intervention with medication was enough to help these and other more serious cases, but Schoenfeld was unsettled by their prevalence. He had expected to assist naïve types who got in over their heads, but there were clearly experienced drug users here who were wildly overdoing it, too.
Altamont wanted to be Woodstock, and those in attendance wanted to take a page out of Woodstock’s playbook. For some, Woodstock was a political statement, a program to be honored and implemented at its West Coast doppelgänger. Berkeley political activist Frank Bardacke and his friends, who called themselves (shades of the French Revolution) the Committee on Public Safety, wandered the crowd, looking to keep merchants from plying their wares at a celebration meant to be about all that was free. Other radicals took issue with some men selling old Stones concert programs, knocking over their table and telling them, “Better give the stuff away, man, or we’ll rip it off in the name of the people.”
Bardacke saw the merchants as a symbolic representation of the old guard they were attempting to overthrow. Others might have read Bardacke’s half-hearted protest as indicative of something unthinking in the counterculture’s consensus. Why did Woodstock have to be aped down to the last detail? And why did the need for ideological purity, for sacred space, trump others’ rights to engage in the most vanilla brand of commerce?
The regular interruptions in the music, and the hortatory announcements from the stage, added to the sense that not everyone was enjoying themselves. But it was too hard to see anything. And the sound was so poor that all many fans took in were the interruptions in the bands’ performances. The thin sound felt as if it were coming from an impossible distance, and would regularly cut out for minutes at a time before abruptly returning. For some, this was the source of the gnawing feeling in the pit of their stomachs. Something was off—terribly off—but no one could quite say what. Some refugees from the inner circle made their way to the margins, laden with reports of the pandemonium below, but only a small handful of fans heard the news. For many others, this was just another glorious day out. No one was entirely sure what had happened to the Grateful Dead, who had been supposed to perform, but with the Rolling Stones still to play, the best was undoubtedly yet to come.
And the listeners at home were ill-informed about the chaos as well. Stefan
Ponek, reporting for KSAN to all the listeners at home in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, had been calling in to the station all afternoon. He had been reporting on the glorious, Woodstock-like atmosphere, the good vibes, the great music, talking up the Altamont ambiance. It was, he told the thousands of listeners hungering for a glimpse of the concert, a “peaceful gathering.” It was unclear whether Ponek was poorly positioned to take in the chaos, or simply chose not to feature it in his reports, perhaps deeming it a sideline to the main story. And yet, Ponek gave his listeners no inkling of what was taking place in the inner circle of Altamont. Perhaps the cumulative pressure of the Woodstock West frenzy made it too difficult to tell his audience just how bad things had gotten.
* * *
By the time Denise Jewkes, of the local group Ace of Cups, and her husband Noel Kaufman got close to the Altamont Speedway earlier that morning, they had to pull off the road and park some distance away, then walk the rest of the way to the concert site. The setup appeared disorganized, but Jewkes, a veteran of the local music scene, was hardly troubled. The community had always come together for these kinds of concerts before, creating the necessary infrastructure for a safe, pleasurable mass gathering on the fly. Surely someone had carefully planned every detail of an event as massive as this, even if the evidence of that planning was hard to discern.
Jewkes and Kaufman wound their way up the hill, through the dense crowd packed onto every square inch of the speedway. They claimed a spot for themselves far above the stage, sitting down and spreading out their picnic. Fans sat shoulder to shoulder, already anxious for amusement. No one was belligerent here, this far away from the action, but there was a dyspeptic quality to the crowd, a frustration that was palpable. Jewkes munched on a carrot, ready for the music to start.
Later, someone would tell Jewkes that they had seen some rowdy bikers in the area behind them, drunken and disorderly. She never got a chance to see them. An empty glass beer bottle, quart-size, came flying through the air from behind her head, and smashed into her temple. It appeared as if it had been lazily lobbed into the air, with Jewkes unlucky enough to be sitting under the final resting point of its downward arc. She felt the bottle crunch into her skull, and she collapsed into her husband’s lap, blacking out. Others had already seen Hells Angels chucking beers at fans closer to the stage. They were ostensibly sharing their bounty with thirsty fans, but it appeared even there to have a malevolent purpose, more intent on hitting someone than quenching their thirst.
Jewkes was only out for a matter of seconds, but when she came to, her vision was blurred and darkened. She and her husband began to haltingly make their way down the hill and toward the stage. Seated concertgoers enveloped the ground, jammed in so closely there was hardly room to maneuver between them. The planners had neglected to leave an aisle between sections, making even emergency efforts a time-consuming, physically draining slog. Jewkes took a seat in a station wagon that drove her to the medical tent. A doctor, his hand to her head, asked her if there had been any gunshots nearby, terrifying her. She was rushed to a nearby hospital for emergency neurosurgery.
Jewkes was the rare concertgoer positioned far from the stage to suffer physical harm at Altamont, but if one were to have hovered directly over the crowd on that Saturday, drifting down in the direction of the stage, the thin sound of guitars and drums would occasionally be drowned out by the piercing wails of lone men and women in agony, and the dull crunch of fist and stick meeting bone. As the inner circle of Altamont drew nearer, so did the sense of dread and dislocation. Those residing in the outer circle of Altamont were often in danger from their own poor decisions. Those in the inner circle faced more immediate threats.
6. “Let’s Not Keep Fucking Up!”
Puttering in mostly unnoticed among the stream of vehicles making their way onto the speedway grounds, a tan school bus crammed full of young men parked just behind the stage. From the exterior, this bus hardly differed from any of the other ramshackle vehicles to have arrived at Altamont that day. But unlike the majority of people attending, the men in the dun-colored bus had come to do a job. They were bikers, and the bus was owned by the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels. The vehicle containing the bulk of the security staff for Altamont rolled to a halt about one hundred yards away from the stage. The remainder of the Angels rode their Harleys—some solo and some with female passengers clinging to their backs—right up to the lip of the stage. The crowd frantically scattered out of the way of the sputtering motorcycles.
When the Hells Angels rode in to a new destination, they always followed a distinct pecking order. The full-fledged members would roar in on their motorcycles first, with the prospects, associates, and assorted hangers-on bringing up the rear. What was true of their entrances was true of all the bikers did. The members would always lead the way. The others, particularly the prospects who hoped to curry enough favor to join the club, would always follow the lead of their superiors.
There would be little oversight of the Hells Angels at the start of the concert, either from the festival staff or the Angels’ leaders. Few, if any, bikers present would be concerned with the long-term reputation of the Hells Angels, and how the broader public might perceive their actions. Oakland Angel chief Sonny Barger, perhaps the most respected (and feared) of the Bay Area Angels, was absent at the start of the concert, attending an officers’ meeting along with numerous other high-ranking Hells Angels. In their absence, the Angels dispatched many of their younger and more spirited members, along with prospects intent on proving their mettle under battle conditions.
On this day, there were approximately twenty or twenty-five Hells Angels present, with another few dozen prospects and hangers-on with them. The prospects in particular knew that the best way to win the Angels’ acceptance was with a demonstration of their unyielding toughness. With little police presence at Altamont, and almost no security presence besides the Hells Angels, bikers had carte blanche to strong-arm the audience. And as fans kept pushing forward from the back, those up front would get dangerously close to the Hells Angels and their motorcycles.
Three hundred thousand people arrived at Altamont over the course of the morning and early afternoon, and the only protection they had from chaos was itself fomenting that very same chaos. There was no visible police presence, and little security beyond the Hells Angels, who, whatever services they might have provided in the past, were clearly uninterested in keeping the peace at Altamont.
As the Angels took their places, a huge contingent of fans was attracted, as if by invisible magnets, into close proximity to the bikers, near the lip of the stage. They were impelled by an unconscious desire to be as close as possible to the Rolling Stones, and by the layout of the speedway itself. Everyone crept closer and closer, and for the people at the front, there was nowhere to go.
Fans reclining near the stage at Altamont. (Courtesy of Jay Siegel)
The raceway was enormous, and the stage tiny in comparison. From a distance, the figures on the stage were hardly more than dots, and fans who had made the trek from the Bay Area wanted to come home with firsthand reports of having seen Mick Jagger in the flesh. They began to push in. The fans already standing near the front were crunched ever closer to the stage. A tight-knit crowd became standing-room-only, and standing-room-only became not quite enough room to stand.
Some onlookers thought the whole scene resembled a New York subway car at rush hour. There you were, holding on to a strap, breathing in the fumes of someone’s wet armpits, and convinced it could not possibly get any more crowded. There simply was not room for another human being in this car. Then the train stopped at the next station, and another crush of human beings shoved their way on. Then the same scene repeated at the next stop, and the one after that. The fifty or sixty yards nearest the stage rapidly transformed into a carpet of people, a breathing mass of undifferentiated humanity too crammed together to separate. It was terrifying to be so closely packed in, to have one’s wel
l-being be so thoroughly at the mercy of the crowd.
From the moment of the Angels’ arrival, violent conflicts broke out everywhere. Wherever bikers were, violence spontaneously erupted. If you asked the bikers themselves, they would tell you it was because their reputations preceded them. Everywhere they went, there would be someone with a hard-on for a biker, intent on kicking some Angel ass so they could go home and brag to all their friends.
Detractors might argue that the bikers themselves treated violence as a blunt instrument, capable of dealing out punishment, retribution, or a much-needed lesson after a perceived infraction. Altamont was no different. Bikers grabbed women by the hair and assaulted them. They spotted attractive women in the crowd and yanked them up forcibly to the top of their bus. They snatched cameras out of fans’ hands and ripped out the film after being photographed without their permission. They threatened to kill concertgoers who accidentally stepped on their fingers. The bikers had established a closed system in which they were simultaneously the criminals and the police force tasked with preserving order. Those looking for justice would find nowhere to turn other than to those who had violated their trust.
Five-foot-seven and 175 pounds, all muscle from his day job as a roofer, “Hawkeye” came with three knives and a .22 revolver, in the mood to party and only too glad to hassle anyone who got in the way of his fun. Hawkeye and his friends from another motorcycle group, the Sons of Hawaii, had come with a fistful of counterfeit $20 bills they had printed at a local copy shop, planning to use them to buy drugs from sellers in the crowd. Upon arrival at Altamont, they realized there would be no need for such elaborate chicanery. He and his friends would steal money and drugs from those displaying their stashes or their bankrolls, and then violently manhandle them when they complained. The victims would almost inevitably head off to find their friends, and when they came back, spoiling for a fight, Hawkeye and his friends would beat them once more. The victims were scared, and desperate for a security presence to resolve the situation, but no authority was higher than that of the Hells Angels. Hawkeye didn’t worry about their complaints, or even their fitful attempts to get rough. Unless they came back with an army, they would have no chance at all. He and his friends were pushing people around, kicking ass, and stealing girlfriends, and having the time of their lives doing it.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 11