When the show ended, some of the Angels rolled up the carpet and stuck it onto one of their pickup trucks. Chip Monck spotted them and, already disgusted by their behavior, decided to make a point of denying them this small satisfaction. The rug belonged to the Rolling Stones, and should not lie on the floor in some Angel’s living room as long as he had a say in it. As the Angels drove away, Monck grabbed hold of one end of the rug, and held still as it dropped into the dirt at his feet. He had not taken into account the two Harley-Davidson motorcycles resting atop the pilfered rug, which also came flying off the pickup.
So much of the day’s terror had stemmed from the damage inflicted by concertgoers on the Angels’ prized, hand-built motorcycles. Now here was an employee of the hated Rolling Stones, unexpectedly seeking to not only steal from the Hells Angels, but to wreck their choppers. Monck, speaking quickly, kept the ensuing dialogue almost civil for about fifteen minutes. Ultimately, the Angels settled the brouhaha the same way they had so many others that Saturday, and smashed Monck in the mouth with a sawed-off pool cue, knocking most of Monck’s upper teeth out. The ground at Altamont was soaked with another man’s blood—perhaps the final violent act of the day.
After assaulting Monck, the Angels smoked joints and drank beer until it was, at last, time to go. They found old tires and pieces of wood and built themselves an enormous bonfire. The sight of the blaze attracted other stragglers, and the Angels carried out their frustrations on the interlopers, the beatings continuing deep into the night. Just before midnight, a convoy of motorcycles roared out of the speedway, taking the 5 to Interstate 680 back toward Oakland. Terry the Tramp, another Angel, ran out of gas on the way home. Barger “pegged” him the rest of the way home, leaning their bikes together and placing his foot on the front peg of Terry’s motorcycle to keep them conjoined. That was what brothers did for each other. They protected each other from the hazards of the world. Bikers did not leave their motorcycles behind, nor did they abandon their compatriots. A Hells Angel defended his brothers against all assaults.
The day after the concert, Chip Monck, toothless and bloodied but demonically focused on recouping his rug, purchased a case of brandy and paid a visit to Sonny Barger in Oakland. Proffering the brandy as a blandishment, and apologizing for the blood still leaking from the stumps of what had once been his front teeth, Monck asked for his rug back once more. Without it, he told the Hells Angels chieftain, he would lose his job. The Stones had failed them all yesterday, he acknowledged, and while he knew that none of the chaos at Altamont had been Barger’s fault, his initial absence had led to a concert whose security was being provided by the chaff of the Angels, and not the wheat. The Rolling Stones were young and callow, but their future held promise, and Monck wanted to be there for all of it. Barger grunted his reluctant agreement: “Take your fucking rug.”
The furor over Altamont, which the Angels’ studied nonchalance could do little to tamp down, revolved around the propriety of the Hells Angels’ presence as a security force. Who had agreed to hire them, and how had they been permitted to act with so little oversight? Most onlookers believed that what Altamont needed and lacked was properly trained security, which would have adequately guarded both the audience and the performers.
There was also the closely related question of whether the Alameda County sheriffs, only minimally present at the concert, should have intervened to protect the crowd from the Hells Angels. It is hard to imagine how four or five officers, even armed ones, might have successfully fended off dozens of Angels, but why hadn’t the local police been summoned to restore order? The conspiracy-minded speculated that the local authorities had wanted to see the concert fail, and the hands-off policy did give off the impression of a dangerously laissez-faire attitude toward the health and well-being of the day-trip visitors to Altamont.
The rhetoric of the Hells Angels played down Hunter’s death, and their role in fomenting the chaos and hysteria of the day. “Afterward,” Sonny Barger would later write, “I didn’t feel too bummed about what had happened at the concert. It was another day in the life of a Hells Angel. I did feel it was lucky more people—including the Stones—hadn’t been shot dead by this guy, Meredith Hunter. I felt as though the Hells Angels had done their job.”
The Angels crafted a narrative that transformed their victim into a potential assassin, and reframed their violent outbursts as a heroic act of diligence. Barger’s response was a shrug, as if Altamont were no different from a barroom brawl or a roadside stomping. “Altamont might have been some big catastrophe to the hippies, but it was just another Hells Angels event to me,” Barger wrote. “It made a lot of citizens dislike us, but most of the hippies and journalists and liberals didn’t like us anyway. When it comes to pleasing the right people at the right time, the Hells Angels never came through.” The Angels were proud of their own obtuseness, happily content to walk away from Altamont with hardly a second thought.
Hidden in Barger’s critique was a peculiar, and charged, conception of his own organization. Altamont concertgoers were expected to have known the rules of engagement with Hells Angels, even though many may very well have never encountered a biker in person before. The rules regarding Angels’ motorcycles, and their physical persons, were treated as holy writ. The necessity of swift punishment for any such violations was as self-evident to the Angels as the police’s arresting a person suspected of committing a crime. Violating the Angels’ law had consequences.
The Hells Angels’ blind spot regarding their own actions shifted the blame onto the crowd they had terrorized. The concertgoers had provoked the Angels by their inability to follow rules they had not been aware of. “Flower people ain’t a bit better than the worst of us,” Barger would write. In Barger’s estimation, the only relevant orders were those issued by the Rolling Stones, who had told them to sit on the stage and drink beer, and their self-proclaimed right to protect their own property and well-being. No one else counted.
It was crucial to remember, though, that the Hells Angels were performers as much as the Rolling Stones or any of the other bands at Altamont, acting out their fantasies of male potency and vigor. Being a Hells Angel meant inhabiting a role with such conviction that one no longer remembered the costume could be removed. The ho-hum response to the violence they had helped to unleash was a part of the performance, as well, with the Hells Angels playing the role of hardened street-fighting men, their senses dulled to the crack of wooden pool cues on skulls or the impact of steel ripping human flesh. Whether or not they felt, in their deepest inner recesses, any remorse over what had taken place at Altamont was secondary to the performances they gave, in which Altamont was treated as merely another day at the office.
Moreover, they believed, the fault for Altamont lay squarely with the Rolling Stones, who organized the disastrous concert and failed to protect their fans. “Say what you want,” Barger later wrote, “but I blame the Stones for the whole fucking bad scene. They agitated the crowd, had the stage built too low, and then used us to keep the whole thing boiling.” The Hells Angels felt burned. They had been subject to the mingled fascination and opprobrium of the media since at least the Monterey rape trial of 1965, but after Altamont, most of the bikers’ defenders melted away. Suddenly, the Angels were alone on the American stage, there to stand trial for what the bikers believed were exclusively the sins of the counterculture, particularly the rock bands that co-opted some of the bikers’ devil-may-care insouciance without any of their ability to stare down trouble.
* * *
Patti Bredehoft still waited in the first-aid tent, frozen in place. Meredith was dead, and she did not know where to go, who to speak to. Ronnie and Judy had long since headed back to Berkeley. She was alone, the enormity of what had taken place only belatedly beginning to sink in, now that the tranquilizer was starting to wear off. She believed that the police had taken away Hunter’s body, but where was she supposed to go now?
Eventually, George Hodges, the Red Cross v
olunteer she had encountered earlier in the day, came around in his white station wagon. He took Bredehoft and some of the other stranded concertgoers and drove them back to Berkeley. Bredehoft was dropped off outside her parents’ house just before 1 a.m. She took out her key and opened the door, thinking of the words she would have to say, the heretofore unimaginable events she would have to describe. She woke up her parents and told them what had happened to Meredith, and soon after, the phone began to ring. More people would be looking for Hunter—Ronnie, Meredith’s family—and someone would have to tell each of them the horrific news.
The radio was on at Meredith Hunter’s sister’s house that evening. Dixie Anderson Parker was ministering to her three fatherless children. She was waiting for her brother Meredith’s return, hoping that he would come and visit, if not that night, then later that weekend. The children loved their uncle, and in the absence of their father, they craved his presence. Reports spilled out that a crazed man had been killed at Altamont, but what could that have to do with Meredith’s excursion with his girlfriend? He was not the type to start any trouble, not likely to tangle with any rough types.
The family’s Christmas tree was already in place in the living room at Altha Anderson’s house, its branches drooping down toward the floor like a weeping willow. Soon, there would be tinsel draped around the tree, and presents covering the ground beneath it, totems of a happy and fruitful year to come. At two thirty in the morning, the telephone rang at Altha’s. It was a family friend, looking to commiserate over the terrible news. This was how the family first heard of Meredith’s death. Meredith’s sister Gwen frantically made calls to local hospitals and police departments in Livermore and Santa Rita before confirming that Meredith was dead. His body had been taken from the mortuary in Livermore, where it had been delivered earlier in the evening, to the morgue in Oakland, close to their home. At three-thirty that morning, Gwen left for the coroner’s office to identify her brother’s body.
At the morgue, Hunter’s shirt was open, and when his body was turned over, his coat was riddled with cuts. Underneath the suit jacket, there was a large bandage, evidently placed there during the fruitless efforts to save his life. The coroner’s report would ultimately detail a total of six wounds to Meredith Hunter’s body. Five were found on his upper and lower back, and a sixth in front of his left ear. All were stab wounds. A toxicology report would ultimately show that Hunter had tested positive for a modest amount of methamphetamine and amphetamines. In his drug use, he hardly differed from a substantial percentage of Altamont concertgoers, who had engaged in their own recreational drug-taking that day. (The autopsy did also note track marks on his arms, likely evidence of a pattern of regular crystal-meth use.)
Meredith Hunter’s funeral took place four days after the concert, at the Skyview Memorial Lawn in East Vallejo. Only thirty people attended, partially because the funeral notice had not been published until Wednesday, the day of the funeral. Patti Bredehoft was among the mourners present, as was George Hodges, the Red Cross volunteer who had ushered her home.
Dixie Anderson Parker had lost both her husband and her brother in the same year, and the feelings it stirred up were less outrage than a dull, burning grief. She was numb, keeping herself busy with the planning for the funeral and looking after her mother, who seemed to be headed for an emotional collapse. She wasn’t angry, although everyone kept asking her if she was, implying that she should be. Instead, Meredith’s death merely added another scarring experience to a life already crammed too full of mounting, inevitable loss.
The family could not afford a gravestone, so the final resting place of their son and brother would remain unmarked for decades to come, a symbol of the forgetting already taking place. Meredith Hunter’s name would be a footnote to music history, but its link to the real young man who had lived, not just died, disappeared under the earth, with no marker to serve as a reminder.
The beige 1965 Mustang Meredith had borrowed from his mother’s boyfriend Charles Talbot had been parked on the side of the road next to the freeway, its occasional driver never to open its door again, never to put the key in the ignition or turn around, exhausted but exhilarated, to head in the direction of home. The police eventually towed the car to an impound lot, and Dixie would have to drive out to Alameda County to retrieve it. It was a curious and empty feeling to reclaim the property of your dead brother, to know that his possessions were no longer his. Dixie drove her car behind the Mustang, a mourner in a procession headed not for the graveyard but for their native Berkeley. What words could describe the void left by death? The Mustang, its two front wheels hefted into the air, returned home, a strong and beautiful machine now without its last driver. It chilled Dixie to watch it, and think about all the places it would never go with Meredith, all the streets it would never trace with its wheels, all the people who would never fit themselves into the contours of its seats.
Sometime in the days that followed—it was hard to separate out one day from the next, as they congealed into a single formless mass of sadness—Patti Bredehoft came to Altha Anderson’s house to visit. Hunter’s family was civil, but they had never known his girlfriend all that well. And now, a buried question lurked under the surface of every polite exchange, every attempt to attend to the raw feelings of those who had loved and lost their son and brother. Had Bredehoft somehow said or done something that had caused Hunter to lose his life? Had she unconsciously instigated the fatal scuffle between Hunter and the Hells Angels? Bredehoft looked and listened and felt judged. She felt she was being asked to justify herself, to somehow prove the unprovable—that Hunter’s death was not her fault, that she had not provoked it, that there had been nothing she could have done to prevent it.
After the funeral, Anderson mingled at home with family and friends numbed by grief and vibrating with rage. Hunter’s teenage friends were there, many of them consumed by anger at the pointlessness and brutality of his death. Who had allowed Meredith to be taken away from them? How could a young man full of energy, full of love and life and future, be nothing but a memory now? There had to be some meaning, some answer to the question of Meredith Hunter’s death.
Dixie listened as they talked about the Black Panthers—their fierceness, their dedication, their stalwart defense of African-American lives. Dixie was distinctly unenthusiastic about the Panthers, seeing them as unrepresentative of her own political beliefs, but it made a kind of symbolic sense that Hunter’s friends, contemplating the horror of his death, were drawn to them. Their militarism and their aura of fierceness made them a more politically minded African-American analogue to the Hells Angels, defenders of an abused minority with an unyielding belief in physical conflict as the ultimate arbiter of American right.
The family seemed unable or unwilling to grapple with the details of Hunter’s death. That he had died was already too much. For them, the story and its complexities—rock bands and outdoor concerts and security arrangements—only distracted from an elemental American story, still maddeningly unexceptional in 1969. A black man had gone somewhere he was not supposed to be, with someone he was not supposed to be with, and he had been killed for his presumption. The rest was commentary.
Days and weeks passed, and no one in Meredith Hunter’s family had heard from the Rolling Stones, or any of their employees, or representatives. This did not surprise them, exactly; what white man, what famous person, was likely to feel compassion over the death of an African-American teenager?
Journalists were interested in Hunter’s family where the bands were not. Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus found Meredith’s seventeen-year-old sister Gwen, a student at Berkeley High School, at home and willing to speak with him. She was surprisingly composed and articulate for someone who had so recently suffered the brutal shock of her brother’s death: “The Rolling Stones are responsible, because they hired the Hell’s Angels as police and paid them. But they don’t care.”
She would call the police “incompetent” when speak
ing with another journalist, this one with local radical paper the Berkeley Barb, and observe of Altamont that “the majority of people there were white and a white person’s not gonna help a black person.” For Gwen, her brother’s death expressed in miniature the story of race in America: “The Hells Angels are white men. The difference between them and other white men, those white men identify themselves by jackets that says Hells Angels.… They’re not gonna be stopped. The police never do nothing to them and they’re not gonna start to do nothing to ’em, just another black man dead to them.”
Patti Bredehoft would also speak with the Berkeley Barb in the days after Hunter’s death, telling the story of his tragic encounter with the Hells Angels. The news had not yet fully sunk in, even for the young woman who had witnessed her boyfriend’s death; in speaking of Hunter’s essential gentleness, Bredehoft still used the present tense to describe him. She told the story of Hunter’s fatal encounter with the Angels, emphasizing whom she believed was responsible for instigating the fight: “He pulled a gun after they started to beat him. They beat him to the ground and then he got up…” The Angels had jumped Hunter, with Hunter only seeking to protect himself from their assault. Nonetheless, Bredehoft concluded that Hunter had not been targeted because of racism. “I don’t blame it on race,” she told the Barb, “because like they were hasseling [sic] white people as much as they were hasseling [sic] black people.”
It would not be until six weeks after the concert, six weeks after their son’s death, that the first person tangentially related to Altamont paid a visit to Meredith Hunter’s family. Chip Monck wandered the streets of Berkeley, stopping bystanders and asking if they knew where Meredith Hunter had lived. Monck, who had had to install the three-foot-high stage designed for the Sears Point site at Altamont, understood why the Stones had immediately departed for England after the concert without a word to the media or anyone else. It would hardly be safe, he thought, for the band to walk the streets of San Francisco after such a calamity. But another part of him wondered if the lack of response to the death of one of their fans was itself part of the show.
Just a Shot Away Page 17