Cox picked up Hunter’s legs and attempted to remove him from the scene with the help of Sam Cutler and some other onlookers. They thought they might carry Hunter onto the stage, hoping to capture the attention of the Rolling Stones, and thereby stop the concert. The Hells Angels would not let him through, and Cox thought that they might have been calculating that Hunter would soon be dead.
Cox began carrying Hunter in the other direction, away from the stage, hoping to get to the medical tent. Audience members close to Hunter held up bloody hands in the fervent hope that Jagger would see them, and respond. Whether moved by the sight of bloodied concertgoers, or because word of the stabbing had reached the stage, Jagger took to the microphone and pleaded with the audience to make room: “We need a doctor here, now! Look, can you let the doctor get through, please. We’re trying to get to someone who’s hurt.”
Bredehoft waited in the tent while the Red Cross volunteers ran off in search of her boyfriend. The sound of the crowd receded, and she was left to sort out the disordered swirl of thoughts and feelings and hopes that raced around her mind. After fifteen minutes, Cox reached the Red Cross tent. Hunter was placed on a metal stretcher.
In the medical tent, Bredehoft noticed for the first time Hunter’s condition. His suit jacket was bloody, and he was unconscious. She realized that something more must have happened to him than the punches and kicks she had seen, something she had been unable to spot in the din and frenzy of the fight. Surrounded by onlookers, Bredehoft was continually being reassured that Hunter would be fine, that all would be well, that there was nothing to worry about.
In truth, medical staff saw that little could be done for Hunter. He was still breathing, but his pulse was weak, and his body had gone completely limp. Hunter’s nose was so thoroughly crushed that he gasped for air, attempting to breathe through his mouth. He had deep wounds on his lower and upper back and his left temple. Dr. Richard Baldwin, the head of medical services at the festival, believed that Hunter’s wounds were so severe that even if he had been stabbed in a hospital operating room, he still would have been likely to die.
The Red Cross workers rushed Hunter into a waiting station wagon, and urged Bredehoft in to accompany him. They took him the half-mile to the speedway’s racetrack, where a helicopter might be able to take him to the hospital. “Don’t let him die,” Bredehoft pleaded, with everyone and no one. “I don’t want him to die.” A man standing next to her under the helicopter tried to console her: “They’re gonna do everything in their power.” “I have to go with him!” she pleaded.
The plan was to evacuate Hunter by helicopter to a nearby hospital, where he might be able to receive the lifesaving care he needed. A doctor and a number of other medical personnel examined Hunter at the gates of the speedway track, giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and cardiac massage, but their efforts were fruitless. Meredith Hunter was dead. There was no need for a helicopter.
Patti Bredehoft was escorted back to the first-aid tent. She was surrounded by the other, less serious casualties of the day: the broken bones and the drug freakouts. She was given a tranquilizer to calm her frayed nerves, and reassured not to worry. Hunter would be fine. He was undoubtedly receiving the best of care as they spoke. Only a few minutes later, two new figures, a man and a woman, approached Bredehoft. They confirmed what a part of her had already known: Hunter had not survived.
For some time—she could not say how long, but it felt like centuries—Bredehoft sat alone. She was surrounded by her fellow Americans, her fellow Bay Area residents, her fellow music fans, and she was abandoned. No one could aid her, no one could rescue her from the abyss she had invisibly stumbled over. A day to see the Rolling Stones and hang out with friends had turned into the last day of her boyfriend’s all-too-short life, and there was no undoing the notes of the song, no lifting the needle from a skipping track and resituating it at the outer edge of the black vinyl circle. Meredith was dead, and she was alone.
* * *
“Under My Thumb” should have been the conclusion of the Stones’ set. But unsurprisingly for this day of fizzled opportunities and disastrous encounters, the Stones dutifully chugged on. Amid the murderous frenzy, the Rolling Stones kept on playing, hoping to preserve what they mistakenly hoped might be the tattered remnants of a fragile peace. “Hells Angels, everybody,” Jagger implored the crowd. “Let’s just keep ourselves together. You know, if we are all one, let’s fucking well show we’re all one.”
The band debuted their new song “Brown Sugar,” which they were playing live for the first time. They tore through “Satisfaction” and “Gimme Shelter” before wrapping up with their customary closer “Street Fighting Man.” The violence never stopped; during “Live with Me,” a naked woman sought to climb to the stage, and was assaulted by a team of Angels, who kicked and punched her with brutal abandon until she fell back onto the crowd below.
Keith Richards’s guitar loped and rattled, expressing Richards’s commingled fury and elegance. Mick Taylor eschewed the stage dance between Mick and Keith, preferring to pose seriously between the Stones’ two stars while silently wielding his guitar.
“Street Fighting Man” was a perversely appropriate closer, a celebration of bare-knuckled violence that served the day as an anthem of praise for the very men who had dashed the Stones’ dreams. An Angel stood on the stage, flinging flowers into the crowd with gleeful abandon. The Hells Angels were not just defending themselves from a hostile and aggressive crowd; they were actually having a blast while doing so. This was their party now.
Throughout the Stones’ set, the majority of the crowd was only aware of a series of interruptions to the music, and Richards and Jagger’s complaints about unspecified behavior near the stage. Most Altamont attendees didn’t learn a fellow concertgoer was dead until they heard the news on the radio that night, or later that weekend. The further you were from the stage, the less likely you were to have any idea what might have happened. While Meredith Hunter was dying, hundreds of thousands of other young men and women, separated from Hunter only by their relative good fortune, continued to party obliviously.
The counterculture for which Altamont was intended to be yet another coming-out party prided itself on its political progressive-mindedness, devoted as it was to ending the war in Vietnam and advancing the cause of civil rights. But even at their own celebration, the counterculture could not prevent another outbreak of violence. More than that, it remained unaware of the violence even as it happened. Hippie culture was devoted to the idea of the maximization of personal bliss. Music and drugs and sex were gateways to pleasure, the royal road to a gentler, kinder America. But the brutish corners of American life lingered, even in the very epicenter of hippie ecstasy, and no amount of wishing away the bloody reality of racially motivated hatred and discord rampant in American life with paeans to harmony could make it otherwise. The counterculture was idealistic but blinkered, and Altamont was its metaphoric nadir. One young black man died while thousands of white concertgoers carried on enjoying themselves, unable to see or hear the news of his brutal fate.
Part Three
CARRYING ON
9. Last Chopper Out
The last notes of “Street Fighting Man” drifted out from the stage, over the fans still packed in like sardines, over the Hells Angels wielding blood-spattered knives and pool cues, out past the Altamont audience, mostly still blissfully unaware of what had taken place, and on into the darkened and barren nightscape beyond. The music had at last come to a halt, and the debacle known as Altamont was now complete. The Rolling Stones had attempted to hold off the chaos that threatened to envelop their jury-rigged utopia with music, and whether due to their own personal failings, or those of the culture they represented, they proved woefully inadequate to the task of warding off disaster. Now everyone was free once more—free to escape, free to return home, where civilized virtues still took hold. The primary actors on this temporary stage began to disperse, each on their own traject
ory away from Altamont.
The concert was over, but people still lined up outside the oozing, festering porta-potties. Many fans waited for the speedway to begin emptying out before they slowly trudged back to their cars. It was simply too crowded to even consider leaving. And the unsettled atmosphere made the cooped-up fans wild. One irate (or drug-addled) concertgoer smashed a full gallon jug of wine against a car seeking to escape the speedway, cracking the windshield and terrifying its inhabitants. And the CHP’s overly energetic ticketing and towing earlier in the day meant that once fans did leave, many people would mistakenly believe that their cars had been stolen or misplaced. Some had to spend an unpleasant night at the speedway, or cadge a ride back to the Bay Area with friends or strangers.
The Rolling Stones fled from the stage and up the hill toward the helicopter waiting to whisk them away. It would be the first leg of their escape from America, and a continent that had welcomed them so gratefully only a few months prior. The band and their handlers tore through a hole in the cyclone fence around the speedway and piled into two vehicles—one car and one ambulance—anxious to make their escape. The drivers leaned on their horns, steadily parting the teeming crowd as they made their way to the helicopter. The Stones and their minions boarded, seventeen people in total. Jagger’s assistant Jo Bergman would later compare it to the “last chopper out of ’Nam.”
The helicopter landed at the nearby Livermore airport, where an airplane waited to fly them back to San Francisco. Richards was furious about the Angels’ hijacking of what was to have been their American apotheosis: “They’re sick, man, they’re worse than the cops. They’re just not ready. I’m never going to have anything to do with them again.” Jagger sat on a wooden bench nearby, his eyes, Stanley Booth wrote, “still hurt and angry, bewildered and scared, not understanding who the Hells Angels were or why they were killing people at his free peace-and-love show.” “How could anybody think those people are good, think they’re people you should have around?” Jagger wondered.
“I’d rather have had cops,” Jagger muttered, and the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gram Parsons, who had joined the Stones on the helicopter, shared his sentiments. The Angels had spent much of the afternoon attempting to shove Parsons off the stage, and he was fed up with their callous behavior: “The Angels are worse than cops. They’re bozos, just a bunch of bozos.”
“Some people are just not ready,” Richards kept repeating to himself. He was anxious over the absence of two of his prized jackets, both left behind at the speedway, and had to be cajoled onto the airplane with assurances that someone would go back for his lost coats.
A fleet of limousines waited at the San Francisco airport to usher the Stones back to the Huntington Hotel. The televisions in their suites were tuned to the news reports of the concert, and the band members wondered nervously about whether they might be summoned back to California to testify in a future court case. Richards smoked a joint and assisted Parsons with deciphering the French-language room service menu. “If Rock Scully don’t know any more about things than that, man, to think the Angels are—what did he say? Honor and dignity?” Richards fumed. “Yeah, man. He’s just a childish romantic. I have no time for such people.” The Angels, he declared, were “homicidal maniacs,” and should all be in jail.
Jagger encountered the film’s producer Porter Bibb at the hotel, and the Stones’ lead singer sounded deflated over the prospect of a concert film: “I don’t want—it’s not that it didn’t happen, I don’t want to try to muzzle it, but I don’t see any sense in trying to exploit what happened.” Only a few hours after the concert’s end, remorse was setting in: “I didn’t want it to be like this.” Drummer Charlie Watts would later call it “an event waiting to go wrong.”
Jagger, doing a radio interview, tried to put the extraordinary, unimaginable chaos of the day into halting words. “If Jesus had been there,” he archly told the interviewer, “he would have been crucified.” The food finally arrived, and Richards, Parsons, and Booth ate silently, stripped of language with which to encompass or explain what they had seen and experienced. “We had been through a shattering experience,” Booth would later write, “in a way the experience we had been looking for all our lives, and none of us knew what to say.”
* * *
As the Stones had played, the Grateful Dead fled for the headliners’ helicopter, not even staying for the entirety of the final set. The Dead’s departure was ignominious, lacking the resolve of the Rolling Stones, who, whatever their other failings of planning or execution, or their lack of compassion for what their fans were experiencing, faced the crowd and did their level best to calm the furies. The Dead merely left.
Could the Grateful Dead, by performing, have done anything to halt the violence? In all likelihood, no. The unrest was too far advanced, and the Hells Angels already too unhinged, for any one performer or participant to put a stop to it. But of all the bands at Altamont, the Grateful Dead unquestionably had the longest relationship with the Hells Angels, and arguably had accrued the most goodwill with Bay Area rock fans. If they had taken the stage and pleaded for calm, or approached the Angels and asked them to halt all hostilities, it could possibly have gone some way toward cooling the tensions at the speedway.
Instead, the Grateful Dead chose to abscond, determined to protect themselves first. The decision should not be castigated lightly. Given what they saw and heard, and what had befallen Marty Balin, it was not unreasonable to conclude that taking the stage might very well mean putting their lives at risk. But it is entirely possible that had the Dead taken the same stance as the Rolling Stones, and taken the stage, some of the later horror might have been mitigated.
Later that same night, the Grateful Dead stopped by the Fillmore West, where they had been scheduled to play a gig. The word about the Altamont debacle had rapidly spread, and the audience had stayed away, sure the Dead would not show their faces. Jerry Garcia, Rock Scully, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann were backstage, taking hits of nitrous oxide from a tank specially designed by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, when the notoriously voluble proprietor of the Fillmore, Bill Graham, stormed in. Graham had also heard about Altamont, and railed against the Dead for their bungled planning. They were the ones, he believed, responsible for the turmoil. “And you especially, Scully,” Graham shouted, “you’re a fucking murderer!” Scully, still high on nitrous oxide, grabbed Graham and threw him down the dressing room stairs. It was an undignified end to a discomfiting day for the Grateful Dead. What better response to being accused of failing to protect their fans from an outburst of wholly predictable violence than another act of violence?
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young flew south to Los Angeles for a show that night at Pauley Pavilion, home of the defending national champion UCLA Bruins. Stills, overwrought by the day’s exertions, fainted.
* * *
Sam Cutler had been left behind as the sole representative of the Rolling Stones, in charge of returning the speedway to its formerly pristine state. Cutler was frustrated with how little all the talk of brotherhood and spiritual communion actually extended to tangible efforts like picking up the mountains of trash. The day after the event, a police photographer went out to take pictures of the concert site, with some observations recorded for posterity: “1. The field located east of the race track was covered with debris, papers, bottles, food, etc.” Only fifteen people stuck around after the show, remaining behind to sort through thirty tons of litter. Cutler issued fruitless pleas over the radio for attendees to assist with the cleanup.
The Rolling Stones spent Sunday leaving the country, with Jagger departing for Geneva with the take from the tour in his suitcase, and Richards, after a breakfast of cocaine and Old Charter bourbon, returning to London with Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor. Jagger was on his way to the south of France, where he would begin looking for a house to rent. They loosely planned a band press conference for Friday, but nothing was organized yet.
The Stones’ manager, Ron
nie Schneider, stayed behind in the United States as the band went back to Europe, and from his perspective, the story immediately began to shrink in importance. Altamont was a major headache and a frustration, but the band had not pulled the gun, or wielded the knife. The Rolling Stones were not culpable, or even involved. This was a matter between Meredith Hunter and the Hells Angels, and the media coverage was already twisting the story beyond recognition. Moreover, where was the outrage regarding the Grateful Dead? The Stones had headlined the show, but the Dead, Schneider argued, had come up with the idea for it. The Bay Area was their home turf, and their status as hometown heroes might—just might—have been enough to dial down the day’s violence.
The Stones camp preferred to see the chaos of Altamont as being less about evil bikers or thwarted assassination attempts than the story of two bands—co-planners in this free concert—who had taken dramatically different responses to the day’s events. The Rolling Stones had confronted terror and uncertainty, and gone out to meet it with little more than their guitars and their authority. The Grateful Dead had faced the same moral dilemma and chose to turn tail and flee. Two bands had shown their true colors that day, and the Rolling Stones had been the courageous ones.
* * *
Most of the crowd had hastily departed after the show, eager to leave Altamont behind them and return to the Bay Area and civilization. But some stragglers remained behind, content to keep the party going for a few more hours. The men whose ranks included Meredith Hunter’s killer stuck around at Altamont, in no hurry to leave.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 16