Just a Shot Away

by Saul Austerlitz

  But Meredith was too excited to listen to Dixie’s concerns, perhaps seeing them as the pent-up worries of a woman still in the earliest stages of recovering from the trauma of her husband’s death. And besides, Berkeley was not Mississippi. Meredith and Patti had been dating for two months, and would regularly walk down the street without anyone batting an eye. Why should this concert be any different?

  Meredith was receptive enough to his sister’s concerns that he decided he was going to protect himself at the concert at the Altamont Speedway. “You know what happens to people who look like us,” he told her. Dixie responded with a chuckle. It was just like her brother to act tough but not even be capable of following through. “I see you got a gun,” she laughed, looking at his .22 Smith & Wesson pistol. “I bet you don’t have any bullets for it.” It would just be there to scare off any hoodlums who decided to pick on a black teenager at a rock ’n’ roll show. He told Dixie not to worry. He would not have to deal with any of that, anyway.

  He called Patti and told her he was planning a trip to the free Stones show, and that his friend Ronnie Brown, whom everyone called Blood, would be joining them with his girlfriend Judy. He would have the use of Charles Talbot’s champagne-beige ’65 Mustang, and the show would be a blast. “Come on out,” he inveigled, and she readily agreed. Meredith got himself fully kitted out in his favorite lime-green suit, with a black silk button-down shirt underneath the jacket, and a broad-brimmed black hat atop his head. Patti was decked out, too, in more traditional flower-child garb, with a short suede skirt and a cream-colored blouse, covered by a white cable-knit top knit by her mother.

  It was early December, still some weeks before the end of the year, and the decade, but that morning, when Meredith prepared to get on the road, Altha already had a Christmas tree up in the living room. Altha had always loved Christmas, and the tree seemed to promise all the things she had never received in her own life: revival, redemption, new life. After the winter, new green shoots would come with the spring. Meredith pulled away from the house and began heading east, toward the Altamont Speedway.

  3. Staging the Show

  The last-minute shift from Sears Point to Altamont meant a scramble to provide the necessary accommodations at a venue that had never before hosted an event of this size. Public transit was nonexistent, food mostly unavailable, bathroom facilities scarce, and the question of security remained unresolved. Each element of the concert—the staging, the transportation, the parking, the security, and the music—was in flux, with little in the way of leadership or oversight to ensure a successful show. With so little time in which to execute the myriad tasks necessary to put on a concert of this size, much was left to chance, or to wishful thinking and misplaced hopefulness.

  Rock Scully, working out of the Grateful Dead’s office, placed a frantic phone call to Michael Lang, who had overseen the triumphant Woodstock festival in August. Lang agreed to fly out from New York to coordinate the last-minute planning, and arrived on Thursday—just two days before the concert. The show was in such disarray that a kind of festival triage had to be implemented. Potential pitfalls hid in plain sight everywhere. There were too few toilets. The speedway’s neighbors had not been informed of the concert. There were too few trees to provide adequate shade for the crowd. The stage would likely be entirely surrounded by fans and their cars.

  There simply was no time, Lang realized, to bring food and water out to Altamont, or to plan for the parking nightmare that would undoubtedly ensue. But in his public pronouncements, Lang betrayed no evidence of concern: “I think we can hold as many people as want to come.”

  Melvin Belli had originally been brought in by the festival’s organizers to help them find the new venue, but once Altamont had been secured, he was charged with smoothing the transition from Sears Point to the speedway. The scene in Belli’s office on Montgomery Street in San Francisco was chaotic, with Belli, who had once represented Jack Ruby, holding court before an audience of supplicants and band hangers-on.

  Belli, his face framed by his omnipresent owlish black glasses, was an acerbic local fixer, best known for firing off a cannon and raising a pirate flag above his offices after winning a case. Belli was tasked with coordinating efforts with speedway owner Dick Carter, the Alameda County sheriff, and other stakeholders in the concert, but some basic questions remained unanswered. “Sheriff wants to know who’s gonna go to the bathroom and where,” Belli told the assembled crowd in his office. “They know practically when every john is flushed, and the orderly habits of the bathroom of all of their voters.” Belli, too, was a performer, his role that of the caustic magus paternalistically aiding the idealistic young kids. “You take the publicity,” he told Carter, “and the Rolling Stones don’t want any money, it’s for charity, so I’ll take the money.”

  The discussion in Belli’s office betrayed a mounting panic about the sheer size of the concert. “There’s not enough room for it,” one onlooker told Belli, and rumors spread that as many as twenty thousand fans were on their way from across the country. “It’s like the lemmings of the sea,” said one onlooker, perhaps unconsciously echoing the New York Times’ description of the Woodstock crowd. The speedway, Dick Carter told the Alameda County sheriff over the telephone, had room for approximately 150 cars per acre. By that calculation, the eighty-acre property could hold 12,000 cars, while the concert planners expected as many as 80,000 automobiles. “If there’s fifty thousand cars Mr. Carter can’t park,” the sheriff argued, “we’re in trouble.” On hearing the news, Belli briefly glanced up at the Maysles brothers’ cameras before looking back down, hesitant to meet the camera’s gaze.

  * * *

  Michael Lang had been hired by the Grateful Dead’s representatives, but it was not entirely clear to him precisely who was in charge of the concert. Were the Dead taking responsibility for the show, or was it now in the hands of the Rolling Stones? Arrangements were all disconcertingly loose, predicated on the assumption that if everything had worked out at Hyde Park, and at Woodstock, then they undoubtedly would here, as well. The stark differences between Altamont and its predecessors—the lack of adequate medical and bathroom facilities, the shortages of food—were glossed over, too insignificant to matter.

  Lang knew he would not have time to put out all the smoldering fires, and chose to concentrate his efforts on what he saw as the most pressing need: the construction of the stage and the build-out of the lighting and sound systems. Lang and the Stones’ tour manager, Sam Cutler, ushered all the crews to Altamont and oversaw their efforts. All of Friday, local radio stations like KSAN and KFRC had been regularly issuing calls for volunteers to head out to Altamont early and help Chip Monck and his crew.

  Rolling Stones stage manager Monck, who had overseen the Stones’ tour that fall, was already at the speedway on Friday morning, scrambling to get the concert stage in place. The stage had been designed for the Sears Point site, where it was intended to be nestled in a niche set atop a small plateau. The crowd was to look up at the bands, guitar-slinging prophets bearing a new set of tablets for the people of the LP. But now, the same stage had to be employed in a space for which it was dramatically unsuited. Monck’s equipment did not even arrive until Friday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours before the concert was to begin. Altamont had little in the way of usable infrastructure, and the speedway’s only décor were the hulks of thirty or forty junked cars that had been wrecked during demolition derbies.

  Monck did not have time to worry about the stage as he frantically searched through mislabeled boxes of gear. Why hadn’t these boxes been properly packed and sorted? And why was the planner of the biggest rock concert to ever grace the Bay Area required to make do with a skeleton crew of fifty, composed of the bands’ roadies, union crews, and unpaid volunteers, during the single day of preparation granted to its coordinator?

  Over the course of the Stones’ grueling tour, Monck had grown accustomed to the process of loading and unloading the band’s ow
n sound and lighting equipment at each venue—a heretofore unprecedented idea in rock concert production. The Rolling Stones did not want to depend on the vagaries of equipment quality at less-than-professional concert venues. In a matter of hours, Monck would not only set up an entire sound system, he would teach the latest batch of green workers assigned to him how to man a lighting system. The frenzy was nothing new for the band, but the scope of the concert—and of the disorganization—were unprecedented.

  At Altamont, the precarious stage design demanded its own unique lighting technique. The stage could not be raised higher than three and a half feet. There were not even any parallels—the small, unfolding, drum-riser-like platforms that might have elevated the stage—to be found anywhere in the Bay Area. There were no follow spots—none had arrived—and so the only illumination was twenty-four thousand watts of backlighting. Monck made do with the limited resources he had, but he was also looking out for the musicians. With only backlighting, there would be no lights in the Stones’ eyes, blinding them. If someone—heaven forbid—chose to launch a beer bottle at the band, they would be able to see it coming.

  The situation was so disorganized and frenzied that crew members with other responsibilities were pressed into service. A small army of roadies and techs worked through the night in the bitter thirty-degree cold, unloading boxes and assembling equipment with hardly a complaint. They were energized by the copious amounts of high-grade cocaine floating around the Stones’ camp, which kept them working through the night.

  The lighting towers went up with the assistance of oversized derricks that lifted them into the air, the sound systems were assembled, and the stage that had been originally designed for Sears Point went in. Approximately one hundred portable toilets were delivered by truck during the night—welcome, but hardly enough for the enormous crowd scheduled to arrive the next morning.

  The stage was in place by nine o’clock that night, and Monck’s crew wrapped up their work just before midnight. The rough, unsanded bones of Altamont’s infrastructure were together, if little else. It would now be possible for a concert to take place at the speedway, but with so little time to organize, a great many necessities would have to be done without. There would be no higher stage, no fencing, and no crew of experienced technicians to hammer out any difficulties as they arose. This hectic dash would be all that would protect the temporary residents of Altamont from chaos.

  The audience, too, would be fed into the maw of the disorganized situation. There would be no aisles, and no barriers to separate the fans from the stage, or from each other. The inherent flaws of the concert space were exacerbated by the setup, in which fans’ natural urge to get closer to the bands encouraged them to push downhill, and create a potentially calamitous crunch near the stage. Monck imagined creating pens for the fans, segregating them in smaller spaces from which they could not exert any force. They would be treated like cattle, and would undoubtedly complain, but the threat of a stampede or a crushing incident would be neutralized. But there was not enough time to organize the pens, or a clear chain of command. Who, exactly, was in charge here?

  Pulling the plug on the concert might have been preferable, but it was simply too late to even contemplate it. Fans were already trickling in to the speedway, and many others were on their way as his crew frantically rushed to complete their work. Even for those who had not yet left their homes, how would the word be spread? Not everyone would turn on the radio to confirm that the concert was still on before they got in their cars. The risk of hundreds of thousands of fans gathering at the Altamont Speedway, with no infrastructure in place, and no music to placate them, was simply too great to take.

  * * *

  Security, too, would be nothing like it had been at Woodstock. Lang had originally hired five hundred off-duty New York Police Department officers to provide security at Woodstock. Even after the NYPD revoked its approval of the arrangement, many of the cops had worked the festival anyway, under false names like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Lang was only too happy to have experienced law-enforcement representatives keeping order at Woodstock. He’d only asked that they undergo an initial interview in which they were quizzed about potential antipathy to the counterculture, and that they arrive unarmed and out of uniform.

  The arrangement had been, by all accounts, a rousing success. Altamont, by contrast, was to have a minimal police presence, with the bulk of the security staff provided by the Hells Angels.

  Everyone in the Bay Area rock scene knew the deal. When the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane played an impromptu free show at Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park, or some other local venue, the Hells Angels would show up, invited to occupy prime real estate. The Angels would position themselves next to the generators and look fierce to keep any potential jokers or saboteurs from damaging the band’s equipment and spoiling the show. By the fearsomeness of their mere presence, the bikers maintained the peace, and allowed the hundreds or thousands of fans gathered for the outdoor concerts to enjoy the music without interruption.

  But those earlier shows had been relatively self-contained. They had been in San Francisco itself, in a park whose size naturally limited the number of attendees. They were often relatively spur of the moment, designed as surprise appearances for diehard fans. And the Angels were present as glorified teamsters, there to look menacing and keep anyone from ripping off the bands. As long as no one took a swipe at the Dead’s amplifiers, attendees were unlikely to have any interaction with the Angels. And so a constrained set of encounters without much opportunity for contact came to appear as a long history of peaceable interaction. Many in the Bay Area scene believed that if the Grateful Dead had blessed the Hells Angels, nothing could possibly go wrong.

  Back when the free concert had been scheduled for Golden Gate Park, the Grateful Dead had suggested hiring the Hells Angels for security. Rock Scully had dispatched Stones tour manager Sam Cutler to meet with a San Francisco Angel and longtime friend of the Dead named Pete Knell, and the two men hashed out the rough details of a deal. The primary task would be to guard the band’s generators, protecting them from overzealous fans who might be inclined to damage the Stones’ power source. The fee would be five hundred dollars, paid out in six-packs of beer. Cutler likely received the money from Melvin Belli, planning to eventually collect one hundred dollars from each of the other bands, evenly splitting the security costs between the five acts scheduled to play.

  When the venue shifted, first to Sears Point, and then to Altamont, the Angels were kept on as security staff, even when the nature of the gig changed from standing guard around a generator to protecting an entire stage of musicians. The promoters were asking the Hells Angels to take on responsibilities they were ill-equipped to handle.

  Moreover, even if the Hells Angels acquitted themselves honorably, the nature of their remit was wildly inadequate for the scope of the event being planned. Who would ensure the safety and security of the attendees? No plans had been made to protect the crowd. And to make matters worse, the Hells Angels were not milquetoast security guards, but thin-skinned bikers with a history of violent militancy. The wolf had been invited into the henhouse, a product of twinned, fateful misunderstandings of the nature of the event they were planning, and of the Angels themselves.

  John Jaymes, the shadowy businessman who had cozied up to the Stones on their tour by falsely claiming to represent Chrysler and providing them with free cars, had told Sam Cutler he would provide fifteen off-duty police officers. But the Hells Angels would be positioned directly in front of the stage, without the benefit of a barrier or moat that would protect them from the crowd. With the stage at the bottom of a natural bowl, a surge in the crowd, perched precariously on the hills above the stage, could push those concertgoers standing closest to the performers into direct contact with the Hells Angels. And how would the bikers react?

  * * *

  The Rolling Stones were equally misinformed about the Hells Angels. They had employed
a group that referred to itself as Hells Angels to provide security at their Hyde Park show in London earlier in the summer, but the hodgepodge of leather-clad poseurs and clueless teenagers bore little resemblance to the genuine made-in-America product. Now, they were headlining another enormous concert, in an unfamiliar place, and agreeing to turn security over to a group of men whose most fundamental belief was in the righteousness of violence as an act of manhood. Both the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones ignored the potential pitfalls of employing the Hells Angels, wanting to link themselves, and their music, to the outlaw allure of the biker gang. What could be cooler than rolling onto the stage in the presence of a posse of badass bikers in leather, Harleys roaring?

  For the performers scheduled to play at Altamont, a purposeful ignorance regarding the nagging details of the show paved the way for untrammeled optimism about its effects. This would be another triumph, another celebration of the counterculture in which artist and audience would share the limelight, each basking in the glow of a youthful nation’s approval. Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner had played many of the already legendary shows at the Fillmore, and in Golden Gate Park, and come away deeply impressed with the air of carnival that pervaded these goings-on. A carnival, as Kantner would know, was participatory. There was no such thing as to be a mere spectator; to watch was to take part. Distinctions of class and race and gender, of social status and fame, were wiped away.

  The poor had temporarily become rich, the lowly had become great, and the outcasts of society found a place that was theirs alone. This was to be more than a concert. It would be the fulcrum from which another triumphant moment in youth culture would be broadcast to a grateful American public.

  For the musicians, the concerns about the preparation for the show were mere details, distractions from the sheer magnitude of the celebration to come. Even the music was secondary to the simple fact of another, even grander gathering of the tribes. “I think the concert’s an excuse,” Mick Jagger told the press the night before the concert. “The thing is, it’s just like everyone coming and having a good time. The concert’s not actually like the proscenium of the theater. It’s an excuse for everyone to get together and talk to each other … ball each other, get very stoned, and just have a nice night out, and a good day.” The goodwill of the community was essential. The stars counted on their audience to paper over any gaps in the preparations with their enthusiasm and benevolence. Both sides were guilty of misplaced confidence in the good intentions of all involved parties.