Altamont
Monterey, then Woodstock. And now, ladies and gentlemen, the hot flash of festivals—Altamont.
Pageants, especially those that rouse the passions, often take the form of ritual: they're repeated again and again. That was part of the problem with Altamont—trying to repeat Woodstock. Too many aspects of the Woodstock “ceremony” were circumstantial and therefore impossible to reenact.
During our performance at Altamont I forgot to wear my contact lenses—maybe I just didn't want to see it. The concept was a gigantic Grateful Dead/Airplane/Rolling Stones San Francisco–style concert in the park. But from the earliest planning stages—and leading up to the death of a man in the audience—this event was doomed. In transitioning from idea to practice, it became a series of last-minute downgrades, all pointing to disaster.
When the concept was first emerging, Paul Kantner and I went to Mick Jagger's house in London to discuss when, where, and how. I'd never met Mick, but the reputation of his group's excesses preceded him. I knew that he and his band were really out of control, much more wild than our group was, and in the taxi with Paul on my way over there I was pretty uncomfortable.
“What's the matter, Grace?” Paul asked.
“It's Mick. What if everybody's shooting heroin and screwing knotholes in the wall or something and I have to sit there and act cool?”
I was afraid we'd be walking into a roomful of foppish junkies engaged in unnatural acts with elegantly dressed ninety-pound groupies, loaded on drugs I'd never heard of. Paul didn't pay me much attention, and by the time we rang the doorbell, I was practically hyperventilating. But good old Mick revealed a different side to his persona; he opened the door in an expensive business suit. I exhaled as soon as I stepped inside. The place was immaculate; Mick had magnificent Oriental rugs covering hardwood floors with Louis XIV furniture and expensive artwork hanging on the walls. He was like a kid dressing up in his rich daddy's accessories. He offered us no dope, just tea. There were no groupies, either. Or unnatural acts. Or fooling around. It was all business.
We sipped tea and discussed the concert idea for about an hour and the whole meeting was so crisp and professional, it totally blew me away. It turned out Mick had gone to business college, and apparently, when he told you he'd be talking business, that's all he did. He was one of a small group of rock stars—Frank Zappa and Kiss's Gene Simmons were also members of the club—who never got irreparably jerked around financially, because he paid close attention to what the managers and record companies were doing when it was time to shuffle the deck.
A smart businessman.
The entertainers who didn't bother to figure out the sleight-of-hand tricks played by the suits are now hiring pro bono lawyers to try to get back the royalties and perks that slipped away while they were “sniffing up” their assets. Incidentally, if it weren't for Skip Johnson—Starship's lighting director, my future husband of eighteen years, and still my good friend—I'd probably be joining the rest of them in a breadline somewhere, wondering what happened to all the money that flew out the window. Skip closely watched the managers, lawyers, accountants, and record companies, and he spoke up when I missed the errors because I was too busy having “fun.” He had the uncanny ability to get ripped at night and show up at the office the next day. Like Mick, he could say thank you to the compliments and still read the fine print.
After hearing Mick's thoughts on how a concert of this kind might be set up, Paul and I reassured Mick that “our people” would stay in touch with “his people.” And we left feeling like we'd just had a meeting with a very young art patron, rather than the crown prince of British hedonism. We thought, Hey, if Mick is this together, maybe this thing can work.
Wrong.
We'd wanted to hold the concert in Golden Gate Park, but two days before it was supposed to happen, the city of San Francisco said no to the park permit. Sears Point raceway was the next option, but the owners wanted one hundred thousand dollars in escrow from The Stones. Understandably, Jagger said no. Finally, we found Altamont. Located about forty minutes outside San Francisco, Altamont was an ugly, brown, flat, open expanse of land with no tree cover and no personality. Definitely not a pastoral setting. And obtaining a permit for even that was a hassle. We finally got it, but as Paul later reminded me, “We took Altamont out of desperation.”
The concert was scheduled on what turned out to be a weird, gray-red dusty day in the muggy dead-grass flatland in the middle of nowhere. The sun never came out. Granted, it rained through most of Woodstock, but this dullness was worse than rain. I wore a pair of blue pants and a blue jacket—nothing striking, no princess posing. This time, I settled for looking like just another guy in the band because the anticipation of another glorious event had been flattened by the constant hassles.
Flying in from Florida after doing a gig the night before, we'd had no sleep, so we were far more concerned with keeping our energy up long enough to make it through our set than with how we looked. There were a couple of trailers near the stage serving as overloaded holding pens for any and all bands, crew, managers, and Hell's Angels, who were acting as security. With a mass of people shuffling around, trying to organize either themselves or some aspect of the production, the atmosphere was closer to traffic at rush hour than an outdoor celebration.
I later told an interviewer, “Woodstock was unruly, but Altamont was reigning chaos.” The Hell's Angels were roaring drunk and ready to ignite even before the concert started. Jefferson Airplane went on second, after The Flying Burrito Brothers, and in the middle of the set, my contact-lens-less eyes could see a blurry scramble over on stage left where Marty usually stood. I walked to the drum riser to ask Spencer what was going on, but he just kept playing with a terrified look on his face. Then I walked toward Marty, but he wasn't there. After jumping off the stage to help some poor guy who was being pummeled by the Hell's Angels, he'd apparently made a big mistake by yelling “Fuck you!” at one of the bikers.
“Nobody says ‘Fuck you!’ to a Hell's Angel,” the drunken biker shot back.
“Fuck you!” Marty repeated, without losing a beat.
Our crew gathered around Marty and for some reason, the “Angel” backed off and later apologized. But the problems didn't end there. Mick Jagger, dressed in a black satin cape, was singing “Sympathy for the Devil” when life imitated art and another fight broke out. Toward the end of The Stones' set we left by helicopter, and my enduring memory of Altamont is Paul's line when we looked down at the audience near the stage. “It looks like someone is being beaten to death,” he said. He was right—in the hospital the man died of inflicted wounds.
Ralph Gleason, San Francisco Chronicle columnist, reported, “In twenty-four hours, we created all the problems of our society in one place: congestion, violence, and dehumanization. The name of the game is money, power, and ego.”