None the less, the damage was done. Jagger had seen Gleason’s article reprinted in Rolling Stone, and had been aghast at the suggestion that he was ripping off audiences. The answer was obvious, and of proven effect. The Stones would say ‘thank you’ to America by giving a free concert.
For such an event there could be only one possible city. San Francisco was where hippies, acid, love and rock first coalesced: it was the home of major bands who might well participate: it was also the home of Rolling Stone magazine. As well as being the source of rock consciousness, it was one of the warmest places to hold an outdoor concert in December. Jagger’s idea could not have come at a more timely moment. Four months had passed since the Woodstock miracle; it was time for another great show of freaked-out togetherness. What had begun as purely a Rolling Stones project instantly became the property of San Francisco’s supergroup community whose leaders were the thunderous and cerebral Grateful Dead. The Dead had already offered to play and act as co-organizers with the Stones’ tour staff. Jefferson Airplane; Santana; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and the Flying Burrito Brothers all volunteered to be on the bill.
The guarantee of film cameras added to this altruistic eagerness. It had been Jagger’s intention all along to have the Stones’ tour filmed as the cinema feature which their Hyde Park concert, mysteriously, never became. Jagger, after all, had drawn almost as many people together in one day as Woodstock’s massed talents had in three. He was irked to think that the Woodstock film would shortly be released across America when The Stones in the Park had been seen only once on British television.
His original nominee to make a rival to Woodstock was the cameraman-director Haskell Wexler. Wexler accepted the job but then pulled out, leaving the tour half-finished and no footage yet shot. Not until the Stones reached New York did Jagger find an alternative in Albert and David Maysles, film-making brothers whose credits included a fascinating cinéma vérité chronicle of the Beatles’ first visit to New York. The Maysles filmed the Stones at Madison Square Garden and in two further shows, but still had far from enough material in the can. ‘Then we heard there was going to be a free concert in San Francisco,’ David Maysles says. ‘We couldn’t decide if it was worthwhile going to that or not.’
After their final paid appearance, at the Miami Pop Festival, the Stones travelled to Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama to work on songs for the album that would become Sticky Fingers. Their staff, led by Jo Bergman, moved into the Grateful Dead’s office in Marin County, north of San Francisco, where the new Woodstock would have to be organized in less than two weeks.
It seems incredible now that people so addicted to the study of signs and portents – people for whom ‘vibes’ were so important a consideration – could not see or feel the forces already propelling them towards catastrophe. All summer, one fact had made itself insistently plain: that love and peace had an underside of insecurity, anger and viciousness. Two rock festivals convened in Woodstock’s triumphant name had been marred by violence, inflicted haplessly, through drug excesses, or calculatedly by hippy militant groups dubbed with eighteenth-century martyrs’ names like the Diggers or Weathermen. So ritualized had the battles around the rock stage become that Rolling Stone was obliged to become part political broadsheet, calling this ‘the year of the American revolution’ and spelling its country’s name with a fascistic ‘k’. One episode above all expressed the change with dreadful simplicity. A bearded dropout named Charles Manson, only weeks earlier, had let his hippy ‘family’ loose in the Bel Air mansion of actress Sharon Tate. Four people, including the eight months pregnant Tate, had been butchered, apparently in the name of flower power.
And over all, like a soundtrack of the new barbarism, floated Let It Bleed – the surly, smoky incantation of Gimme Shelter; the homicidal playfulness of Midnight Rambler, with additional dialogue by Albert de Salvo, the Boston Strangler. The Stones had made destruction cool and the Devil a rock star; they had sold a million copies of an exhortation to slaughter. They were the household gods of every spaced-out, subterranean screwball in America. ‘Welcome Rolling Stones’ ran a typical street-corner manifesto, ‘– our comrades in the desperate battle against the lunatics who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world hears your music and is inspired to even more deadly acts. We will play your music as we tear down the jails and free the prisoners, as we tear down the state schools and free the students, as we tear down the military bases, arm the poor, as we tattoo “burn, baby, burn” on the bellies of the wardens and the generals and create a new society from the ashes of our fires …’
Meanwhile, at the Grateful Dead’s Marin County house, people living in the rosy past of four months ago told each other this would be the biggest love-in and freak-out ever. The concert had by now attracted a huge crowd of putative organizers, drawn from virtually every faction in San Francisco music, socio-politics and street-corner activism. Among the arguing daily throng could be identified Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead with Rock Scully, their manager; Jo Bergman and Ronnie Schneider of the Stones’ staff, Sam Cutler, their compere, and John Jaymes, their security manager; Chet Helms of the Family Dog; Emmett Grogan of the Diggers; David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; plus dozens of lower-caste Bay Area celebrities, propagandists, hangers-on and journalists.
There were also the Maysles brothers, filming what was still seen as the prologue to a climactic triumph. The Maysles were at San Francisco airport to record the arrival of Chip Monck, a blandly smiling, Afro-permed youth who had built the highly successful Woodstock stage and had been commissioned to repeat his achievement here. Chip Monck vanished, still smiling, into the increasing hubbub which a Rolling Stone reporter drily noted. ‘Meetings of two, three or ten people in every side office broke up in confusion after a few minutes … There was an air of frantic activity about the place. But in fact, nothing was happening.’
The problem – not foreseen until now – was finding an accessible open space whose owners would permit its occupancy by half a million-odd encamped rock fans. Everyone had assumed that Golden Gate Park, the most obvious and suitable site, would be made available: unfortunately, however, no one contacted the San Francisco Parks department until some days after the concert had been announced. It was then learned that the Parks department required a bond of four million dollars for insurance against damage to city property and to pay for the mammoth job of clearing up afterwards. Frantic telephone calls were made to other large landowners in the San Francisco area. They, too, saw visions of littering and defecating rather than love and peace, and brusquely refused to donate their open spaces, as suggested, gratis.
The difficulty seemed solved when Craig Murray, President of the Sears Point Raceway, offered his land at no charge and on minimal conditions, foremost of which was that any proceeds from the concert should benefit Vietnamese orphans. As a site, the raceway was ideal, being large, accessible to crowds and practised in dealing with their food and sanitary requirements. Craig Murray’s offer was gladly accepted. Chip Monck and his stage-building and lighting crews moved out to Sears Point to begin the process of transformation.
Not until the stage was almost built, and tens of thousands of hippies were rolling up their bundles for the trek to Sears Point, did a fatal flaw reveal itself. Sears Point Raceway was owned by Filmways, a Los Angeles-based movie company whose attitude proved noticeably less philanthropic than Craig Murray’s. To the terms originally offered by Murray, Filmways attached a last-minute rider stipulating that they must receive exclusive distribution rights to any film shot at the concert. The alternative was to pay them a million dollars in cash, with a further million dollars lodged in escrow to compensate for any damage done to their property.
It subsequently emerged that Filmways had some cause for this apparent bloody-mindedness. Another of their subsidiaries, Concert Associates, had promoted the two shows at Los Angeles Forum when the Stones had carried off three-quarters of the $260,000 box-office g
ross, had made exorbitant demands for backstage amenities and – Concert Associates claimed – had reneged on a promise to play a return date at the Forum. With this residual bad feeling, Filmways could not be expected to show largesse to any event involving the Stones. Ronnie Schneider, on his side, flatly refused to give away the film distribution rights or pay the sums demanded. Twenty-four hours before the concert was due to start on a stage already built, Sears Point Raceway was scratched.
At this apparently hopeless juncture, with the Grateful Dead faction squabbling impotently among themselves and the Stones threatening to play, if necessary, on some empty parking lot, a striking new player made his appearance. He was Melvin Belli, San Francisco’s most famous trial lawyer, a white-haired legal showman who had been attorney to Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer and was now involved in the Charles Manson murder trial. Mick Jagger, losing faith in hippy initiative, retained Mel Belli to untangle the mess with Sears Point and Filmways, and try to find a last minute alternative concert site.
The Maysles’ cameras ran on in Belli’s office as ‘The King of Torts’, in brown Beau Brummell suit and bright yellow shirt, diverted his powerful mind from the Manson case to the problems of San Francisco’s free rock festival. As Ronnie Schneider remembers, Belli’s initial advice was somewhat unorthodox. ‘He said “You could always just go ahead and do the show at Sears Point, and take a chance on them suing you. Maybe they’d never ever get around to it.”’
The spectacle of Belli cross-examining possible site-donors by telephone as Schneider and John Jaymes looked on – and Manson witnesses waited in the next room – gave the crisis a surreal touch. One such alternative donor had been found, but was now raising objections in a voice of increasingly passionate irritation that Belli’s drawling courtroom wit seemed only to exacerbate. ‘… You don’t understand my problem. I have a time problem,’ this unnamed individual pleaded. ‘My people need more time to work on this thing … I see nothing but trouble … This whole thing is getting to be a pain in the ass …’ ‘Well, I’m not a proctologist here,’ the lawyer replied suavely.
Amazingly enough, in the course of that Friday morning, Belli did find an alternative site. A man named Dick Carter, proprietor of the Altamont Raceway, near Livermore, California, phoned in with an offer to donate his land on terms even more moderate than Sears Point’s original ones. The only conditions were that the concert must be free, that its organizers guarantee $5,000 to clear up afterwards, and that a million-dollar insurance policy be taken out to protect against major damage.
The site, some forty miles south-east of San Francisco, was a stock-car racing track carved into an eighty-acre grass plot which – on paper – seemed more than adequate to contain the expected audience of 300,000. The crucial question was whether, in the twenty hours remaining, Chip Monck and his construction team could dismantle the stage they had built at Sears Point, transport it with all its ancillary towers and generators the sixty-five miles to Altamont Raceway, and reassemble it in time for use at noon the following day. Monck – the solitary hero this enterprise would produce – replied that it could be done, with extra volunteers, if everybody worked through the night.
By mid-afternoon, Mel Belli had concluded negotiations with the philanthropic Mr Carter, a thin-faced man wearing heavy hair-oil and a short toothbrush moustache. ‘The Sheriff wants to know,’ quipped Belli rotundly, ‘who’s going to the bathroom, and where.’
‘It’s on!’ Rolling Stone announced in a jubilant stop-press. ‘It will be a little Woodstock and, even more exciting, it will be an instant Woodstock …’ The same message went out all evening over scores of rock radio stations, turning the migrant tide away from Sears Point and towards Altamont. A few people did not share the general euphoria. ‘They’ll never do it,’ said Bill Graham, the promoter, speaking from his stores of untapped experience.
‘They should call it off or it’ll explode in their faces …’ Others, casting a horoscope for the event as had been done for Woodstock, were dismayed to see that on December 6, the Moon would be in Scorpio, portending a time of chaos and violence.
Exactly who first had the idea of hiring Hell’s Angels as a security force, no one can remember now. Some say it was Rock Scully, the Grateful Dead’s manager; others remember Emmett Grogan of the Diggers proposing that the Stones be escorted to the stage by a ceremonial guard of ‘a hundred Angels on hogs [motor-cycles] … that way, no one will dare to go near them’.
The idea did possess a glimmering of logic. Previous rock concerts in the San Francisco area had found it better to invite the Angels than to risk their arrival, unbidden, in a spirit of antagonism. Giving them spurious official status had proved an even better emollient. So, in the spirit of Aquarian brotherhood and devout hope that the same ruse would work again, various Hell’s Angel chapters throughout north California were contacted and invited to act as ‘stewards’ at Altamont.
They were not hired as bodyguards for the Stones, as all subsequent reports would allege. What happened was that Stones people – notably Sam Cutler, the concert compere – went along with the plan to invite them. To Cutler, as to the Stones themselves, all the term ‘Hell’s Angel’ probably signified was the pimply-faced boys with freshly washed hair who had been so cosmetic and inoffensive a feature of the Hyde Park free concert, five months earlier.
Californian Hell’s Angels were not the same. They were highly organized, semi-outlaw gangs whose fascist insignia were all too accurate a reflection of character, and whose vicious mass reprisals against anyone suspected of slighting their brotherhood made even the police unwilling to challenge them. Heaven help anyone on the freeway not showing due respect to an Angel, his woman, his chapter emblem or, most of all, his neurotically gleaming, high handlebar ‘hog’.
In latter years they had acquired a certain chic, thanks to writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Emmett Grogan, who perceived in their impenetrable brutishness and grubbiness an honesty otherwise absent from modern American life. So it was politic, but also ‘groovy’ to set these real-life urban bandits in visual counterpoint to the mythic outlaws and vagabonds of rock.
It was now six o’clock in the evening of that confused and frenetic Friday, December 5. The weak winter sun had declined into chilly dusk. On the hills around Dick Carter’s raceway, scores of figures could be seen, tramping with a peculiar dogged, fatalistic tread which, added to their beads and plaits and rolled blankets, gave them the appearance of native Americans on the way to a new hunting ground. The first spectators were arriving at Altamont.
The end of their journey was very far from being a beauty spot. On three sides of the racetrack stretched empty slopes covered with grass whose pigment seemed burned out of it by exhaust-fumes, and dotted here and there with the wrecked shells of cars used up in the track’s ‘demolition derbies’. Shards of rusting auto metal and broken glass crunched under sandalled feet. It all looked bleak and uninhabited – and, indeed, it usually was. Altamont Raceway had long been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. This was a golden opportunity, in Dick Carter’s eyes, to give the place a new image.
The first-comers pitched their tents and, as the night grew colder, lit fires made with palings from the wooden perimeter fence. Others squeezed in to sleep or make love behind the eviscerated dashboards of the wrecked stock cars. On the low-lying section nearest the highway, Chip Monck’s volunteer crew laboured to put together the stage they had transported from Sears Point. The atmosphere was good-humoured, as at Boy Scout camp, with touch football under the arc-lamps, guitar singsongs and good trips by firelight. A ragged cheer greeted the arrival of eight ancient trucks, each loaded with a dozen portable one-person toilets that were presumed – incorrectly – to be merely the advance guard of the sanitary facilities.
At about 3 a.m., the Stones themselves arrived by limousine with Ronnie Schneider. Mick Jagger, dressed in a pink cape and bulbous pink velvet cap, inspected Chip Monck’s nearly completed stage, then walked among the c
amp fires like young King Harry visiting his troops before Agincourt. Someone democratically held up a joint to him and – having asked for the TV cameras to be switched off – Jagger took a hit and passed it back. The vibes at this stage could hardly have been better. Keith Richard liked the feel of the crowd so much, he stayed the rest of the night, talking, smoking and eventually settling down to sleep on the grass.
By early Saturday morning, as the wan winter sun came up, 100,000 were already on the site, with thousands more arriving each hour, abandoning their cars eight miles away on a jammed-solid ten-mile stretch of half-finished freeway, and joining the trek down the access road, over the hills or along the railway line. From the air, the effect was of a huge ploughed field, its furrows alternately earth brown and denim blue, moving as if by some seismic compulsion over the paler-contoured semi-desert.
For half a square mile around Chip Monck’s stage, the slopes were solid with bivouacked bodies, each clinging to its precious inches of space with as much fervour as if the earth were shortly to be turned upside down. Here and there, stumbling among the legs and backs, could be seen one or other of the dozen film crews which Albert and David Maysles had mustered for the occasion. The Maysles wanted vignettes of hippydom, and they were not disappointed. Everywhere the camera lens looked, it saw painted faces, tattooed bodies, babies being suckled at the breast. Ever and again, in the delight of a good trip or the anguish of a bad one, some half-clad figure would leap to its feet and demonstrate the whirling dervish ritual of freaking out. All seemed to be going exactly to plan for what the organizers had begun to call ‘Woodstock West’.
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 38