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

by Saul Austerlitz

  * * *

  In 2009, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office dropped a bombshell when it announced that its cold-case unit would reopen the Meredith Hunter case. The new investigation’s remit was limited. It wanted to determine whether there had indeed been, as Alan Passaro’s defense attorney George Walker had repeatedly argued during the original trial, a second stabber responsible for Hunter’s death. The investigation, led by Sergeant Scott Dudek, looked through the old case files and studied the film footage shot by the Maysleses’ crews. Passaro had already been tried and acquitted, so double jeopardy made the question of his culpability irrelevant to the investigation, but Dudek came to believe, as he told a reporter, that Hunter was “a contributing factor to his own death.” Furthermore, Dudek believed that Hunter might have actually fired his gun, even though tests done at the time of Passaro’s trial indicated that he had not. The investigation ultimately determined that only Passaro had stabbed Hunter.

  * * *

  Altha Anderson spent weeks in Herrick Hospital in Berkeley after learning of her son Meredith’s death. She underwent repeated rounds of electroshock therapy and came home, ashen and partially absent, as if a part of her had been excised. There were still schizophrenic episodes, but they were not quite as volatile as they had been. But if Anderson was more lucid now, that only opened her once more to the pain of her son’s sudden death. Why had Meredith been taken from her? Who could assuage her loss? She was drawn back to the Holiness congregation, which gave her the direction she needed. Religion offered answers where nothing else could, a sense of a world in balance, of wrongs being righted and the divine order being restored, in the next world, if not this one.

  Anderson appeared at a meeting of the Alameda County Planning Association in early January. She was present to request that the Altamont Speedway, site of her son’s death, become a public park. “My son’s blood is on the land,” she said, “and I would like to see the land serve a useful purpose for the youth of southern Alameda County. I cannot bring my son back, but by your action you may prevent any more wrongful deaths at Altamont.” The speedway, ignoring her wishes, remained open for business, but further musical events were barred from Altamont. There could be no more than three thousand people present at any future gathering. But there would be no tribute to Meredith Hunter’s life at the speedway, no marker of his death. No one would come to Altamont to reflect and remember.

  What did it mean to be a family in the aftermath of so harrowing a loss? Meredith’s brother Donald would sit out in the front yard, day after day, staring out into nothingness. It was as if he were waiting for Meredith to return, loping along the street, adjusting his hat to the proper tilt, crammed full of stories of his time away. After all, he had been gone so many times before. Why couldn’t this be another extended absence? Donald, plagued by his own demons, never articulated these thoughts, but his sister Dixie felt his anguish as he sat there, hoping for a ghost to make him whole again, make his family whole again.

  Schizophrenia was the family’s scourge, striking where least expected, decimating one generation after another. Both Donald and Gwen would develop schizophrenia like their mother had. Whether the tragedy of Meredith’s loss had affected their brain chemistry was debatable, but Dixie had the sense that her brother’s death was an earthquake, and the ripples of its aftershocks had taken down the remainder of her siblings, too.

  Dixie kept her head down. She went back to school, studied fashion arts, got her teaching certificate. She had so much experience raising children, she figured she might as well make a career of it. Dixie studied the Montessori method, which sought to let students explore and learn in their own time, on their own terms. She treated the children she cared for like her own, like the siblings she had raised. She helped the kids who needed help, and bathed them all in love every hour of the day they spent with her. Dixie wanted all the children to know that they were provided for, that someone was there to dry their tears, that someone would listen to them. Who knew what they might encounter when they walked out her door?

  She had not been much interested in the Passaro trial. The case would bring her no closure, and it certainly would not bring Meredith back. The verdict, too, was no surprise. Dixie firmly believed that a white man would never be convicted of killing a black man in America, and the trial did nothing to disabuse her of the notion.

  It had been her mother who had been convinced by an opportunistic lawyer to sue the Rolling Stones. Anderson, hardly in a position to oversee any lawsuit herself, was won over with vague promises of riches from a fabulously wealthy British rock band. The Rolling Stones’ lawyers attempted to have the wrongful-death suit tossed out on a technicality, claiming that papers had never been served to Mick Jagger. The lawyer negotiated with the Stones on Anderson’s behalf, and eventually made off with a good chunk of the $10,000 she had wound up receiving.

  Dixie was more struck by the response, or lack thereof, of the Rolling Stones and the other parties involved with the concert. No one had come to apologize, no one had offered their condolences, no one had even acknowledged the extent of her family’s loss. What could $10,000 do when Meredith was, now and forever, absent? Dixie would never get to banter with him again. Life would go on, and he would be absent. There would be an empty space in the family where Meredith had once gone, and where Dixie could imagine, in her more desperate or wistful moments, what might have been. What would it have cost Mick Jagger or Keith Richards to merely acknowledge her grief? She never watched Gimme Shelter, either. She did not want to see her brother in his terrified last moments, did not want to remember him that way.

  Dixie’s mother was sick, the same terrible disease plagued her siblings, and Meredith was gone. Her husband was dead, and Dixie was raising her children alone. Four years after the loss of her husband and brother, she met DeWitt Ward. It was not love, not like it had been with Jesse, but he had no children of his own, and he would give her children what they needed. DeWitt was stoic, and often hard to read, but Taammi and her siblings got along well with him.

  Dixie and DeWitt got married, and they bought a house on a quiet street in Oakland. This was where Tim and Tanya and Taammi grew up, where they became a family. Dixie was there during the days, too, caring for her kids. It didn’t matter who they belonged to, they were all her kids. Dixie kept her head down because there were no opportunities to lift it up. Every time she thought she might, another catastrophe or crisis intervened.

  There was no one for Dixie to talk to about all she had endured. Her siblings were stricken now, too, her mother was absent, and her children had to be protected from knowing how unbearably cruel the world could be. It was too painful to remember, too painful to be reminded of those moments listening to the radio, hearing the reports of the Hells Angels subduing a maniac with a gun, and not realizing yet that that “maniac” was her Meredith. It was too painful to think about that solitary trip to pick up Meredith’s car, too painful to think about all the things he would miss. He would never see Tim and Tanya and Taammi grow up, would never have children of his own. He would never be able to console Dixie again, never be able to share in her joy. He would be forever absent.

  Dixie didn’t talk about Meredith with her family because she didn’t want to remember the nightmare of his death. She didn’t visit his grave, a short drive away. She wanted to remember him quietly, with joy. She would not give herself over to her feelings because then she would have to acknowledge the enormity of what she had lost: her brother, her husband, her mother and siblings mostly lost to illness. It was too much for a single human being to bear. But each year, when early December came around, and she spotted the Christmas trees beginning to sprout in living room windows around the neighborhood, she remembered the tree that had been in her mother’s living room that day. Christmas was a time of painful remembrance, bringing up all the memories she tried so hard to stifle. The tree was supposed to represent life, and it hadn’t. The tree was supposed to spread and grow, and it
hadn’t. Neither Dixie nor her mother ever had a Christmas tree in their homes again.

  Dixie would tell her son Tim, time and again, to come home before dark, to avoid standing on corners. She could walk to her corner and see young white men and women standing outside bars and restaurants, smoking and talking and laughing. They could do it, but her children could not. It simply wasn’t safe. If a group of white boys were standing on a corner, they were enjoying themselves. If a group of black boys did it, they were a gang, and the police would be summoned. And violence could strike without warning, from any direction, at any time.

  * * *

  In the mid-2000s, a filmmaker named Sam Green was surprised at how little he knew about Meredith Hunter. He had made a film on the violent leftist radical group the Weathermen and had come across Hunter’s name a number of times when researching the era. He was taken aback by how little information was available about Hunter’s life, and decided to pay a pilgrimage to Hunter’s gravesite. The grave was unmarked, and a cemetery employee named Mr. Wilks offered to escort him there.

  Green was charmed by Mr. Wilks, and by his musings on the meanings ascribed to cemeteries, and kept thinking about Meredith Hunter, forever young, lying for eternity in an anonymous grave. He decided to come back to Skyview and re-create his experience of walking and talking with Wilks, and turned it into a film he named after the location of Hunter’s grave: Lot 63, Grave C.

  Meredith Hunter’s headstone. (Courtesy of Saul Austerlitz)

  The resulting effort was not really about Meredith Hunter so much as it was about all that Hunter symbolized about the 1960s, and about the passage of time, but the film’s numerous admirers were troubled by that unmarked cemetery plot. Without being asked to, strangers began sending donations, in small amounts and large, in the hopes that a gravestone could be placed to remember the life of Meredith Hunter. Today, Meredith Hunter’s grave is no longer unmarked. Visitors to Skyview can make their own way over to Lot 63, Grave C, and find his final resting place, which reads: IN LOVING MEMORY—MEREDITH CURLY HUNTER JR.—OCT. 24, 1951—DEC. 6, 1969.

  * * *

  Taammi Parker had never seen her uncle’s gravestone. She had been two years old when he was killed, and while her mother Dixie Ward occasionally spoke of her brilliant, funny, protective younger brother, she knew there were certain questions she was not supposed to ask. Her uncle’s death hurt Dixie so much. From as early as she could remember, Taammi knew that, more than anything, she wanted to protect her mother from further pain. That was, she believed, what she had been put on this earth to do.

  It was a mostly happy childhood, she thought. She had vague memories of a less happy time, a period of emotional collapse, but most of her youth was shaped by her mother’s determination to give the children what she had never had: stability, comfort, a rooted love. The children had come first, always. One summer, Dixie had taken Taammi and her siblings on a tour of nearby amusement parks, one after the other. The kids had shrieked on the roller coasters and gorged on the snacks and been transported to a rung just below heaven, and Taammi only realized after the trip was over that her mother absolutely hated amusement parks.

  Dixie took the children everywhere. Anything she had not been able to do as a child, she strove to do for them, from swim lessons to trips to Carmel. But there were other times, too: times when the phone would ring, and their mother would tell them, “I have to go.” They would never have any idea where she’d gone, or what she had to do, but Taammi suspected it had something to do with how, every time anyone mentioned their uncles Meredith or Donald, a wave of pain would cascade across Dixie’s face. Even on their roller coaster tour, there were places Dixie would not stop, fearful of what might happen to the children at the wrong gas station, the wrong restaurant. Taammi remembered having to pee in a jar on occasion.

  She knew that her uncle had been killed, but the details eluded her. Whenever the Hells Angels appeared in the news or on TV, she could feel her mother stiffen. Neither she nor her siblings ever asked her about it, because they could see how much it hurt, and they didn’t want to make her relive the pain on their account. Their mother’s philosophy seemed to be to take the things that weighed you down—grief, anger, the horrors of the past—and prick it silently with little holes until you felt slightly more buoyant. There were hints, though, of the absent members of the family, and the pain Dixie silently carried. When Taammi’s aunt Gwen, stricken with schizophrenia, died in 2008, the same year that her grandmother Altha died at the age of eighty-three, her mother said, “She never had a chance either.” The family’s history was a palimpsest, with traces of the past now rendered illegible, but still visible under the surface.

  Parker was in her early thirties, and already a successful internet entrepreneur, before she discovered the truth about her uncle’s death. Her mother’s silence on the subject had left her unaware of how he had died or the larger significance of his death.

  She was watching a VH1 program called The 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock & Roll when she heard the name “Meredith Hunter” mentioned, and saw the now ubiquitous footage from Gimme Shelter. Parker was flabbergasted. Shock forced a laugh out of her chest, then she went quiet. She turned off the television, turned off the lights. She lay down and cried, letting the tears roll down her face. She didn’t bother to wipe them away. There was no point.

  Knowing what had happened to her uncle rendered her momentarily catatonic. Her brain still worked, but her limbs had stopped functioning. It was too much for her to take in, to know that her uncle’s last moments had been spent fleeing from a man who was intent on piercing his body, over and over, until he could not lift himself up anymore. She was sad and grateful for her mother’s forbearance, her stubborn resolve to feign normalcy for her children, even as the story of her brother’s life and death likely played in an endless closed loop in the theater of her mind. The strength to be that determined was beyond her imagining. Only then did Parker begin to understand the enormity of what her family had endured, and the weight of what her mother had silently carried for her entire life.

  Dixie had spent thirty-seven years caring for other people’s children. She had been a fixture in the community for so long that she looked after some of her children’s children. She helped the children who needed help, and ministered to them all. It was essential that no one be forgotten, no one slip through the cracks. But now she was tired. She did not have the energy anymore. DeWitt was sick, and after caring for him on her own for years, Dixie had to move him to a facility. After seventy years of life, Dixie had some time to think, and the traumas of the past were catching up with her. She felt the ghosts creeping at the door once more.

  Dixie found it too painful to honor Meredith’s memory, but Taammi crafted her own ritual for the uncle she had never really known. Every night at 8:15, a reminder on her phone beeped. It was time for her to honor her ancestors. She would mention them each by name, her uncle Meredith’s prominent among them, and let their presences slip past like images on a screen. In this way, she paid tribute to the lost members of her family, and to her mother, who bore it alone for so long.

  Now, any mention of Altamont took Taammi’s breath away. Each allusion was like a renewed death, a reminder that, in all the hoopla about the death of the 1960s, the teenage boy who had actually died that day had been forgotten. Her family had been forgotten, too, a footnote to a footnote. It was terribly painful that something so enormous in their lives could feel so unacknowledged.

  Parker belatedly came to understand that her mother had loved her own siblings as if she had been a mother to them, too, and that their absence was the central fact of her life. The family’s stories were silenced, because the women who remembered them found them too painful to recount. The past was a vast unknown country. When there was so much to bear, all you could do was push forward. And later, when it might have been a better time to reflect, or mourn, the protective gambit had become a habit, and you kept doing it, even though it di
d not necessarily serve your interests anymore.

  The state of race relations in the United States had improved on its façade since 1969, but Parker worried that there had not been enough changes made to the foundation to effect any serious transformation. She took to volunteering with organizations seeking to improve the lot of African-American men and women. The deaths of young black men, particularly those in encounters with armed representatives of state force, affected her deeply. When a New York police officer choked Eric Garner to death in 2014, she called her mother to vent her grief and anger, and her fear that nothing would ever change. “No,” Dixie told her. “This time everybody can see.” But everyone had seen Meredith Hunter’s encounter with the Hells Angels, too, and had still condemned the victim for his own death.

  Taammi Parker believed the reason she had been born was to be solid for her mother. She was determined to remember what her mother simply could not, to contemplate her mother’s difficult life, and the unbearable times she had endured, and in so remembering, to honor what her family had experienced. This was the story of black people in the United States, she thought, but her family had been served an even more distilled potion of bitterness to choke down. Meredith Hunter was not just a name, not just a dead man at a rock concert. He was her uncle, and he was loved. Each night at 8:15, she remembered.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing about this disastrous day in the life of the 1960s was frequently a somber exercise, but conducting more than eighty original interviews also offered me the opportunity to learn about the lives of a wildly disparate array of people who happened to be at Altamont, or who know people who were. The most interesting stories were often the ones that had nothing at all to do with my subject. One day, someone should write an entire book about Adele Kubein, who dropped out of grade school, hung out with the Hells Angels as a teenager, lost a daughter in Iraq, became a prominent antiwar protester, went back to school, got her bachelor’s, master’s, and a doctorate, and became an esteemed professor while fighting cancer.