The Hell’s Angels began arriving at about 10 a.m. Cheers and even applause were heard as the roar of 850cc engines parted the crowd like gossamer, and the grime-back squadrons bumped and swerved their heavy steeds downhill in ceremonial order: the ’Frisco chapter, the San Bernardino, the Oakland, the San José. With them the Angels had brought a yellow school bus filled with supplies of beer, cheap red wine and tabs of even more dangerously cheap LSD. They had also brought, as badges of their stewards’ rank, chains, knives, brass knuckles and, their own special persuader, sawn-off wooden pool cues, weighted with lead.
As the cavalcade passed through, bottles of wine and joints were offered to them and graciously accepted. One female onlooker, forced to jump aside, shouted a reproach. The Angel stopped and waited while his girlfriend dismounted, walked up to the other girl and punched her in the mouth.
By midday, the scheduled starting-time, even on that part of the site not policed by Hell’s Angels, good vibes were fast melting away. Sunshine had given way to cloud and a grey, grubby light which showed Altamont Raceway in all its true depressing character. Three hundred thousand people had long since swamped the few meagre facilities provided to feed and amuse them. Queues stretched for hundreds of yards from the tiny outcrop of portable toilets. Nineteen doctors, in scattered medical centres, were already inundated by victims of the bad drugs apparently being peddled by organized syndicates. Supplies of antidote drugs like Thorazine were running low. Nothing could be done with most of the victims but to put them behind rope enclosures to jerk and writhe like plague victims not quite dead. Nothing had happened yet to indicate this was Woodstock West rather than a vast, agglomerating slum of bodies either inert with chemical horrors or comatose with boredom. Not a note of music had been played. The sound system wasn’t yet working properly.
Down at a stage already overburdened with roadies and Hell’s Angels like a waterlogged life raft, Sam Cutler turned in exasperation on a black man who had climbed up to join in. Or, rather, stepped up – the stage-rim was, inexplicably, only four feet or so from the ground.
In a love-and-peace accent almost visibly bursting at the seams, Cutler said:
‘I’d really like you to get off the stage, baby – please.’
‘Okay, man,’ his tormentor said, also in the idiom that could express only pacts between friends. ‘I can dig that – you know?’ A moment later, when Cutler’s back was turned he stepped up on the stage again.
‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ an only slightly less brittle version of Sam Cutler’s voice eventually boomed out over the still wavering PA system. ‘We give you Santana, the first band in the best party in 1969 …’
Santana’s blend of Latin big band energy and the passionate lead guitar Carlos Santana himself was the newest sensation in rock. As the fat brass sound rolled outward, with all its suggestions of fun and fiesta, good humour very nearly won the day. Figures were up and dancing everywhere, shaking kaftan sleeves like ragged eight-armed Indian gods. ‘It was almost pure ecstasy,’ Sol Stern of Ramparts magazine later said. ‘Turning round, all I could see were people back as far as the clear blue horizon. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane with energy and turmoil all around. I thought everything was going to be all right – that the power of the music would keep it all in balance.’
By halfway through Santana’s set, swirls and flurries of violence, at first almost too quick for the eye to follow, were happening all along the stage-front to its scaffolded corners where massed Hell’s Angels confronted the ordinary public. A blond-haired boy, trying to break through, disappeared under a hail of punches and kicking motorcycle boots. An older freak with a Mexican moustache, who had stripped to reveal pendulous breasts and a penis clenched like a button mushroom, stood, apparently in deep thought, after numerous blows from an Angel’s weighted pool cue. A photographer who tried to record the incident was felled with pool cues, kicked and stomped as he lay bleeding and finally smashed in the face with his own camera.
While the stage was re-set, Sam Cutler attempted to curb the Angels’ rampage, as urged all around him by circuitous politeness and tact. Santana’s performance had been punctuated also by a fusillade of full beer cans, thrown from the Angels’ school bus commissariat thirty yards away. Cutler sent an emissary to the Angels in charge of the bus, offering to buy their entire beer supply for $500. The beer could thus be put on the stage, preventing its use as random missiles. This was the origin of one powerful Altamont legend: that the Hell’s Angels were hired by Rolling Stones people for $500-worth of beer.
Next to perform were Jefferson Airplane, a band of psychedelic chamber musicians fronted by the vengefully beautiful and beady-eyed Grace Slick. The Airplane had always championed Hell’s Angels, even played benefit concerts for them. Grace Slick, all crow-black hair and fitted blue satin, attempting to establish camaraderie, said, ‘Will the Hell’s Angels please take the stage?’ Jefferson Airplane played We Can Be Together and the violence re-erupted – quick flurries of black leather, white insignia, a face or arm upraised under flailing pool cues.
‘Hey – we’re cool …’ Grace Slick’s voice protested over the PA system. ‘We can be cool. Hey down there – why are we hurting each other?’
Jefferson Airplane played Revolution, with its hopefully empathic refrain ‘up against the wall, motherfucker.’ More Angels closed in like soldier ants around a single black youth. Marty Balin, the Airplane’s vocalist, leapt off the stage to intervene and was himself bludgeoned unconscious. Paul Kantner, the lead guitarist, said into the microphone, ‘I’d like to tell you all what’s happened. The Hell’s Angels have just smashed Marty Balin and knocked him out for a while.’
Across the stage, a bearded Angel seized a spare hand-mike. ‘Is this thing on or what?’ his voice rasped gigantically. ‘… Are you talking to me?’
‘I’m not talking to you,’ Kantner’s amplified voice answered. ‘I’m talking to these people.’
‘Fuck you,’ the Angel’s voice roared back.
‘It’s really weird up on that stage,’ a voice kept repeating. ‘Man, it’s really weird.’
Jefferson Airplane were still onstage when the Stones’ charter helicopter touched down fifty yards to the rear, on an asphalt strip meant to be a high security musicians’ landing and departure area. In fact it was as crowded and chaotic as any other part of the site. No attempt was made to camouflage the Stones or steer them to the trailer dressing room any way but straight through the crowds jostling for a sight of Mick Jagger. They had gone only a few steps when a teenage boy, half-crazed with cut-price acid, lunged forward and punched Jagger in the face, crying ‘I hate you, you fucker. I want to kill you.’ Bodyguards twirled the boy in one direction and Jagger, visibly pale and shaken, in the other. He managed to make light of the incident, however, and ordered that no reprisals be taken against his attacker.
The passing of the word that Jagger was here seemed to cause a lull in the stage-front violence. Things improved still further as the Flying Burrito Brothers, featuring Keith’s new friend Gram Parsons, played their sweet, anodyne country rock. The Stones, in their backstage trailer – unaware that there had been any particular trouble – went about the familiar procedures of tuning up and holding court. Jagger, fully himself again, appeared on the steps outside and began autographing the proffered books, album-sleeves and military draft cards. Later, he and Keith walked across to look at the audience and even climbed onstage for a few moments with the Burritos. It was noticed that, wherever a Stone went outside the trailer, he was accompanied by a guard of between three and six Hell’s Angels, all armed to the teeth.
In fact – as Ronnie Schneider confirms – the Stones placed no reliance on this grubby phalanx and had hired their own personal bodyguards for protection against the Angels as much as any demented fan. Their two principal guards, an inoffensive-looking white man and an enormous black man named Tony Fuches, both quickly ran into Hell’s Angel trouble. At an access-point to the stage, th
e white bodyguard had a cigarette stubbed out against his hand. More Angels were rushing to join the attack when a signal from one of their leaders – the celebrated Sonny Barger – caused them suddenly to back off. According to Schneider, the man concerned was an FBI agent, a figure whom even Hell’s Angels dared not challenge.
The black bodyguard, Tony Fuches, made his presence felt in a more straightforward way. Threatened by two Angels at once, he punched them in the face simultaneously, so hard that he broke both his wrists.
Crosby, Stills and Nash were onstage with their new addition, Neil Young, their choirboy harmonies barely audible over the deteriorating PA. Stills, Nash and Young had not wanted to play at all and were doing so only after strong persuasion from David Crosby. Their performance, nervous and desultory, was like a green light to chaos to break out again. Hell’s Angels were now surrounding and beating onlookers at random – spectators, male and female, even their own camp followers and chapter novitiates. At one point, for no apparent reason, a ten-strong group charged outward into the audience, pool cues hacking to right and left. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young finished their set, unplugged their guitars and bolted for their escape helicopter.
There was a further lull as stretchers were passed along to pick up the fallen and those behind pressed forward to fill the vacated spaces. Sam Cutler, hemmed in at his microphone, played his final card. ‘The Rolling Stones won’t come out,’ he said, ‘until everybody gets off the stage.’
Cutler’s words were apparently the signal for a dozen or so Angel ‘officers’, led by Sonny Barger, to ride their bikes through the crowd and park them in a slanted line directly below the stage. Barger would afterwards maintain that the concert-organizers had specifically asked him to provide this special barricade, augmented by gleaming, untouchable hogs. Sam Cutler and Rock Scully would be equally sure that no one ever made any such request.
To all this fast accumulating danger, the Stones now added their usual imperious and indolent disregard of the fact that people wanted to see them perform. More than ever on this tour, it had been their habit to delay and delay, piling up the tension, the expectation, the half-adoring rancour at this new demonstration that they couldn’t give a damn. Round the stage, a rumour circulated that they were long since ready but that Mick Jagger wanted complete darkness so that the stage lights would show off his costume and make-up to best effect.
Darkness was falling rapidly. As the cold intensified, fires were lit from the remnants of the raceway fence, or from garbage. A pall of smoke drifted up and settled around the still darkened stage. Doctors working in nearby medical tents asked for extra light, but were told that might spoil the impact of Jagger’s entry when it came. Backstage, the Stones’ helicopter pilot told Ronnie Schneider he was too nervous for his machine to wait until the end of their performance, as arranged. Tony Fuches, the black bodyguard, said he’d hold the pilot there at gunpoint if necessary.
When the Stones finally materialized, in a demon-red spotlight blaze, so did an escort of Hell’s Angels so dense as to be almost obliterating. Jagger, wearing an orange and black satin cloak and his Uncle Sam topper, had literally to fight his way to the low stage-front. The Angels were no longer protecting the stage: they had commandeered it for a display of their own power in which the Stones figured only as semi-captive mascots. Jumpin’ Jack Flash found himself hobbled in a tiny recess between crimson-lit Angels, being born in a cross-fire hurricane with barely enough space to swing his elbows. ‘Fellers –’ he kept saying in pretended amusement. ‘Will you give me some room? Will you move back, fellers, please?’
Halfway through Carol, even that good tempered rock ’n’ roll number, pool cues began flailing again among the faces close to Jagger’s silver boots. Out in the darkness beyond the smoke-red arena, Keith Richard’s chords were finding their mark. Boys and girls stripped naked in the dank cold, flinging themselves forward against the cracked leather cordon as puny white martyrs, almost begging to be surrounded, beaten, stomped and kicked. In the stage-front area, a dozen photographers, mindful of their colleague’s earlier fate, kept their lenses resolutely blinkered. Only the Maysles’ film crews, each with an Angel shotgun guard, avidly recorded all there was to see.
Now came the moment when – according to which equally possible version one prefers – Mick Jagger’s intuition deserted him or his vanity became overmastering. Either way, the result was incredible stupidity. Folding his cloak around him, he stepped forward in the mincing gait he had evolved for this most presumptuous of all his masquerades. ‘Please allow me to introduce myself …’ sang Satan, in his trendy orange satin, across a landscape whose authentic hellishness he could not, or would not, see.
The effect was as sudden as if the ground had opened up. Faces down to Jagger’s left collapsed sideways under the tossing assault of Hell’s Angel staves. The Devil-invoking samba beat expired in a whistle of guitar feedback. Satan, cut off in mid-verse, grasped for words that would return him to the hippy plane. ‘Brothers and sisters … brothers and sisters, come on now. That means everybody – just cool out. Just cool out now. We can cool out, everybody. Everybody be cool now, come on …’
The beating down of pool cues paused as if in answer to his exhortation. ‘Okay,’ Jagger said, evidently believing he had worked some similar miracle to that of James Brown in the race riots. ‘I think we’re cool now … we can groove.’ A shaky little joke revealed his continued failure to grasp the situation below him. ‘We always have something very funny happen when we start that number …’
Something, not very funny, was happening, the incidental purpose of which seemed to be to stop Sympathy for the Devil ever from getting beyond its first few bars. It had re-started but petered out again. In the mêlée below Jagger, a naked girl struggled her face, breasts and arms through a crevice to reach up entreatingly to him in the instant before her black leather shroud closed in. ‘Fellers …’ Jagger protested lamely. ‘Does it take five of you to handle that?’
The stage now thronged with Angels like a bar at closing time. There was also a large and ugly Alsatian dog prowling round unattended, sniffing at Charlie Watts’s bass drum and Bill Wyman’s trousers. As Jagger stood indecisively there, an Oakland Angel with a Mormon elder chin-beard came up beside him and began to speak frowningly into his ear. If Jagger lacked resolution, Keith Richard did not. Pointing furiously across his guitar, he shouted to the stage-front Angels to stop what they were doing. Sam Cutler rushed forward to restrain him, but Keith kept pointing and shouting, ‘That guy there … if he doesn’t stop it, man …’
‘Er – people …’ Jagger began again. ‘Who’s fightin’ and why? What are we fightin’ for?’
‘It’s that guy down there,’ Keith shouted, still pointing. ‘If he doesn’t cool it, man …’
‘San Francisco … This could be the most beautiful event. Don’t fuck it up …’ It was that rare thing, Jagger’s ordinary voice, accentless, wan, almost trembling. He stood there, a forlorn, flat-footed figure, wrapped in black and orange satin, punctured with the uncomprehending dismay of finding himself totally ignored by an audience.
‘All I can do is ask you – beg you to keep it together. It’s within your power.’
To underline Jagger’s entreaties to everyone to sit down, Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman began to improvise a slow instrumental sequence from the chords of Under My Thumb. Behind them, on a trailer belonging to the Grateful Dead, David Maysles signalled his cameraman, Baird Bryant, to keep filming this unprecedented instance of the Stones playing calm-down muzak. Jagger himself still stood there helplessly. Close beside him, the face of a Hell’s Angel stared into his, enlarged by the unreal perspective, its eyes sightless with unpronounceable malice, its bearded lips opening and closing like a poison pink anemone.
Twenty feet from the stage, the crowd suddenly parted to form a broad avenue, such as might open to greet a conquering hero. Down the middle came a lanky young black man, dressed in a light green suit, and runni
ng with inspired energy. For a hypnotic second or two, this oddly lean and elegant figure, its right arm stretched up as if to touch off an Olympic flame, whirled in the half dark between a clump of Hell’s Angels and a girl in a white crocheted mini-dress. Just for a trice against the crochet work, the object in his right hand showed its dark, long-barrelled silhouette. Then the dark mass surged in again to obliterate him.
The stabbing to death of eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter by a Hell’s Angel wearing the skull and crossbones insignia of the Oakland chapter, should by rights have been witnessed by only two or three among the thousands standing torpidly near. No one on the stage saw it, least of all the Stones, at this moment trying to collect themselves enough to begin playing again. It happened too quickly even for Baird Bryant, the stage cameraman, to see it in his own view-finder while filming it. David Maysles, acting as Bryant’s sound man, was aware only of a flicker ‘like a tassel … something you’d wave.’
Neither cameraman nor sound recordist realized what had happened even as they filmed Mick Jagger leaning forward, trying to hear something being shouted up at him. The appeal then broadcast by Jagger seemed no different from others which had preceded it. ‘We need a doctor … now please. Look – could you let the doctor through, please? Somebody’s been hurt …’ Jagger could not see that people around Meredith Hunter were holding up hands soaked in his blood to try to show the awful extent of his injuries.
The Stones had pulled themselves together and were playing again by the time a young doctor in a green combat jacket had fought his way to the clearing where Hunter lay, and had taken over from the couple of horrified boys trying to wash away the blood with hot coffee from a paper cup. By the time the doctor had got Hunter to the backstage medical tent, the performance was on its feet again. ‘Under mah thumb …’ Mick Jagger sang. ‘A Siamese cat of a girl …’ It could have been that very girl, in her white crocheted mini-dress, who stood by the unwanted ambulance, crying, ‘They can’t hear his heart … I don’t want him to die …’
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 39