Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont

by Saul Austerlitz

  Barger, who would later acknowledge that he was high on cocaine during the broadcast, fumbled through a series of explanations and clarifications, repeatedly mentioning that he and his fellow bikers had parked where they had been told to park, before arriving at what he saw as the heart of his argument.

  A biker’s heart and soul was his motorcycle, and the concertgoers at Altamont had made the mistake of disrespecting the Angels’ bikes, snapping off their mirrors and damaging their pedals. “I don’t know if you think we pay $50 for these things, or steal ’em, or pay a lot for ’em, or what,” Barger noted. “But most people that’s got a good Harley chopper’s got a few grand invested in it. Ain’t nobody gonna kick my motorcycle,” Barger fumed. “And they might think ’cause they’re in a crowd of three hundred thousand people, that they can do it and get away with it. But when you’re standing there looking at something that’s your life, and everything you’ve got is invested in that thing, and you love that thing better than you love any thing in the world, and you see a guy kick it, you know who he is. If you have to go through fifty people to get to him, you’re gonna git ’im. You know what, they got got. And after they got it, then some other people started yellin’. And you know what, some of them people was loaded on some drugs that it’s just too bad we wasn’t loaded on.”

  Drug-addled fans had come racing down the hill looking to do battle with the bikers, but “when they jumped on an Angel, they got hurt.” No one could mess with the Angels, or their motorcycles, without suffering the consequences. The Angels’ rules governed all situations where outsiders came into their presence, and anyone foolish enough to cross them could not plead ignorance as a defense. The Angels defended their interests with an iron fist. “Sonny, you got it,” Ponek told him, implying that his concerns about the Angels’ behavior had been assuaged by Barger’s rambling and bellicose monologue, which he and the other hosts had failed to interrupt or derail on a number of occasions.

  Ponek took the mic for some tentative closing words: “We gotta leave it. I think there’s no conclusions to be drawn except this has been a very weird experience. To give this much attention to a rock ’n’ roll show … it’s brought out a couple of good things out of it.” He argued that the failures of Altamont reflected less on the concert’s attendees than on its planners, who had accidentally provided others with guidelines for how not to put on a concert in the future. Interestingly, for all the discussion of the Angels and the Stones, little was said about the Grateful Dead, who were already starting to disappear from the narrative of Altamont.

  * * *

  Jann Wenner had read the Sunday papers, seen Wood’s coverage of the show, and put it out of mind. Rolling Stone would undoubtedly cover the show, but there did not appear to be anything of particular note that had taken place at Altamont. On Monday morning, Wenner, founder and publisher of Rolling Stone, arrived at their offices at 746 Brannan Street, located upstairs from the print shop that put out their newspaper, settled in for the weekly editorial meeting, and was stunned to hear his staff’s starkly divergent take on the show.

  The concert, according to his writers and editors and photographers, had not only not been a triumph; it had been an epic debacle, one whose contours were only beginning to come into focus. It was more than just a bad trip. It was a roadblock laid in front of the careening counterculture, and a reminder, as Greil Marcus saw it, that there was a death wish here every bit as profound as what might be found at any Nixon rally or John Wayne movie. The horrors of Altamont evinced a moral insanity that profoundly unsettled him. Marcus was torn between competing instincts: the first, to simply ignore Altamont, to treat it as unworthy of mention in the rock ’n’ roll newspaper of record, and the second, to surround the story, to cover its every contour and poke into every crevice to emphasize to the naïve youth of the country the myriad ways in which idealism could turn to rot.

  Wenner sat at the conference table and listened to the testimony from his staff as the noise of hot lead being hand-set in the type shop below drifted upstairs. Taking in the reports of what they had haphazardly assembled during the concert and in its immediate aftermath, he knew the answer to Marcus’s conundrum. “We’re going to cover this thing from top to bottom,” Wenner announced, “and we are going to lay the blame.” It would not be enough to simply report what had taken place during the concert; Rolling Stone would also unambiguously point the finger at the culprits it saw as being responsible for Altamont’s failings.

  Burks wholeheartedly agreed with Wenner’s decision. Having listened to the KSAN broadcast, he was taken aback by the recriminations and threats already being fired back and forth between Hells Angels, crew members, musicians, and fans. There would need to be an impartial—or relatively impartial—arbiter, one well informed enough to seriously cover Altamont, and able to stand apart from the fray. Burks passed out assignments, asking for reportage, observations, and local color. They would also need some more reporting muscle. Rolling Stone was many things, most of them good, but other than Burks, there were not many traditional shoe-leather reporters on staff. Marcus suggested calling in his neighbor, a Berkeley alum and soon-to-be graduate student named John Morthland, to assist. Morthland had attended the concert, where he had been too far away to see the Hells Angels, or even to hear much of the music, but had been galvanized by the KSAN broadcast and its sharp contrast with the good vibes of the television news reports from the concert.

  For Wenner, the calculus of covering Altamont was complex. His newspaper was so enamored of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’s group that it had been named after them, and a hefty part of its appeal was its unfettered access to the Rolling Stones. The counterculture that Rolling Stone covered and reflected often preferred cheerleading to critiquing. What would happen if Wenner’s investigation wound up identifying the Rolling Stones as the villains of Altamont? Wenner thought it over, and decided to take the risk. His relationship with Jagger would survive this, too, even if Jagger would be greatly surprised and displeased by criticism from Rolling Stone. And truthfully, Jagger would likely be upset by coverage of Altamont of any kind, so Wenner might as well push ahead with the special Altamont issue he had in mind.

  John Burks had become a journalist in the fabled Newsweek organization, which trained its young writers and editors to serve as cogs in an all-knowing, all-seeing system. Burks had, without even being entirely aware of what he had been doing, been echoing the Newsweek house style by assembling files on Altamont, asking his friends and contributors for material on what they had seen and heard. Instead of rewriting and reworking all the raw material from the files, Burks considered merely assembling them and folding them together into one lengthy, deliberately cacophonous story.

  Along with Morthland, soon to become a permanent member of Rolling Stone’s staff, Burks began making calls and tracking down leads. Morthland called hospitals and police stations. He interviewed doctors who had worked in the Altamont medical tent, and spoke with Sonny Barger. He attended a follow-up press conference at Melvin Belli’s office. He called Dick Carter, the owner of the Altamont racetrack. Having also attended the show, Morthland did some on-the-scene reporting, drawing from his own experiences at Altamont. Burks, meanwhile, had been speaking with representatives of the Stones’ and Grateful Dead’s camps, Sears Point employees, and others who had been involved in the early planning for the free Rolling Stones show.

  Stories and story ideas and leads went up on Burks’s corkboard wall. As the issue’s deadline approached, the air at 746 Brannan took on a bluish tinge from the cigarettes being puffed at desks by the harried editorial staff and writers. Wenner would occasionally pop his head into one of his editors’ offices, asking how the story was progressing.

  Burks and his team had assembled some remarkable material in only ten days, from some surprising sources. After much painstaking legwork, Burks had tracked down an eyewitness to Hunter’s killing. Staff writer Ralph Gleason had been dispatched to negotiate with the youn
g man. The witness wanted to tell his story, but he also wanted to avoid the wrath of the Hells Angels. Gleason promised him that he could tell his story without divulging his name in print.

  When the call came through, Burks turned on his tape recorder and let Paul Cox speak: “I didn’t know his name or anything, but he was standing alongside of me. You know, we were both watching Mick Jagger and a Hell’s Angel, the fat one. I don’t know his name or anything, he reached over—he didn’t like us being so close or something, you know, we were seeing Mick Jagger too well, or something. He was just being uptight. He reached over and grabbed the guy beside me by the ear and hair, and yanked on it, thinking it was funny, you know, kind of laughing. And so, this guy shook loose; he yanked away from him.”

  Burks asked the questions and the witness shared what he saw during the moments Meredith Hunter’s life came to an abrupt close. Crucially, Cox asserted that he had seen Hunter stabbed before he had pulled his gun—a claim that would come under intense scrutiny in the months to come. The interview was both the most newsworthy material Burks and Morthland had uncovered, and also the reportage that most closely resembled what they had in mind for their folded-in story, in which a multiplicity of voices would jostle for attention, each with their own version of the day’s events.

  Burks believed that they had found their opening, and the interview, edited only lightly, wound up serving as the bravura opening of the Rolling Stone story. It thrust readers immediately into the fear and chaos and violence of Altamont, without even an initial question to clarify what they were hearing. There were no identifying names for the interview, just a series of questions and the disturbing answers that followed. The context would follow.

  The finished story ran more than twenty-five thousand words, occupying the bulk of Rolling Stone’s January 21, 1970, issue, which hit newsstands about six weeks after the concert. The cover image was surprisingly stark: a black-and-white shot of concertgoers, some standing and some sitting, some looking off into the distance and some glancing at the ground. Sunlight streamed through the gaps between the fans, with a trio of rays forming a triangle around the central cluster of concertgoers. For all its formal beauty, the picture is telling primarily for what it lacks: enthusiasm, bonhomie, or even a shared focus. The counterculture was fractured, unable to agree on what it valued, or what it preferred to look at—or look away from. The cover’s tagline put it simply, mincing no words: “THE ROLLING STONES DISASTER AT ALTAMONT: LET IT BLEED.” Wenner was proud to have sidestepped what he saw as the more commercial impulse to splash a garish, blood-spattered image on the cover, or to have used a headline like “MURDER AT A STONES CONCERT.”

  The result, a feat of commingled reportage, editorializing, and analysis, incorporated firsthand accounts from the likes of Sam Cutler, Mick Taylor, David Crosby, and Emmett Grogan. It took readers from the confines of Melvin Belli’s office to the Altamont stage, from the excited planning meetings at the Grateful Dead’s offices to the tragic hush in Meredith Hunter’s home. Bill Graham chimed in to blame Chip Monck, for constructing an unacceptably low stage, and Mick Jagger, for bilking his fans. The article jumped around in time as well as space, going from quotes from the morning-after KSAN broadcast to detailed reports of the frantic last-minute efforts to prepare the speedway for the concert.

  Burks’s folded-in style, which eschewed the use of individual bylines, gave the impression of the newspaper speaking in a single voice. Rather than a series of jumbled and disordered impressions, this was Rolling Stone standing on its hind legs and insisting on its authority to issue a definitive ruling on the missteps of the counterculture. The Altamont issue sought to honor complexity by telling the story out of order. We jumped in at the very moment Meredith Hunter was about to be killed, and then proceeded to leap backward and forward in time until we took in a kaleidoscopic view of the Altamont landscape.

  Given the short time frame, numerous errors slithered into the final version. Perhaps most significantly, Rolling Stone told its readers that Hunter had been killed during the Stones’ performance of “Sympathy for the Devil,” and not four songs later, during “Under My Thumb.” (Marcus would later entertain the idea of a different cover for a future issue, one intended to clear up the mistake that Rolling Stone had helped to propagate. This issue’s cover would read “NOT ‘SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL’; ‘UNDER MY THUMB.’”)

  Rolling Stone and many concertgoers present at Altamont were convinced Hunter was killed while the Rolling Stones played “Sympathy for the Devil.” They would tell journalists that the tragic encounter had happened soon after Keith Richards had played the opening chords, or as Mick Jagger had sung the first lines, or right as the song reached its frenzied pinnacle.

  The impression that “Sympathy” had been playing as Hunter died came about because, as Greil Marcus later put it, it was simply too metaphorically perfect to not be the soundtrack to murder. Audiences in the late 1960s heard Jagger and felt a dark shiver, a sense of Jagger’s summoning unambiguous evil in all its black-mass majesty. “Sympathy for the Devil” was a character study and a pocket biography, a highly compressed vision of the history of evil drawn to the scale of a pop song: Christ’s crucifixion and the violent deaths of the Romanovs and the Kennedys, all metaphorically summoned by this silver-tongued demon. No other song would serve, no other song would summarize with such devastating aptness the Stones’ dangerous dalliance with the dark side, which had ultimately, many believed, cost a young man his life.

  For all these reasons and more, it simply had to be “Sympathy for the Devil” playing when Meredith Hunter was stabbed. The song allowed for the symbolic transfer of authority from the Hells Angels to the Rolling Stones. It had been a Hells Angel who had stabbed Meredith Hunter, but by playing “Sympathy” when it happened, the Stones had wrenched open the gates of Hell and allowed Beelzebub, or his minions, to reach out and curse Altamont.

  This was a kind of magical or religious thinking, in which infernal powers superseded human authority, but it was also a form of wish fulfillment. The fans really did want Mick Jagger to be powerful enough to summon the Devil. They wanted the Rolling Stones at the center of this story, even if the events of the day left the band as little more than helpless bystanders, having set in motion forces they were unable to control. If “Sympathy for the Devil” was genuinely an evil song, with the ability to curse an entire concert, and kill Meredith Hunter, it meant that rock ’n’ roll was powerful enough to change the world. Altamont had been irrefutable evidence, in this mindset, of rock’s power. The metaphorical rightness of the communion of a band, a song, and an event had been not just about the Rolling Stones’ bona fides as musical sorcerers, but of the sincerity of rock as a force in the world.

  Mistakes like the juxtaposition of songs notwithstanding, the result of Burks and his colleagues’ efforts was unexpectedly fierce, a no-holds-barred piece of journalism that saw fit to clobber the Rolling Stones for their failures. There was anguish, too, and a sense of misguided hero worship, only belatedly recognized: “Well, fuck Mel Belli. We don’t need to hear from the Stones via a middle-aged jet-set attorney. We need to hear them directly. Who really cares whether they’re going to lay some bread on Meredith Hunter’s family? It isn’t going to bring him back to life. But some display—however restrained—of compassion hardly seems too much to expect. A man died before their eyes. Do they give a shit? Yes or no?”

  Both Burks and Marcus were modestly disappointed with their work, convinced that the folded-in story was insufficient to the task of explaining Altamont. For Marcus, the final result was unsatisfying, lacking some essential but inexplicable quality that might have more accurately captured the madness of Altamont. Burks recalled a letter that British prime minister Winston Churchill had sent to one of his generals during the Second World War. At the end of a ten-page, single-spaced letter detailing his plans and thoughts and ideas, Churchill closed by saying he wished he had had the time to write a shorter letter. Burks believed
that more time would have given him the chance to compress and shorten the unusually long piece into something more cohesive. But there had only been a ten-day sprint to put together the entire issue, and there had been no time for a shorter letter.

  The Rolling Stone special issue began the process of revising the misguided story initially peddled by Wood, the San Francisco papers, and the AP. “The media of the San Francisco Bay Area, with a few exceptions, were programmed strictly for Woodstock West,” Rolling Stone argued. “They knew what to expect and whatever happened they knew what their story would say.”

  Unlike those other sources, Rolling Stone was instinctively trusted by the counterculture as a whole. (One wonders how perceptions might have changed had the roles been reversed, and Rolling Stone had served as Altamont’s defender while the mass-circulation press called it an unmitigated disaster.) Having put its imprimatur on the story of Altamont’s failure, it reoriented the collective understanding of the concert—a process eventually to be joined by the arrival of the Maysleses’ documentary film. Altamont had become, just as its organizers had hoped, an instantly recognizable symbol of the counterculture—only not in the fashion they had intended.

  11. “We Only Want Beautiful Things”

  When Charlotte Zwerin spoke, the editors working for her would have to lean in closer to hear her, anxious not to miss any stray bits of wisdom from the soft-spoken wizard of the editing room. She was not a public figure like Albert Maysles, not a raconteur like David. No one would catch her hanging out in Mick Jagger’s hotel room. For Zwerin, the cinematic process only began in earnest once the film cans started to arrive in the editing room.

  For Zwerin, documentary filmmaking required an ex post facto casting process, in which the mass of undifferentiated footage would be scoured for stimulating storylines and compelling faces that might hold the interest of audiences. Thoughtful fiction filmmakers might devote months to the question of casting: who would play the heroine? Who would take the meaty role of the villain?