Charles Manson comes to the canyon, the boys from Lookout Mountain take on Woodstock, the Burritos survive Altamont, the dark side comes to the fore
The “’60s”—the relentless pop-cultural event, not the actual decade—had barely started when the calendar 1960s ended. The ’60s that were soon to be ossified by nostalgists begin in 1964 with Beatlemania and end, with several bangs and whimpers, right on schedule. A triptych of events conveniently arrayed in the final months of 1969—the Charles Manson murders in Los Angeles, the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in upstate New York, and the Rolling Stones’ free concert at the Altamont Speedway outside Livermore, California—provided a tidy metaphorical conclusion to the ’60s, just as the 1929 stock market crash became the preferred denouement for the Jazz Age.
In both cases, the reality is somewhat less circumscribed. Dorothy Parker and her gang were still raising hell in Paris in the late ’30s while Nazi reconnaissance planes droned overhead. The songs of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young most tenderly associated with the ’60s—“Our House,” “Almost Cut My Hair,” “Teach Your Children,” even “Woodstock”—weren’t released until 1970. There is among Americans especially a puritanical imperative that wishes for times of great sexual, personal, and artistic liberty to end apocalyptically so as to punish the participants for upsetting, if not God’s plan, then the orderly procession of things. Which is how the happenstance and coincidence of three otherwise random events in 1969—Manson could have struck just as easily in 1968, or not at all—were turned into a solemn cultural bookend.
Nevertheless, the last five years of the ’60s had been building, inchoately and chaotically, toward a crescendo; a moment that most of those in the thick of things didn’t realize they were living was defining itself. The “’60s” didn’t end in 1969 any more than the “’20s” did in 1929; instead, 1969 happened to be the year that so much of what the ’60s were about reached an apogee. It was also the year that showed everyone just how fragile the peace-and-love underpinnings to the ’60s really were, and that the baby boom’s great unifying constant—the music pouring out of Laurel Canyon and L.A.—could also be a nexus for the most appalling aspects of humanity.
Charles Milles Manson had been in reformatories and prisons for more than half of his life by the time he drifted into L.A. in 1968. He was born in Cincinnati in 1934, the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old mother convicted of armed robbery when he was five. Manson spent most of his adolescence and young adulthood in juvenile detention centers and federal prisons, convicted of armed robberies, car heists, pimping, and check forging. By 1967 he’d married and divorced twice, had fathered two sons, and was about to be paroled from the Terminal Island prison in San Pedro, south of L.A., after serving seven years of a ten-year sentence for cashing a stolen check (his request to remain in the prison was denied).
During his incarceration Manson had become obsessed with the Beatles and taught himself to play the guitar and write songs. After hitting the bricks at Terminal Island, he insinuated himself into the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco, where he looked like just another guitar-toting, songwriting freak. It was there he began collecting the beginnings of his Family—young, attractive girls, often from privileged families, all of them damaged to one degree or another and susceptible to the blandishments of an intense, charismatic “hippie.” With a growing entourage of impressionable young women in thrall to his philosophies—a hash of biblical revelations, Scientology, and his own song lyrics—Manson moved to L.A., where he hoped to secure a recording contract. He fit in so seamlessly at the parties and clubs that many were later shocked to realize they’d unwittingly shared a joint with him or listened to him deliver one of his ponderous raps.
Sally Stevens, an L.A. record executive who lived on Lookout Mountain at the time, recalls, “I was kind of wandering about this party and there was a door slightly open and I could see people all sitting in a circle. There was a candle in the middle of the floor, and there was this guy sitting in the corner. He was kind of holding forth to everyone, and they were all sitting there like a bunch of sheep. And as I looked in the door, he said, ‘Come in, come in.’ I just got a bad feeling from him and said, ‘No, that’s okay.’ Later on, when they arrested Manson, I went, God, that’s that guy.”
Manson hit pay dirt, or so it must have seemed, when Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys’ drummer and singer, picked up two Family members and had sex with them at the Sunset Boulevard mansion he was renting. When Wilson returned from an errand, he found that Manson and the rest of the Family had simply moved into the house. Wilson was placated by the prospect of unlimited sex and, for a while, Manson’s hippie-apocalyptic ravings and songwriting. Wilson paid for the Family’s food and drugs—even penicillin shots when the girls came down with the clap. Manson meanwhile made demo tapes of his compositions and got them to Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day and a popular young record producer who’d recorded the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders. The tapes made the rounds at L.A. record labels but were invariably rejected. (The Beach Boys would nevertheless record one of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist”—retitled “Never Learn Not to Love”—and release it exactly eight months before the massacre on Cielo Drive.)
“Circulating around Elektra Records or A&M when I was there was some Manson tape that had come in, gotten rejected, come in, gotten rejected again,” says Michael James Jackson, an A&R executive soon to become a successful record producer. After Manson’s arrest, Jackson says, “people remembered that tape suddenly, and some people were thinking, Gee, glad we didn’t sign him; and, Gee, wonder if our rejecting him played a role. There was this vague sense of not so much guilt that anyone contributed, but that they were part of a chain of events that, unknowingly and unwillingly, led to the outburst of whatever all this rage was.”
Manson didn’t take the rejection well. By 1969 he and the Family had holed up at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a dreary redoubt in the Santa Susana Mountains that had served as a set for Westerns in the 1950s. There Manson inculcated his followers in his fantasy that an epic race war was at hand; he dubbed it “Helter Skelter,” an homage to a song on the White Album whose lyrics Manson was convinced were a personal message from the Beatles to him confirming his vision of the coming apocalypse. Once Helter Skelter started, Manson preached, the blacks would rise up and kill the whites, but he and his disciples would retreat to Death Valley and later emerge to inherit the earth. When Helter Skelter failed to materialize, Manson told his followers that they’d have to show the blacks “how to do it.” On the night of August 8, 1969, the Family set out from the Spahn ranch.
Manson’s instructions were concise. Family members Patricia Krenwinkel, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Linda Kasabian were to drive to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon and massacre everyone there (Kasabian was lookout). The next morning a housekeeper found the bodies of Steven Parent, the actress Sharon Tate—eight months pregnant by her husband, the director Roman Polanksi—the hairdresser Jay Sebring, and coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski, who lived on Woodstock Road in Laurel Canyon. (Polanski was shooting a movie in Europe the night of the murders.) Tate, Sebring, Folger, and Frykowski had been stabbed 102 times; Parent had been shot. “PIG” was scrawled on the front door of the house in Tate’s blood.
Before dawn the next morning, Manson, Watson, Krenwinkel, Kasabian, and Leslie Van Houten drove to 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. After helping Watson tie up Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and assuring them they were only going to be robbed, Manson left the house while Van Houten, Krenwinkel, and Watson murdered the LaBiancas. Police found Leno’s body the next morning with a carving fork protruding from his stomach and “WAR” carved into his skin; Rosemary had been stabbed forty-one times, thirty-six more than was necessary to kill her. Smeared in blood on the walls and refrigerator were the legends “DEATH TO PIGS” and “HEALTER [sic] SKELTER.”
Police initially botched the case so badly that they actually arrested Manson and the Family on suspicion of auto theft and released them. Months later, after the Family had been rearrested and jailed on car-theft charges, Atkins bragged to her cell mate about the Family’s responsibility for the Tate-LaBianca murders, and Manson was finally charged in the killings. After a spectacular trial, Manson, Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison after California briefly rescinded the death penalty. Kasabian, who hadn’t participated directly in the murders, was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony.
In the months between the murders and Manson’s arrest there was terrified speculation in the canyon about the identity of the killer, in no small measure because everyone knew that, before Tate and Polanski, Melcher had lived in the house on Cielo Drive with Candice Bergen. As a record producer and generational peer, he was one of them. “The paranoia started to come down,” says Stevens. “It was fairly frightening because no one really knew who was responsible for this. A lot of people left town because they thought they were gonna get it from whoever they imagined it was. Everyone thought at first it was a big dope dealer who was revenging himself on people. There was one guy, a boyfriend of Cass Elliot’s, everyone thought it was him, and he’d fled for Algiers or something.”
Once Manson was charged with the murders, the paranoia only increased. Plenty of people suddenly remembered interacting with the Family when they had seemed like just another offkilter hippie retinue—they had frequented the gatherings at Elliot’s Woodrow Wilson house and the canyon’s other party scenes. It was said that Manson had meant to kill Melcher as revenge for not securing him a record deal but didn’t know that Melcher had moved to Malibu and had had the Family butcher the wrong victims. A competing theory was that Manson knew full well Melcher no longer lived on Cielo Drive but wanted to use the murders to send him a message. During the trial there were plenty of Family members not charged in the murders floating around town; some of the women shaved their heads, carved Xs on their foreheads, and hung around the Federal Building downtown giving chilling interviews about their “father” on trial inside.
The effect of the Manson murders on the canyon was profound. “That’s when it really started to turn weird,” says Nash. “Because up until then everybody’s door was open, nobody gave a shit—y’know, come on in, what the fuck—and then all of a sudden it was like: I gotta lock my car. I gotta lock my door. It was the beginning of the end, I think.” “Once people found out that hippies were killing people, it was a whole different thing,” says Paul Body, a musician and a doorman at the Troubadour. “It was really scary suddenly,” says Stevens. “People used to just hitchhike merrily everywhere and that really slowed down.”
David Strick, an L.A. native soon to become a prominent entertainment-industry photographer, entered the business shortly after the murders. “A kind of lurking dread developed,” he says. “There was a huge number of whacked losers who were part of the hippie scene—I mean, they were absolutely demented—and you might well have grown up with them. One of the Manson girls went to junior high school with my sister. They were just kind of like in the general mix.” Body went to high school with Van Houten, who delivered sixteen stab wounds to Rosemary LaBianca. “She was in my French class. Sweet little girl, homecoming princess and all that bullshit. We hung around the same sort of people. Then she got into the drug thing, then LSD, and that just ruined her. Then she hooks up with Manson and becomes totally different than anything I remember.”
The murders forced L.A.’s counterculturalists to confront the possibility that not everyone with long hair under thirty was their brother. “The Manson murders changed the idea that hippies were safe, that hippies were harmless, that hippies could inflict no harm on anybody,” says Pamela Des Barres. “That the guy with long hair and the beard could turn out to be the devil was really a nightmare.” Before the Manson murders, says Strick, “when you had a party, there was no such thing as crashers. It was nonterritorial and completely open. That’s why people could see hippies they’ve never seen before walking in and out of their wealthy houses and wealthy lives and not think they were going to kill them. These were the same people you were passing a joint to.”
“If you were surprised by the Manson murders, you weren’t connected to what was going on in the canyon,” says Gail Zappa. “I don’t think that you could have neccesarily predicted it, but those people were dangerous and everyone I know knew it. They did not have the same character or quality of life that you were witnessing elsewhere. I think it’s also part of the drug culture; it got to be a very exploitive business and people were owing people lots of money and there was a lot of drugs involved around that whole scene. If you took drugs and dampened your perception, then that’s why you didn’t notice. But for those of us who were drug free? Oh, we noticed.”
What was particularly frightening for the canyon’s young stars was that, according to Atkins, there were plans to attack high-profile entertainers, ostensibly to incite Helter Skelter but just as plausibly to avenge his thwarted dreams of stardom. Elizabeth Taylor was to have had “HELTER SKELTER” carved onto her face and her eyes gouged out, Frank Sinatra would be skinned alive while his music played, and so on.
“It was so close,” says Nash, “not only physically was it close, but he was a musician. I mean, fuck, he auditioned for Neil [Young] for fuck’s sake. And it was brutal and horrible and the entire antithesis of what the peace-and-love movement was about. Slaughtering pregnant women? For what reason? Everybody knew that something had happened that had changed the vibe of the area dramatically forever.” It had become fashionable for rock stars in town to record or perform to rent houses in the canyon instead of staying at the Chateau Marmont; post-Manson, they went back to the hotels. Strick photographed a story on the Manson followers during the trial. “They were vicious, weird people. Afterward the editor of the newspaper said: ‘Don’t ever talk to them again, don’t go near them.’” Strick says the writer of the story refused to answer his door for months afterward.
Probably the most unsettling aspect of the murders was the parallels between Manson’s Family and the cliques around L.A. centered on charismatic men inside or on the fringes of the music industry. Manson may not have gotten a record deal, but he did have the trappings of rock stardom—the Jesus-like beard and hair, the trunkful of songs, the beautiful, sycophantic young women otherwise known as groupies had they coalesced around, say, Frank Zappa’s scene at the log cabin or Vito Paulekas’s studio. “I wouldn’t say Frank was on a power trip about it, like Manson probably was, and Vito wasn’t either,” says Pamela Des Barres. “It was more of a gathering of the tribes and bringing the people together.”
Still, there was and remains something cultish about rock stardom. Manson was the first of the hippie generation to show how, with a few turns of the wheel, it could become lethal. “There was always a real undercurrent of very nasty stuff,” says Strick. “The rules of nature hadn’t been changed by a few records.” The point was driven home twenty years later by the rock-and-roll aspirant David Koresh, who harangued his flock of Branch Davidians in Waco with electric guitar solos and doomsday scriptures until, with an assist from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, he created his own private apocalypse, taking seventy-six men, women, and children with him.
“We were in this peaceful mentality about sharing, that it was a community, that there was no judgment,” says Jackson. The Manson murders served notice that your “brother” could be your killer as well as your keeper. “I’m not a fan of the word ‘evil,’ because ‘evil’ sounds religious to me,” Jackson says. “But it [the Manson murders] had a cruelty to it that was not just unacceptable but literally unthinkable. The fact that Manson was persuasive enough that he had created this little following and they could actually think like that, as if they had some sense of purpose, and were then capable of doing it, was purely frightening.”
Allowed to address the court during his trial, Manson famously blustered, “These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.” Later in the screed he added, “Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment . . . ? It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says, ‘Rise,’ it says, ‘Kill.’ Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.” Manson, in other words, blamed the Beatles and, implicitly, the rock culture to which he’d been given a tantalizing glimpse only to have the door slammed in his face. For years, religious fundamentalists had been decrying rock and roll as the devil’s music; now a failed rock musician who plenty thought was the devil was confirming their worst fears.
“In truth, the devil had always been there,” says Michael Des Barres. “The ’60s created the devil, and Manson came out of that.”
Five days after the Manson murders, the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair opened in a pasture in Sullivan County, in upstate New York. Whereas Manson would soon be cited as evidence of the counterculture’s internal rot, Woodstock was hailed as proof of its resilience. Woodstock drew 450,000 (some estimates are much lower), lasted four days—from Richie Havens’s stirring and hastily improvised opening set to Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner”—and cost in the neighborhood of $2.4 million versus $1.1 million worth of tickets sold. There were 5,162 medical cases and three deaths, two of them drug overdoses, the other a young man run over by a tractor while in his sleeping bag. Laurel Canyon was represented by Canned Heat and Crosby, Stills & Nash, joined by Neil Young.
CSNY rehearsed for this, their second official live performance—the first would take place at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater the night before their Woodstock slot—at Shady Oak, a house nestled in the hills on the Valley side of the canyon. Formerly owned by Wally Cox, it was purchased by Peter Tork at the height of his Monkees fame. Tork’s tenure there was already legendary for marathon parties and the abundance of young women in states of undress in more or less permanent residence around the swimming pool. When Tork blew through his Monkees money, he rented the house to his old folkie pal Stephen Stills, whereupon the jam sessions in the downstairs music room and the Möbius strip of parties-cum-hangouts continued unabated.
Stills added a special touch by rehearsing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, complete with screaming amplifiers and pounding drums, on the patio. “One day Stephen says: ‘It’s a beautiful afternoon—I want to hear how this sounds in the outdoors. Let’s just set up all the instruments outdoors and play for a while,’ ” says Nash. “And we did.” When Crosby questioned the wisdom of openly provoking the neighbors, Stills accused him of betraying his freak-flag allegiance. (“I think David was a little more paranoid about the police than Stephen was, y’know?” says Nash.) It was typical of the band’s heated infighting, in which one member would hurl another’s lyrics at him as evidence of mendacity or the dreaded “cop-out.” Dallas Taylor, the band’s drummer, recalled one evening at Shady Oak “sitting there, taking a long hit off of one of Crosby’s killer joints, vaguely aware that an argument was going on around me: ‘Fuck you!’ ‘No, fuck you!’ ‘That’s a cop-out, man!’” The next thing Taylor knew, Stills had escorted him downstairs to the music room to jam with Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles. The refreshments, according to Taylor, included a large mound of cocaine sitting on a mirror on the Hammond organ. (The Rolling Stones, connoisseurs of bad behavior and rock-and-roll pedigree, would later stay at the house.)
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young went on well past dark the second day of Woodstock after seven bands, including Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, and Ten Years After, in a career-making performance, had wrung the crowd all day and night. Opening with Stills’s masterpiece “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” written about his affair with Judy Collins, whom he met on Ridpath Drive in the canyon, they faced the enormous audience with only their acoustic guitars and harmonies. The sixteen-song set went well, despite Stills’s gold-plated ad-lib that the band was “scared shitless.” David Geffen later strong-armed Warner Bros. into using CSNY’s version of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”—written in a New York hotel during the festival—as the closing music for the Woodstock movie by threatening to withhold the band’s performances from the film.
CSNY’s harmonies and ethereal musings on love and mythology captured the festival’s gentle spirit, which itself seemed to confirm the freshly christened Woodstock Nation’s possibilities for forging a new sort of social contract. Despite rain, mud, bad acid, and lack of food, sanitation, and crowd control, the festival managed to make it through four days with no major incidents. This was interpreted by the straight press as nothing short of a miracle—which indeed it was—while the freak contingent tended toward the point of view that it was all somehow inevitable, that hippie values of tolerance, love, and use of mind-expanding substances could deliver on the rhetoric.
Still, there were a hundred, a thousand circumstances that, had they gone the other way, could have turned Woodstock into a hellish countercultural station of the cross (as evidenced thirty years later at the disastrous Woodstock ’99). Henry Diltz, the festival’s official photographer, arrived from Laurel Canyon two weeks before the concert. At first, he recalled, the site was “an idyllic summer camp—hippie carpenters hammering nails, the field a sea of green alfalfa. Then one day there was a little group of twenty or thirty people sitting out there. And the next day there was a thousand and the next day four thousand.” By the time the concert officially opened, it was clear much of the crowd had simply walked in ahead of time. There was actually a discussion on opening day about forcing the entire crowd to walk out and come back in again to pay or show tickets. That became moot when the tens of thousands still outside the perimeter came pouring through a chain-link fence opened up by the festival’s own security under the sensible premise that they would face a riot of epic proportions if they attempted to eject everyone who hadn’t paid.
So from the standpoint of what could have happened, Woodstock got off easy. And as the images of the festival were beamed around the world, it was inevitable that someone would try to replicate it whether for profit or, in the case of the band second only to the Beatles in the ’60s rock pantheon, in a burst of altruism mixed with opportunism. As it happened, the Rolling Stones had already planned to end their 1969 tour in December with a free concert in San Francisco. They’d held a similar gathering in London’s Hyde Park earlier in the year to honor founding member Brian Jones, who’d been discovered floating dead in his swimming pool. The Hyde Park concert attracted several hundred thousand and went off peacefully, and it seemed plausible that the San Francisco show would, too. Woodstock’s tremendous spectacle inevitably ramped up the expectations for a free concert featuring “the world’s greatest rock and roll band,” as the Stones had taken to billing themselves, in the counterculture’s very epicenter. And so the Stones’ relatively straightforward free concert metastasized into the “West Coast Woodstock.” At a press conference several weeks before the festival, Jagger said of the concert, “It’s creating a sort of microcosmic society which sets an example for the rest of America as to how one can behave in large gatherings.”
Henry Diltz, beholding Woodstock’s sad, sodden detritus from the stage as Hendrix played the last morning of the festival, had a vision that, in hindsight, would be an omen for what was to come. “There were probably just a few thousand people left. And I remember looking around, and the mud, with the forgotten sleeping bags and flotsam in the field, reminded me of an old Civil War image—after the battle. And when he played that ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ with the notes crying out, it bounced off the hills because there was no crowd there to absorb it. It was the most eerie thing.”
The notion of Altamont as the “anti-Woodstock” was burned into the cultural consciousness practically before the last notes of “Street Fighting Man” decayed in the chilly predawn hours in the countryside east of San Francisco. While there had been, as at Woodstock, three deaths by prosaic mishap, there was nothing at Woodstock remotely like Hells Angels beating audience members with pool cues or the fatal stabbing by an Angel of Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old black audience member in the overwhelmingly white crowd of 300,000, who charged the stage with a gun while the Stones played “Under My Thumb.”
Rolling Stone weighed in six weeks after the concert with “Let It Bleed,” an epic recapitulation of the day’s misadventures; it was followed by Gimme Shelter, a devastating account of the 1969 tour and its benighted finale at Altamont financed by the Stones and directed by the documentarians David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. The Rolling Stone article advanced the theory that the Stones had cynically used the audience at Altamont as “unpaid extras” in the film, with the Hells Angels as their brutal Praetorian Guard hired for the now-legendary “$500 worth of beer.” As the critic Michael Sragow pointed out in his history of Gimme Shelter on its twenty-fifth anniversary, “The legend of Altamont as apocalypse was largely based on that Rolling Stone cover story,” which set the tone for future coverage and may have influenced the rough treatment the film was given by critics like The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael.
Altamont was unquestionably a dark day. Not even the musicians, accustomed to imperial deference from fans to flunkies, were spared. No sooner had Jagger alighted from his helicopter backstage than a bystander coldcocked him in the face. Marty Balin, singer in Jefferson Airplane—Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the Flying Burrito Brothers also performed—was knocked unconscious while attempting to intervene in a skirmish between the audience and the Angels. Says Chris Hillman, who played with the Burrito Brothers: “I went from playing Monterey”—1967’s evanescent Monterey pop festival—“which was one of the greatest musical festivals, to playing Altamont. And that was like going from heaven to hell.”
Altamont was no more inherently evil than was Woodstock. It can in fact be argued that it was the “purer” of the two enterprises . For while Woodstock was conceived as a profit-making venture, Altamont was from the start planned as a free concert, albeit with full understanding of the benefits to be derived from the Stones’ largesse, not the least of which was bonding with San Francisco’s storied hippie culture, whose rapid decline was hard to discern five thousand miles away in London. What prevented disaster from striking Woodstock had more to do with luck and marginally better planning. “As chaotic as Woodstock was, it was relatively well organized,” says Nash. “Altamont was a complete mess. We had no way to get our gear in. I think that was the day that Melvin Belli hot-wired a fucking truck to get our equipment in there to get to the stage. Melvin Belli! A famous lawyer hot-wiring a truck and stealing it!”
The presence of the Angels at Altamont—drugged, drunk, and surly—was also unique to the Bay Area rock scene. While the Stones had used the London Angels as an “honor guard” at the Hyde Park free concert, they were nowhere near as violent as the California Angels, who had nevertheless been courted by slumming San Francisco counterculturalists for years. Hunter Thompson, while researching his 1967 book about the gang, had brought the two camps together at Ken Kesey’s ranch in La Honda, south of San Francisco. Thompson was certain the Angels would run amok at the party; instead, they sampled LSD and were fawned over by Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, and an uneasy alliance was struck. (R. Crumb’s iconographic cover artwork for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills album included the legend approved by hells angels frisco.) So the San Francisco rock scene and the Angels had some history of peaceful coexistence. Given the lack of trouble at the Hyde Park concert, Sam Cutler, the Stones’ road manager, arranged via the Grateful Dead for the Angels to fulfill the honor-guard role at Altamont.
The Angels, as it quickly became apparent, served to greatly exacerbate problems that already existed. The location of the concert had bounced from Golden Gate Park, after San Francisco city officials refused to issue a permit, to the Sears Point Raceway outside Sonoma. The stage and most of the equipment had been readied at the racetrack when Filmways, Inc., which controlled Sears Point, attempted to wring a distribution deal for the movie. The Altamont Speedway was secured just twenty-four hours before the concert. It was too late to pull down the elaborate staging already in place at Sears Point, so a makeshift stage, built so low that those in the front row could rest their elbows on it, was cobbled together. On December 6, 1969, the roads leading to the racetrack were clotted with cars as far as the eye could see. Altamont was on.
Chris Hillman had bad vibes about the concert even before the Burrito Brothers left Los Angeles. “I felt it was wrong when it was offered to us. Gram Parsons was begging the Stones to let the Burritos be on the show. And I kept saying, ‘Why are we doing this? Why are we spending money to go up and play this? It doesn’t feel right.’” Two days later, the car carrying the band to the concert was involved in a minor accident in the morass of traffic on the fringes of the festival. “We get out,” says Hillman, “there’s no parking, there’s no order. I literally had to inch through the crowd holding my Fender bass over my head. It was like being in New Delhi and trying to walk through a mass of people on pilgrimage. I get to the stage, and there it is: the Hells Angels are beating people up and it was just like a nightmare. I had to argue with two of the Hells Angels to get on the stage to play. They were like ready to beat me up. I had to talk to them real slowly, they were so out of their minds.”
Nash, too, was less than enthused about the prospect of playing the festival. “We only did it because Jerry Garcia asked Crosby to get Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to play Altamont,” he says. “We did it as a favor to Jerry. It was certainly one of the weirdest shows I ever played. They were playing this electronic music really loud in between acts. It was really tense.” (Reminded that few people even realize CSNY played Altamont, Nash says, “I know. We left that to Mick and the lads: ‘Nope, that’s a Rolling Stones concert, thank you very much!’”)
All day, the stage front was racked by sullen outbursts as the Angels wielded their pool cues. Nash says that although there was a lull in the violence during CSNY’s set, “everybody in our band knew we needed to get on with our show and get the fuck out of there. This did not feel good. It was clear this was going to be an ugly scene. It was obvious to everybody.” After Balin’s knockout, Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner berated the Angels over the loudspeakers; an Angel on the opposite side of the stage grabbed a mike and menaced Kantner. A tense standoff ensued before the band started playing again. The Manson murders would soon confirm that not all longhairs were hippies; the Angels were now demonstrating that the fey mutual admiration between the gang and the hippies—Allen Ginsberg had gone so far as to write a mealymouthed poem, “To the Angels,” pleading that they stop beating people up—was bullshit.
There were also class considerations at work. The Angels were typically blue-collar and delinquent; the hippies just as typically white-collar, college educated, and—illegal drugs and minor civil disobedience aside—law-abiding. Preserved in the Maysleses’ unblinking documentary, Altamont literally becomes a stage where social castes from the same, supposedly monolithic generation—each with long hair and a mutual interest in getting high, getting laid, and listening to rock and roll—reveal themselves to be two species. Stan Goldstein, the Maysleses’ deputy, pointed out that away from the stage and the Angels’ glowering presence, the audience at Altamont looked and behaved much as the audience had at Woodstock. “Tens of thousands of people had no idea of what was going on just a few dozen feet away. They knew only that the music was interrupted frequently.”
By the time the Stones finally hit the stage in the cold pre-winter darkness—the Grateful Dead had been scheduled to go on before but bowed out so the concert would not run desperately over schedule—there was nothing left but the inevitable. Twice during the opening number, “Sympathy for the Devil,” the band had to halt as melees with the Angels erupted in front of the stage. At one point Jagger pleaded for order while the audience—one eye cocked for the next attack—looked back at him blankly. “Brothers and sisters!” he cried, sounding genuinely perplexed. “Why are we fighting? Who wants to fight?” The audience, having no answer, stared back.
As the band hit the closing notes of the second number, “Under My Thumb,” the stage front suddenly cleared. It wasn’t apparent to the band or even to those in the front rows, but Meredith Hunter had rushed forward, gun drawn, and been stabbed in the head and back by the Hells Angel Alan Passaro. (A jury later acquitted Passaro of murder, ruling he had acted in self-defense.) Hunter died before he could be transported to the hospital. Jagger and the band knew none of this, only that someone had apparently been wielding a gun and that the Angels kept wading into the crowd and assaulting people. After playing an abbreviated set, the Stones and their entourage hastily crammed into a helicopter and evacuated the West Coast Woodstock as if fleeing an insurrection.
Altamont wasn’t the apocalypse of the ’60s but rather something much less and much more. The baby boomers’ sense of invincibility had been steadily battered as the decade wound down; now the generation’s absolute conviction that the rules didn’t apply to it, that anything was possible, including fielding immense, lackadaisically planned festivals where no one would be harmed, had been debunked with terrible finality. Altamont’s power lay not in its supposed evil but in showing baby boomers the folly of believing their own hype, at such a portentous moment, with cameras rolling. It was a stunning repudiation. Back in Los Angeles and Laurel Canyon, where so much ’60s hagiography had been created and perpetuated, there was no question that it was anything else. “Suddenly the dream was over and the dark side came to the fore,” says Gary Burden, “and it was never the same.”