IT STANDS ALONE alone in rock ’n’ roll history: Altamont. It shouldn’t even have been at Altamont.
SAM CUTLER: [Ralph J.] Gleason and [Bill] Graham bear a lot of the responsibility for the fact that the Stones’ free show was supposed to be in the center of San Francisco in Golden Gate Park. The problem was Gleason and Bill Graham basically stopped that from happening. There was no place for the concert to go. It just slowly spiraled out of control. It got moved to Sears Point. They got greedy and wanted a huge slice of the film. At the last minute, the site at Altamont came up, which I never saw before the actual show. We should have called it off. Needless to say, when the concert turned to shit, the Stones unfairly got the blame, and I have been living with my share of that opprobrium for forty years.
Bill Wyman’s hindsight is more sanguine:
BILL WYMAN: Don’t do free concerts in America (laughs). Don’t say thank you . . . just jump on the plane and wave. We’d had such a good tour that we felt we’d make a gesture to the American people and just do a concert for all the people that couldn’t make the concerts and wanted to, and could hitchhike there, and didn’t have to pay money and all that. It was a shame that it became the focal point of the entire tour because if you ever talk about the ’69 tour, all anybody remembers of it is not the great shows we had for seven or eight weeks, it’s the Altamont program. And even that’s out of all proportion, because there were an estimated four hundred thousand people there—some people say more—and the trouble was all in the front. I would say 80 percent of the audience didn’t know anything about the trouble because they couldn’t see it, they weren’t aware of it, except that we kept starting and stopping playing. But it was focused around forty people in a crowd of four hundred thousand, so that was really out of proportion, too. It was just very unfortunate.
We interviewed one of the four hundred thousand people who showed up that day expecting a very different kind of experience:
AKI KANAMORI: I was an undergraduate at Caltech entering my senior year. My mother and brother and I had heard about Woodstock. We thought this would be the West Coast version of it. So we all drove out there that morning. We got there too early or something because we had to wait for quite some time. The first band I remember playing was Santana. There were large intervals of time when nothing was happening. I also remember the Flying Burrito Brothers. Of course, the Stones came up much later. That was the problem. There were these long intervals when people would go away and come back, and you didn’t know what was going on. We asked around; nobody seemed to know that much. And finally, my mother and brother got tired; it was getting cold. We started thinking, “Maybe they’re not playing at all.” There was a lot of tension in the air. Then it seemed like something was going on and they were finally setting up. It was starting to get dark. The sun was going down. It was a very bright reddish sunset. Then it got very dark.
One of the strong indicators that Altamont wasn’t going to be a day in the park (even though it was supposed to be a day in the park!) was the treatment accorded to Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane earlier in the proceedings. I asked Marty about it:
MARTY BALIN: We came back from a tour and I had just gotten home and they said, “We’re flying off to Altamont to do a gig with the Stones,” and it was that afternoon. So I remember getting a helicopter with the Stones, getting there and going on stage. And we started the first number . . . and I had my eyes closed and I was singing the first number. And I looked up and there were these Hells Angels with pool cues beating up this naked guy who was obviously on acid and he wanted to get out of the crowd, you know, like people did in those days. And they were like beating this guy, and thousands of people just stepped back and let it happen. Then I just figured the guy needed some help, so I dove over. I figured no one was listening to us sing anyway. It looked like a good fight, so I just jumped in and started punching with them and helped him out. They sort of stopped. Then I got back up and started to sing again. Then pretty soon the guy got to the back of the stage and they were beating him up behind me. I looked behind me and they were fighting again so . . . God, I was mad, you know, I just got mad. I went back and started jumping in with them again. I started kicking and punching. They had this leader guy with a wolf head helmet on his head, so I went after him. I had a few drinks and I was doing pretty good. Suddenly they got me from behind and that was the last thing I remembered.
But when I woke up, I had boot marks all over me—tattoos and everything. But you know it was real sad because there were all these people, and they just stepped back and let them kill this guy in front of them, and I thought, “That wasn’t the ’60s.” It wasn’t right.
A rare promotional poster for Altamont
For anyone not familiar with the basic facts of Altamont, the New York Times printed this basic summation on April 13, 2000, by Gerald Marzorati: “The Hells Angels had been hired to provide security at the free, outdoor Altamont festival, which drew 300,000 people and was to feature not only the Stones but also the Grateful Dead (whose manager had recommended the Angels’ services), Santana, the Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The Angels, many of them new recruits to the club with something to prove, spent much of the afternoon clearing the area in front of the stage with the help of weighted pool cues. Then, a few songs into the Stones’ closing set, several of the Angels developed a particular interest in an 18-year-old black man 10 or 15 yards from the stage. Meredith Hunter was attacked by one of the Angels, and when he pulled a gun and ran, was chased down, stabbed and beaten to death by a pack of them. None of the Stones could see this, but they knew something was happening—it was there in the confusion of their playing, and in the fear they conveyed to one another in those quick glances with which longtime band mates say all that needs to be said.”
Filmmaker Albert Maysles offered this synopsis of the “security” issue:
ALBERT MAYSLES: I got to understand the problem was that the guy who would normally be in control of the Hells Angels somehow or other wasn’t there. And instead they got this other guy who was totally inexperienced and things fell apart.
SAM CUTLER: Who brings a gun to a rock ’n’ roll show? None of the Hells Angels had guns. Here’s this black guy, who’s a speed dealer and had all kinds of convictions against him, and a member of a black Oakland gang that as part of their membership had to be armed. I had to go up and tell Mick. I saw the whole thing. I was about twenty meters from it. I had to go tell Mick, “Listen, there’s somebody in the audience with a gun.” I said, “Mick you got to get off stage now.” Mick went, “No, we got to finish.” He had balls of brass. He was so courageous. I take my hat off to him. He saw it through to the end . . .
Here’s Hells Angel Sonny Barger’s version:
SONNY BARGER: They say that was the end of the Age of Aquarius, but actually to us it’s just another day in the life of a Hells Angel. A guy pulled a gun on us, he got killed and that’s the bottom line. We got movies of him shooting at us; we got movies of him getting killed and nobody went to jail for it. There was a trial, everybody was acquitted.
PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF. . .
To understand the absolute anarchy that was the Altamont concert, look no further than the case of a stout swindler named John Jaymes.
Already a career criminal by the time he joined the tour in ’69—passing checks, forgery, and grand larceny—Jaymes got on board the Stones’ touring party by promising to procure free ground transportation for the Stones and their entire entourage. Then, he deftly went to Chrysler claiming to represent the Stones, and offered them advertising in exchange for free rental cars and limos. Once he successfully delivered the cars, no one questioned his credentials.
When the free concert was moved from Sears Point to Altamont, Jaymes sped ahead to the racetrack to sign the contract for the site in the name of his alleged company, Young American Enterprises. He even assumed liability for any security issues associated with the show. Predictably, the security Jaymes had promised for the show was seriously lacking, leaving the Stones to find quick replacements.
No one was exactly sure who Jaymes was. The New York Times called Jaymes “promoter of the Stones’ nationwide tour.” To many in the Stones’ entourage, the whispered rumor was that the shadowy Jaymes represented mob interests in New York City. Stones’ tour manager Sam Cutler had a different idea. He intimated that James was working with the FBI. Speculation aside, one thing was for sure, James was another necessary, insane facet of the Stones tour. Furthermore, he was just hitting his prime as a hustler.
After Altamont, Jaymes went on to greater grift. Under his new name, John Ellsworth, he fronted a phony charity called the International Children’s Appeal. The scheme got the endorsement of no less than the United Nations and First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who unwittingly helped Jaymes poach more than a million dollars from Senator Edward Kennedy, NFL legend Rosey Grier, and Hollywood bombshell Jane Russell among many others. Little did they know all of their kind contributions went to fund an international drugs and weapons laundering scheme.
How could Jaymes assume so much power unquestioned? How did he get on the tour to begin with? How did the so-called head of security come out of Altamont unscathed after the fallout from so many security lapses? Only the madhouse that was the Altamont concert could give shelter to a three-hundred-pound gorilla of a con man like John Jaymes.
As Barger notes, the whole thing was captured on camera by documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles. David died following a stroke in 1987 at the age of fifty-four. Albert is eighty-five years old at this writing and offered us the following crystal clear recollections of the events at Altamont and his documentary Gimme Shelter:
ALBERT MAYSLES: I got a call from Haskell Wexler one day, who was an old friend of ours, and he said he’d just been talking with the Stones and they were about to begin their tour and they were going to be at the Plaza Hotel the next day and we might want to look them up. So we went to the Plaza, knocked on their door. We didn’t really know their music but we went to their concert the next day, which was in Baltimore, and we said, “These guys are good.” We wanted to make something that was not just a concert film.
We spent a lot of the next two years filming them and ended up making two movies, Gimme Shelter and Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, though that was more of the Madison Square Garden concert. We didn’t establish any ground rules, it was just, “We’ll tag along.” We didn’t start filming it any way other than as a process of discovery.
Were they influenced by any of the other existing rock ’n’ roll movies?
ALBERT MAYSLES: We didn’t draw upon any of the rock ’n’ roll movies that had come before; we were just focused on what was happening in those moments. We had developed a filmmaking philosophy which was totally observational. We never asked questions, no interviews, no host, just what’s happening.
SAM CUTLER: Albert Maysles had the wonderful facility of making a film and you weren’t really ever aware that it was a film you were in. They never got in the way. They never appeared in anything. They never asked for anything to be staged. They just filmed what was going on. It’s an amazing film.
ALBERT MAYSLES: We were lucky in so many ways. Pennebaker’s film on Dylan is a very good film but I think he was unlucky in that, due to no fault of Pennebaker’s, Dylan is not that easy to film, very distant. Not so with the Stones, we were right in close with them all the time.
Scenes from Hell: The Stones at Altamont
Could Altamont have turned out differently?
ALBERT MAYSLES: The events at Altamont really turned out to be a characterization of that era. It’s interesting to speculate what would have happened if drugs had been legalized, as they should have been then and now. I think there would have been a proper security force and none of that ruckus from the Hells Angels.
Both the Stones and the Maysles brothers were excoriated afterward in the press.
ALBERT MAYSLES: The press got it wrong when they called it a murder. To this day, we don’t know what the motive may have been. It really should be called a killing. The New York Times piece by Vincent Canby was titled “Making Murder Pay.” Did you read Pauline Kael’s review of Gimme Shelter? It was totally, totally wrong. The basic premise of her article was that we staged everything. We didn’t stage anything. I still get so angry when I see the journalists from that time who accused the Stones of being responsible for the tragedy, because of the titles of the songs and so forth. It’s terrible. It’s unfortunate and unfair.
People have described Gimme Shelter as portending the demise of the ’60s. When you look at it, and you know how things turned out even worse in the next two years, you look at it like a prediction of the future. And the people who said that when we filmed the Beatles in ’64 and then the Stones in ’69, that the films are sort of like the bookends of the ’60s.
That’s one way to look at it. Here are a couple of others: Calendar purists will tell you that the ’60s ended on December 31, 1969, at midnight. Some historians will tell you that what we think of culturally and politically as the ’60s began on November 22, 1963, with the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and ended on August 9, 1974, with the official resignation of Richard Milhous Nixon as president of the United States. And finally, any true fan of ’60s rock ’n’ roll will tell you that the ’60s ended on the evening of December 6, 1969, at a decrepit motor-sports racetrack in northern California named Altamont.
