The ambulance had been put there, in fact, to transport the Stones the fifty yards back to their helicopter. ‘I was out there, searching for the driver, to help the guy who’d been hurt,’ Ronnie Schneider says. ‘I ran into a cop – the first one I’d seen all day. As we stood there, this cop heard over his walkie-talkie that the guy was dead.’
The Stones played on, meanwhile, vaulting from Under My Thumb to Midnight Rambler, Queenie and Brown Sugar, hitting each head-on with the kind of lucid brilliance that terror so often inspires. ‘We knew that if we stopped, there really would have been a riot,’ Mick Taylor says. They even did Street Fighting Man as per programme, with its now sickly inappropriate valediction from Jagger: ‘We’re gonna kiss you goodbye …’
As the Stones bolted from the stage, the Angels moved in on the remaining beer supply, howling that now the party could really begin. Across in the asphalt pit area, fourteen people threw themselves into the Stones’ eight-seater helicopter. Before the door closed, it was lifting off, its perspex bubble crammed like a cookie jar with bodies and leather lapels and boots, and Mick Jagger’s sweat-smeared, frightened face.
There was none of the usual after-show drinking and carousing that night. Even Keith Richard seemed to want to do nothing but fold his tattered frame into a brocade armchair, nurse a bottle of Jack Daniels and stare glumly off into space. Mick Taylor locked himself in his hotel room and slid the chain across the door.
Shocked as they all were, they still did not realize what a piece of butchery had been enacted literally before their eyes. Next morning’s San Francisco Chronicle reported the Altamont festival as a brilliant success only slightly marred by death. As well as Meredith Hunter, three more youths had been killed; two run over by a car as they lay in sleeping-bags, the third drowned in an irrigation ditch. The Chronicle preferred to stress Sam Cutler’s claim that the event had been life-enhancing. According to Cutler, four babies had been born during the day’s events. Dick Carter, the raceway owner, was reportedly delighted with his first foray into pop promotion and was now planning an even bigger festival, headlined, he hoped, by the Beatles.
London newspapers picked up the same line of a Stones-inspired freakout where death had been almost cosmically counterbalanced by birth. STONED! chortled the Daily Express, unconsciously echoing that long-forgotten B-side. Arriving back in London, all the Stones were understandably tight-lipped. Even Keith Richard told a UPI reporter that Altamont had been ‘basically well-organized, but people were tired and a few tempers got frayed.’
The real story only began to emerge late that Sunday night, via an exhaustive on-air inquest by San Francisco’s rock station KSAN. Numerous callers-in reiterated the grisliness of conditions at Altamont and the mindless brutality they had witnessed there. Despite obvious fear of reprisals from the Angels, even Sam Cutler was persuaded to admit, ‘I didn’t dig, in fact, what a lot of people did yesterday.’ For editorial balance, there was the voice of Hell’s Angel Sonny Barger, almost plaintive in its claim that the Angels had been the victims of rock star vanity and vagueness. ‘I didn’t go there to police nuthin’, man … They used us for dupes.’ According to Barger, the trouble had started after several Angels below the stage had their bikes deliberately kicked over, and one even set on fire. ‘I ain’t no peace creep, man … Ain’t nobody goin’ to get my bike, man. Anyone tries that, they gonna get got. And they got got.’
Barger’s own autobiography – for such a thing does, indeed, exist – goes even further in portraying the Angels as naive, well-meaning chaps who realized they were being used by the Stones to create an atmosphere of theatrical menace, but nevertheless tried to do a conscientious job as security guards. According to Barger’s account, Meredith Hunter actually shot and wounded one of the Angels during his sprint through the crowd, but this had to be kept quiet at the time because the Angel concerned was a fugitive from the law. ‘I don’t feel too bummed about what happened’ is Sonny Barger’s perspective, thirty years on.
It further emerged that no babies at all had been born during the festival. The nearest approximation was a youth who announced he was pregnant, just prior to jumping from a traffic flyover and suffering serious multiple injuries.
The most damning contemporary account did not appear until almost six weeks afterwards, in Rolling Stone magazine. A 20,000-word article by a team of RS writers who had been present reconstructed the whole chaotic story with a wealth of investigative detail not previously associated with underground journalism. Among the eyewitness testimony was a description of how Meredith Hunter, an apparently law-abiding black teenager from Berkeley, had had his hair yanked by a Hell’s Angel and, on giving ‘a mean look’, had been set on by half a dozen more. Hunter, it was said, tried to escape but had been knifed in the back as he ran towards the stage. Bystanders saw him pull a gun from his coat pocket and wave it in the air. An Angel had then moved in, stabbing Hunter repeatedly with a seven-inch knife, clubbing and kicking him as he lay bleeding, even standing on the victim’s head before strolling nonchalantly away. Hunter had died from massive stab wounds in the back, side and temple which the sketchy medical facilities could not begin to staunch. His only audible words had been to his attacker: ‘I wasn’t going to shoot you.’
Rolling Stone’s conclusion was unequivocal. The real blame for Altamont lay, not with Mel Belli or Dick Carter or even Sonny Barger, but with those whose name the paper bore on its own masthead. The Stones were portrayed throughout as monstrously conceited, deaf to all warning signs, careless of all the terrible consequences. It was powerful even courageous journalism, albeit marred by inaccuracy and confusion. Rolling Stone still had no idea how much its own harping on inflated ticket-prices had hardened Jagger’s resolve to do a free concert. Nor could its writers resist embroidering a too perfect detail: that when Meredith Hunter was stabbed, the Stones had been playing Sympathy for the Devil.
Most stinging of all was the comment on the Stones’ hurried exit from San Francisco, leaving others to pick up the pieces and the corpses. ‘… 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. 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?’
Bill Graham, the concert-promoter – whose expertise had been so consistently ignored – was more specific in his furious condemnation. ‘I ask you what right you had, Mr Jagger … in going through with this free festival? And you couldn’t tell me you didn’t know the way it would come off. What right do you have to leave the way you did, thanking everyone for a wonderful time and the Angels for helping out? What did he leave behind throughout the country? Every gig, he was late. Every fucking gig he made the promoter and the people bleed. What right does this god have to descend on this country this way? But you know what is a great tragedy to me? That cunt is a great entertainer.’
On January 8, 1970, a twenty-two-year-old Hell’s Angel named Alan Passaro went on trial in Oakland, California, for the murder of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont festival on December 6. Passaro admitted stabbing the black boy but stated it was in self-defence, after Hunter had actually fired the gun he was waving. He further stated that he had inflicted only slight wounds and that someone else must have made the ghastly rent in Hunter’s left temple, the gouge at the top of his spine and the stab through his tailored jacket into his abdomen.
The main prosecution evidence consisted of a feature film currently on release throughout America. It was the Maysles brothers’ documentary, rush-released to cash in on the post-tour publicity, and named, after the Stones’ last incantation to chaos: Gimme Shelter.
The climax of the film – not even seen by the cameraman until its editing stage – formed the crux of the murder trial in Oakland. There on screen, playing three times daily coast-to-coast, was the killing of Meredith Hunter.
The Maysles’ film had enabled police to identify Hunter’s attacker as
a prisoner serving time in a California jail for a drug offence committed a few days after the Altamont festival. Further screenings were held throughout the trial to help the jury determine whether the obese Angel striking at Hunter was Passaro, and whether his seven-inch knife, or someone else’s, had struck the fatal blows.
Since Passaro’s Angel brothers had already delivered Hunter’s loaded gun to the California highway patrol, the jury had no choice but to acquit him.
A California courtroom was thus the first to see the film record of the Stones’ triumphal comeback and its obscene climax. There, as the jury watched, were the good tour moments: the wild scenes at Madison Square Garden, the good mix of Wild Horses down at Muscle Shoals. There was the genial press conference, when the woman journalist said, ‘Are you any more satisfied now …?’ There was Mick Jagger, in beret, scarf and lipstick – looking uncannily like the young Leslie Caron – watching his own repartee on the Maysles’ film-editing machine.
‘Financially … just sa’isfied. Sexually sa’isfied, y’know. Philosophically tryin’,’ Jagger’s on-screen voice said.
‘Rubbish!’ commented his voice derisively in the editing room. There, at last, was the crucial moment at Altamont in the red-spotlit dark, as Jagger stood, helpless among the real demons his masquerade had summoned up. There was the crowd, falling back to form a wide avenue. There was the long-legged, prancing figure in its light green tailored suit. There was the converging blur of a Hell’s Angel, a death’s head badge, a plunging knife, a gun silhouetted on a girl’s white crocheted dress. There it was again in slowed-down replay; murder in highlight, like some great sporting moment, a man dying twice for dramatic emphasis. There was the sequence showing the Stones again, several weeks afterwards, watching Meredith Hunter’s end on the Maysles’ editing machine. There was Charlie Watts, as divorced from the unholy fable as ever, yet dominating the scene with his long, sensitive, bewildered face. ‘Some o’ those Angels, y’know, couldn’t have been nicer … It was all so insane, what went on y’know … It was just unreal … Oh, dear – wha’ a shame …’
There for all time is Mick Jagger, evidently shocked by what he had just seen, yet ruled as ever by the need to show no emotion. His reddened lips have not stirred from their photogenic pout as Altamont ends and the dejected hippy masses wander off like refugees towards a new, unsympathetic decade.
Eventually he gets up and tosses his scarf over one shoulder.
‘Okay …’ he says. ‘See y’all …’
FOURTEEN
‘THE STONES LIKE FRANCE TREMENDOUSLY’
The new decade loomed ahead with all the invitingness of a hung-over morning after. All around lay the debris of the sun-soaked, joss-scented, careless spree that had ended, like a candle brutally blown out, on the last stroke of midnight, 1969. The hit record of the moment had none of the twangly euphoria with which youth had celebrated and congratulated itself so many times over the preceding ten years. It was a dramatically orchestrated ballad, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, whose title seemed to offer a faint ray of optimism amid the prevailing gloom. ‘When you’re weary … feeling small,’ sang Art Garfunkel, his voice riven with pity for all those who had awoken in the Seventies, rubbed their eyes and realized with horror that they were in their mid-twenties.
The Beatles caught the zeitgeist perfectly as usual – but for the last time ever. All the melancholy of an expiring belle époque seemed distilled in their film Let It Be, which showed the once-indivisible quartet racked by terminal squabbles and bitterness. Although the official break up would not be announced until 1971, everyone accepted that the Fab Four were no more. The Apple house in Savile Row, where Allen Klein now reigned supreme, had been purged of all its hippy hangers-on and its talent and now simply looked after accounts. Paul McCartney was in exile on his Scottish farm. George Harrison was making a solo album, Ringo Starr playing character parts in movies. John Lennon was living with Yoko Ono in a stately home, riding around its grounds on a supercharged golf cart and preparing to write a song containing the line ‘imagine no possessions’.
That seven-year race between the Sixties’ two foremost groups through Top Twenty charts and Melody Maker polls seemed to have produced a winner at last. The Beatles were breaking up. But the Stones were breaking out.
On July 30, 1970, Les Perrin’s office confirmed that the Stones had terminated their relationship with Allen Klein and would now be represented by Prince Rupert Loewenstein of the merchant bankers Leopold Joseph. It was further announced that the Stones had ended their relationship with Decca Records and its US subsidiary, London. The group and their merchant bankers were still undecided about whom to choose of the twenty-one different companies reportedly competing to sign them.
His eventual dumping seems to have taken Klein uncharacteristically by surprise. On June 3, Variety had quoted him extensively on his plan to give the Stones a business structure much like the Beatles’ pared-down Apple. In particular, Variety said, they would have their own record label, distributed by whichever corporation was lucky enough to acquire them. Two months later, the Robin Hood of pop turned round to find an arrow in his back.
After the arrow came a full-frontal arbalest. The Stones filed suit in the New York State Supreme Court, seeking $29 million in damages from Allen Klein, and claiming he had used his position as their manager ‘for his own personal profit and advantage’.
Though the break with Decca had long been on the cards, some last-minute efforts were made by Sir Edward Lewis’s men to stop so gigantic an asset from walking away. Decca joined the frantic wooing of the Stones by hopeful record companies that went on during their 1970 European tour. In Paris, Ronnie Schneider was asked if Decca could do any little thing to make them more comfortable. Schneider said it might be nice if their bill were paid at the George V Hotel. Glad to, the Decca man said, not realizing that the George V still let its VIP guests order goods to be delivered from the Paris shops and have them paid for by the concierge.
The size of the bill told Decca unequivocally how things stood. Relations thereafter were terminated with malevolent politeness. Decca informed the Stones that, under their present contract, they were obliged to provide one more single. The Stones duly delivered an unusable studio doodle entitled Cocksucker Blues.
They had entered the new era, in fact, with rather too much alacrity for the taste of those still clinging to a driftwood Sixties dream. Altamont seemed in retrospect the deliberate smothering of all things beautiful, with the Stones impassively looking on. Britain, too, had seen the Rolling Stone special report by now, as well as highly critical follow-up pieces in papers like the Sunday Times. Enormous resentment was felt throughout the rock culture at the Stones’ apparent lack of remorse and their seeming escape from all comebacks and comeuppance. (Actually, they had been threatened with indictment as accessories in the Meredith Hunter murder. They were currently being sued for $80,000 by Altamont farmers and were themselves suing Sears Point Raceway over the enforced last-minute change of venue.)
Their fourteen-city European tour, that August and September, helped to baptize the new decade with its hail of joyless uproar and eddying smoke. In Paris, the street battle around L’Olympia recalled the Sorbonne riots of ’68, with gendarmes launching tear-gas attacks and cars overturned and burning. In West Berlin, sixty-five policemen were injured and twenty-one vehicles damaged in attacks by ticketless fans on the city’s Deutschlandhalle. It was the same – almost wearily the same – in Hamburg, Helsinki, Milan and Gothenburg. Baton charges, falling bodies, the scamper of ambulances with quaint foreign sirens: all would blur into one image on TV screens in the Seventies, barely making people glance up from the meal trays on their knees.
It is to Mick Jagger’s credit that he allowed the release of a film whose climax showed him in such an appallingly unflattering light. He had commissioned the Maysles brothers to make Gimme Shelter; he could easily have suppressed it, or demanded removal of its more damning
scenes. His decision to let it go out uncut – despite probable repercussions on the European tour – seems mostly to have been based on the $30,000 he had personally invested in it. He did, however, seek advice from his old film-making friend, Donald Cammell, who told him what serious movie critics have since confirmed: that Gimme Shelter is an ugly masterpiece.
The abuse directed at Jagger after Gimme Shelter was mild compared to that which assailed Ned Kelly, when the film received its premiere in July 1970. Just how a director like Tony Richardson could have propagated so sorry a mess remains mysterious. All the film seemed to consist of were men in slouch hats, on horses, riding very fast to unspecific destinations while a (puzzlingly American) voice-over warbled the ballad of Kelly’s exploits. There in almost every implausible scene was Jagger, a bearded railing in feeble Irish brogue against ‘the stiff-necked English’. One reviewer wrote that Jagger was ‘as lethal as last week’s lettuce’; another said that, encased in Ned Kelly’s homemade armour, he looked like ‘a cut-price sardine’. Jagger himself affected scornful detachment. ‘Ned Kelly – that load of shit! I only made it because I had nothing else to do.’ Donald Cammell’s recollection was that after seeing the finished film, Jagger burst into tears.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, showing the Stones at work on Beggars Banquet, also appeared in 1970. So, a year late, did Performance, starring Jagger, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg. A management shake-up at Warner Brothers, and general paranoia in Hollywood about an impending recession, finally allowed the film to be released, in a heavily truncated version. Here, at least, Jagger was not a laughing-stock. His portrayal of Turner – widely interpreted as a portrayal of himself – received mild praise that, compared with Ned Kelly’s reception, sounded like standing ovations. For all its faults, and the heavy-handed studio interference, Performance seemed to belong to 1970 rather than any part of the Sixties. Still denied general release, it was to become a cult movie, drawing capacity houses whenever it chanced to resurface.
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 40