The year 1969 was a huge one for the Grateful Dead and it started off with a couple of bangs—literally. First, there was the Led Zeppelin photo shoot that we photo bombed in our own way, you could say. We didn’t mean to scare off Led Zeppelin but we scheduled a photo session at Herb Greene’s studio on the same day that they did—it was their first time in San Francisco and maybe even in America. They weren’t really well known over here quite yet and they had a gig at the Fillmore West that ended up being some kind of breakout show for them.
Their photo shoot was first, before ours, and we were getting tired of sitting around. Every successful band has dealt with the “hurry up and wait” methodology that afflicts the music industry; there’s just no way around it. This has led to a lot of truly destructive (and/or self-destructive) behavior by a lot of bands over the years, including us. At that photo shoot, I remember that Pigpen brought a .22 Colt-style six-shooter with him. He used to flaunt that thing around and scare people with it. Anybody who knew him would’ve found this amusing because Pigpen was the sweetest guy in town. He never would’ve hurt a single living thing and he never once did. But he did love to have fun with this gun—when he got restless, he’d sometimes shoot it off for amusement. He’d brandish it in conversation and then fire one off in some direction just to make his point. And for humor. At the Led Zeppelin photo shoot, when we all got tired of sitting around, he fired a round into the ceiling, I believe. It was all horseplay. But that was enough for Led Zeppelin. They ran. It’s comical and ironic to think of now, given some of the truly unruly and outright evil behavior they later exhibited, once they became big enough to get away with it. We were harmless in comparison. But don’t tell them that.
We had another comical encounter right after that, but instead of guns, this one involved Playboy Bunnies and LSD. We were invited to be the musical guest on a TV show called Playboy After Dark, hosted by Hugh Hefner. The show was totally weird and awkward. It was supposed to be a variety show that kind of brought the magazine to life and it tried to sell a fake version of what life was like at the actual Playboy mansion.
We arrived on the set and, again, were subjected to the “hurry up and wait” phenomenon. The show was conceived to look like a house party but it was actually filmed at CBS Studios in Los Angeles, on a giant soundstage that was kind of intimidating just by its size alone. One of the things I noticed about this place was that it had a giant coffee dispenser—one of those three-foot-tall things, for the union and for all the people working the show. And everybody was drinking coffee.
We went through the long and tedious process of getting ready: we had them put makeup on us, Mickey and I got our stuff together, we all agreed what songs we were going to play, and all of that. Bear—you know, Owlsey—was back with us at this point. He had a brief revival as our sound guy, until that bust in New Orleans. With Bear came his long delays with getting the sound “perfect,” so we had to put up with that, in addition to all the normal sitting around and doing nothing that is standard fare for television shoots.
Pretty soon, though, I noticed that some of the stagehands and cameramen were having a bit of trouble doing their jobs. They were saying things like, “Joe, you’re out of focus.” “No, number 13, you’re out of focus.” “Is this thing on?” “Hi! Who is this?” “Cameras are weird, man.” There was all this broken communication. I finally figured out that Bear, or at least someone in our ranks, had gone to that coffeepot and electrified it. Everyone was dosed. Including Hugh Hefner who, at the end of the night, tried to thank Phil and me. You could see he was really trying, and he really was being sincere, but he was also really high on acid and it was hard for him to talk. It didn’t quite come out right. All we could do was laugh, cackling the whole way to the end of CBS Studios, because we were really high on acid, too. Everybody was really high on acid—the entire film crew, the band, the actors and actresses, all the Playmates. They all got a surprise taste of Owsley’s finest that day. So it ended up being a fun time after all. Like a guerilla Acid Test. With bunnies!
Our performance from that broadcast found its way over to YouTube, if you care to watch it. We played “St. Stephen” and “Mountains of the Moon.” You can’t really tell that everyone was tripping their brains out … but they were.
I don’t condone dosing people without their prior consent, but consider the context. If you recall, the Grateful Dead started out as the house band at the Acid Tests, which were thrown by the Merry Pranksters. You could argue, then, that as a band, we were literally born out of a psychedelic prank. Therefore, certain things were just woven into our DNA. And when various members of the band stopped eating acid as part of their diets, well, the pranks, at least, continued.
Bobby was a natural prankster and going through hotel lobbies or airport terminals could be especially hazardous with him. Especially in the days before TSA, before 9/11 and all these heavy-duty regulations. One time, I think we were in Portland—I don’t know what year—Bobby thought it would be funny to pull out a toy cap gun. It looked just like a snub-nosed .38 and he whipped it out in front of the ticket counter and just started firing it off in the airport. He got arrested for that one. The rest of us went on to wherever and left him to pay for his sins.
I think Bobby was kind of afraid to prank me too much because he knew that my retaliation might up the ante beyond his comfort zone. Payback is a bitch. But he would tell front-desk clerks or airline ticketing agents that so-and-so, usually a tour manager, was stoned out of their mind and carrying a lot of drugs on them and things like that. Little things for amusement. His amusement.
One particular prank that I remember, very clearly, inadvertently involved former U.S. senator George McGovern. In 1972, McGovern was running for president on the Democratic ticket against Richard Nixon. It’s a presidential race that will always be remembered for Nixon’s scandal at the Watergate hotel. The Grateful Dead somehow managed to pull off our own little hotel scandal involving McGovern that year. Unlike Nixon, we didn’t get in trouble for it. Or, at least, not enough that we needed to resign.
McGovern’s campaign had reached out to us, seeking the Grateful Dead’s endorsement. We weren’t ready to do that, even though none of us could stomach the thought of a second Nixon term. McGovern was the much better choice and we probably should’ve supported him, but we were an adamantly apolitical band back then. We ended up meeting McGovern in person, on an airplane—by coincidence, we were on the same flight. He invited us to play the White House if he won. We declined. He lost, anyway.
In late October 1972, with both campaigns in overdrive, the band happened to be booked at the same hotel as McGovern. Two different types of parties—the Democratic and the Dead. This was somewhere in Wisconsin, around Milwaukee. I don’t recall the name of the hotel … but it wasn’t Watergate.
We were destined for trouble at that hotel. Perhaps as some kind of prelude, I got into a fight with Bobby on the way back from the gig after the first night. The argument was over the very important distinction of which freezes first—asphalt or metal. I swore up and down that it was metal. Bobby swore up and down that it was asphalt. To settle it, we jumped out of the van and I wrestled Bobby to the actual asphalt. I had him pinned to the ground and I was trying to smash his head against the curb when one of our roadies, Ram Rod, very carefully put his boot under Bobby’s head so he wouldn’t get hurt. We were into it pretty heavy. Ram Rod’s boot snapped us out of it, and we dusted each other off and continued being rowdy.
That kind of energy followed us back to the hotel the next night, too. We didn’t know McGovern was there at first, so that had nothing to do with it.
We were in the middle of a tour and we must’ve gone through states where fireworks were legal, because we were stocked up on them. Band and crew alike. We had pounds upon pounds of firecrackers, and just as many pounds of bottle rockets. The hotel was horseshoe shaped, with an atrium in the middle, so the rooms all faced each other on the inside, going however many stories up. There was that great wide-open space that overlooked the indoor courtyard or whatever. We kind of got wise to where we all were and we took stock of each other’s room numbers. Then, we opened our inside-facing windows and started shooting bottle rockets at each other. It was amazing. They were powerful enough that they’d go across the hotel atrium and into a room; not always the right room that you were hoping for. They weren’t exactly ballistic missiles and aiming them was a loose concept. So there would be some poor guy with his windows open who suddenly had a bunch of bottle rockets explode in his room. We proceeded to battle, launching bottle rockets back and forth. We’d light strings of firecrackers—hundreds of them—and chuck them down on the courtyard or mezzanine below and they resonated so beautifully, it was like firing cannons in the Grand Canyon. There was this incredible echo. And because we just played a show, we had all this energy that we were letting out.
While I haven’t told you about Keith Godchaux joining the band yet, and we’ll get to all that, he was our keyboardist at the time. This tangent should’ve come with a spoiler alert. Sorry. Anyway, Keith was with me in my room and we were just firing our ammunition away like crazy. We also had cases of Heineken with us and, as we’re drinking, we’re filling up the entire bathtub with broken beer bottles. That’s a lot of Heineken, I guess.
We’re drinking and we’re firing off bottle rockets and we’re lighting off firecrackers and nobody’s really getting the upper hand or anything. It’s just chaos. Apparently, downstairs and throughout the rest of the hotel, McGovern’s Secret Service men had heard the explosions and hit the deck. They thought they were under attack. If that Nixon don’t get you, then the Dead sure will.
Ram Rod’s room was right next to mine. Directly above him, one story up, was our lighting designer for that tour, Ben Haller. Now, as with many of those old hotels, air would get sucked into the room through the outside window and blow out under the door. So, being the smart guy that he was, Ben cut open a down pillow and emptied the whole pillowcase while leaning outside, right above Ram Rod’s room. Every one of those feathers got sucked into Ram Rod’s window and when he came out of there, it looked like he had been tarred and feathered. He had been sweating from the firecracker war, so the feathers stuck all over him—he was completely covered in them. Head to toe. It was the ultimate pillow fight. And that was the end of it: Ram Rod lost the war. Ben won. That’s how you win when you’re playing with us.
We would’ve all been able to celebrate the victory and take part in the spoils, but just at that moment, there was a loud knock on my door. I opened it and saw two rows of gentlemen facing me. The first row was the local heat and the next row was the Secret Service. McGovern’s men had really been freaked out and dove for cover and had reached for their guns and all of that, so now they were trying to get to the bottom of it. “Are you guys lighting firecrackers?” “No.” I was leaning with my left hand up against the wall and when I went to move, I had so much gunpowder on my hand that it left a perfect imprint on the wall. The cops laughed—they had never seen anything so incriminating.
I reminded the McGovern party that they had asked us to endorse them or support them or maybe even play for them in Washington, and I played that card: “You’re not going to be mean to us now, are you?” That must’ve worked, because they just made Keith and me go to a different hotel. There was one right across the street, so it was fine. But they only moved the two of us. It was like they thought we were the most contagious, or the instigators or something. A bunch of troublemakers. Two of them.
Also: I may have gotten into some kind of thing at the front desk, which contributed to being kicked out of the first hotel. But that’s just going by eyewitness reports; I must’ve blacked that part out.
When we checked into the new hotel, I was still wired and going nuts and probably still something of a liability. But then I turned on the radio and it happened to be tuned to the most incredible jazz station and I started blasting it. Even though the music was really outrageous, it had a calming effect on me. It put me into this blissed-out state of being; after all that excitement, I had found inner peace and I was really thankful for that. Nobody was hurt that night, and nothing got too damaged, except maybe the manhood of some of the Secret Service agents who ran for cover.
So, yeah, pranks: we loved them and we managed to pull a couple of them off, in our time. We also loved guns and explosions and all of those things—I remember Pigpen and I had pellet guns at one point and we’d “borrow” the hotel’s phone books and set them up across the room and take target practice. We’d completely decimate the books, and that was how Pigpen and I would keep each other entertained during downtime. They were just pellet guns and we didn’t shoot them at each other and we didn’t rob banks or anything. Good clean fun.
But where were we in this tale? Back to the beginning of 1969, following the “Playboy Acid Test.” We got our hands on the latest in recording technology—a sixteen-track recorder (which, of course, is antiquated these days)—and we hauled it up the steps of the Avalon, and later the Fillmore West, and we became the first band ever to make a live sixteen-track recording. We weren’t trying to make history; we were just trying to record a live album. We released it toward the end of the year, on November 10, 1969, as Live/Dead. It was our first live release and it remains one of our best-loved albums. Its appeal was that it took great “you-had-to-be-there” live versions of songs like “Dark Star” and “The Eleven” and put them right in people’s living rooms. Studio versions could never do those songs justice, but advances in live recording (some of which were at our own hands) meant that we could bring the live Dead experience to vinyl.
That said, I didn’t even remember what the cover of Live/Dead looked like until I started digging through everything for this book. I didn’t have much to do with the whole process behind it, since it was live—I just played my heart out at those shows and that was that.
But we were also recording a lot in the studio during that same time period, working on our third studio release, entitled Aoxomoxoa, which doesn’t mean anything—it’s just a cool palindrome. People have surmised over the years that you could read the “Grateful Dead” lettering on the front cover as “We Ate the Acid” which, I suppose, is true enough, if you look at it just right. Was that intentional? I’m not telling. But I will say that, despite rumors, that’s not a five-year-old Courtney Love on the back cover in the group photo. That’s my daughter, Stacy.
The recording of Aoxomoxoa was notable for several reasons. First, the sixteen-track technology came along only after we did our initial recording using an eight-track at the end of 1968. But when the studio procured one of the first sixteen-track recorders in the world (the same one we used for Live/Dead), the decision was made to toss everything we had already done and record it all again. From scratch. This time we could go deeper and experiment with things no other band had done yet. Being able to utilize twice as many tracks essentially doubled the possibilities of what we could do with each song. The end result was dense and cumbersome in places, and all that studio time cost us a fortune, but we were experimenting on the sonic frontier, exploiting cutting-edge technology.
Mostly, what I remember about those sessions, is this: We took pinhead doses of STP to use as speed during the recording, and then we brought nitrous oxide tanks into the control room during the mixing process. We called those sessions the Barbed Wire Whipping Party. (We recorded a song of the same name, with words by Robert Hunter, but it never made the final album.)
The real-life Barbed Wire Whipping Party was at Pacific High Studios in San Francisco. When you’re mixing down tracks while sucking nitrous oxide, it’s like anything else: You think you’re driving great until you wake up, wrapped around a tree. But at least we all had a lot of fun with that one, which wasn’t exactly typical of our studio experiences. We spent an excessive amount of money on Aoxomoxoa, because we basically recorded the same album twice and then spent countless hours in production. Once again, Warner Brothers wasn’t happy with us, or with the enormous debt that we accrued with them, but whatever. It was worth it in the end. Aoxomoxoa came out on June 20, 1969, and it eventually went gold. It only took about twenty-nine years.
My son Justin was born ten days before Aoxomoxoa hit the shelves, on June 10, 1969. “Just in” time to go to Woodstock. There’s actually a shot of him, in Susila’s arms, getting off the helicopter, backstage, in the Woodstock movie. The Grateful Dead didn’t make it into the documentary, but Justin did. Which was prescient, considering that he now directs music documentaries and concert videos. We’ll get to Woodstock, but my son comes first.
In advance of Justin’s arrival, Susila and I decided to get married. I took her to Reno, but unlike my previous marriage there, this one was legit. We were living on Benton Lane in Novato, at a tumbledown shack of a place, on a hill, just across town from Mickey’s ranch. We moved there because we got kicked out of the Lucas Valley house following the pot bust. Like Mickey’s ranch, our place was technically outside the town limits, which means it was unincorporated, which means the local police didn’t have jurisdiction over it, which means we could shoot rifles there and go crazy. A highway patrolman owned the property next door and would shoot solid steel bullets clear through oak trees, despite the Geneva Convention (which had banned solid steel bullets). Needless to say, we left him alone and he afforded us the same luxury. Susila has said that this was during my cowboy phase, when it was all dynamite, horses, dogs—and baby.
About that baby: When Susila started going into labor, I went into a high state of panic. We went to a hospital in Novato but they wouldn’t let me into the delivery room with Susila. They said, “Husbands aren’t allowed in.” I said “Bullshit!” and Susila said “Bullshit!” and we got into an ambulance and we hightailed it to San Francisco and went straight into French Hospital.
I’d been hitting a little bit of the Jack Daniels to help my nerves. I got in there and they washed me up and put the gown on, and they put Susila in the stirrups and the whole thing, and you see a little head sticking out, just a teeny bit, and you watch a little more of the head come out, see some blond hair, and these eyes, the cheeks, the chin, the neck. Like most men, I really wanted a son. So, when his dick popped out I went, “Yeah! A boy!” The doctor looked at me like, “Would you be quiet please?” but I wouldn’t—I was a little drunk and I was just yelling up a storm. I was so excited at the birth that the doctor wiped him up but before he even cut the umbilical cord, he handed him to me, and it shut me up, because I was holding this child that was still connected to his mother, and I was just blown away. And that’s Justin.
We left home in such a rush that we didn’t take anything with us, and Susila got into the ambulance after the first hospital wearing only a sheet. I must’ve forgotten to grab her clothes, because she didn’t have anything to change into when we left French Hospital. She had to borrow clothes from someone. She was mad at me about that one, and it was really embarrassing for her, I’m afraid. But it was also just really exciting for both of us, to have a son, and it still is to this day.
About two months after Justin’s birth, we took our first family trip—to Woodstock. August 15 to 17, 1969. It wasn’t really a vacation because Daddy had to work. Just like at Monterey Pop and all the other big shows, the Grateful Dead blew it. We didn’t play that well. Because of rain and problems with grounding, we were getting electrocuted on stage—Bobby especially—and Bear had his usual delays with getting the sound just right. Meanwhile, the sound on stage was damn near impossible to work with. We couldn’t hear each other. In the end, I don’t even remember what songs we played. It wasn’t a memorable performance.
I took a tiny speck of STP before the gig, for energy, and I think most of us took acid before our set—no surprises, there. If you weren’t at Woodstock, then you’ve at least read about it, so you have some idea of what it was all about. Three days of peace, love, and music. Some of the other artists included Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, The Band, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. You can watch some of those bands give the performance of their lives in the theatrical documentary, but—once again—we declined to sign the release forms and passed on being included in the film. For the Grateful Dead, our performance was anticlimactic, although it was still thrilling to be a part of it.
The one memory that really sticks out, oddly, is when we tried to get out of there. We helicoptered in from our nearby hotel. But when we went to leave, it was after dark, so they had us load up into a vehicle. Then they drove us out—through the middle of the fucking crowd. It was like trying to part a sea of people half a million strong. Quite literally. I’d never seen that many people in one place in my life and I got freaked out. Afterward, I realized it was all fine. The Deadhead community didn’t fully exist just yet, but these people acted just like the Deadheads did later. It was part of the same continuum. They were just incredibly gentle and kind to each other and that’s really what made Woodstock so beautiful and historically significant. It was the best of everything that the Haight-Ashbury scene had once promised, but this was on a national scale. With the world watching. And the scene really shone through. Strangers were stopping strangers just to shake their hands.
And then came Altamont. Four months later. The two historic events are often juxtaposed against each other because, as people are quick to point out, they were somehow related (Altamont was even nicknamed “Woodstock West,” though it didn’t stick). But if the two were siblings, then Altamont had to be Woodstock’s evil twin—there was light and then dark, good versus evil, and it all played out in extremes at these two festivals. Woodstock was the culmination of the entire hippie movement. Altamont was its death. As if to punctuate this, the festival took place on December 6, 1969. There went the ’60s. Wave good-bye.
Earlier that fall, the Rolling Stones came to the United States for what may have been America’s first real rock ’n’ roll arena tour. People have called it that, anyway. Ticket prices were outrageous—$7 or $8 at the high end. The shows were reportedly electrifying. And the Rolling Stones were every bit the first real rock stars. They weren’t outlaw cowboys like the Grateful Dead, or pop-culture gods like the Beatles. They were rock stars.
The Stones reached out to us because they wanted to stage a free concert in San Francisco as the tour closer, and they knew that was our domain. We agreed to play it with them, and help them organize it, but things got fuzzy from there. They sent ahead their road manager, Sam Cutler, and we had a meeting at Mickey’s ranch.
I’m going to say a few words about Cutler here because, in the wake of Altamont, the Rolling Stones kind of disowned him—and the Grateful Dead adopted him. He was a smooth talker, a natural salesman, and he could wriggle his way in and out of stuff with a certain elegance. Being a road manager demanded all of those things—the street hustle and the handshake charm—so he was good at his job. He was also good at shaking people down, when necessary, and he wasn’t the type to back down. If you can hang with the Rolling Stones, then you’ve got your chops in that department, and you can hang with the Grateful Dead for sure. We trusted him, we liked him, and we still do. But, being from England, he didn’t always understand American pronunciation, and that was sometimes amusing. “Hey, want to go play in Ar … Kansas?” “No, Sam, you mean Arkansas.”
Anyway, we had meetings about the free concert with the Rolling Stones in the weeks leading up to it, and in some ways, part of the problem was that nobody was particularly in charge. Cutler—and, by extension, the Rolling Stones—called some of the shots. Rock Scully—and, by extension, the Grateful Dead—called some of the shots. Ram Rod and some other people who worked for the Dead were working that Stones tour, so there seemed to be this natural feeling of collaboration, even though the two bands represented two very different camps. The Rolling Stones thought, “Hey, we’ll let the Dead put this together, because that’s what they do, and we’ll come and headline.” Alternately, we looked at it as a way to share a bill with the Rolling Stones—and we saw it as their thing. They were headlining. It was their deal; we were more like guests than hosts.
During one of the meetings at Mickey’s ranch, we were eating dinner in his barn—Jerry, Phil, most of the band—and these three skunks snuck in under the table. I had my Great Dane with me, lying down in the corner, and I saw him raise his eyes, lift his head, and start to growl, like he was about to pounce. I jumped on him as fast as I could to shut him up because if those skunks—they were civet cats, more specifically—fired off, then the whole barn would’ve stunk too much to discuss Altamont. Meeting adjourned. But I sat with the dog, and the skunks looked around, sniffed our feet, and left. Everybody has a “bad omen” story about Altamont and that was mine. The astrology was all off. All signs were bad news.
When Mick Jagger announced at a high-profile press conference that the Stones were going to close their tour by throwing a free concert in Golden Gate Park, that’s when things really started to come undone. He knew that he wasn’t supposed to announce it in advance like that. The stealth element was one of the ways we were able to pull these free gigs off. The publicity meant that now we wouldn’t be able to secure the proper permits to hold it in the park after all. We had to move it outside the San Francisco city limits. We found a place in Marin called Sears Point. A racetrack. It was a rather good location but the Rolling Stones and the company that operated Sears Point played politics and, ultimately, that site had to be scratched. Two days before the show. After an insane scramble, Scully was able to make arrangements with Altamont Speedway, which was located on a desolate stretch in Alameda County—the East Bay, past Oakland, about an hour outside San Francisco. Despite its proximity, the scene in the East Bay was significantly different from what was happening in San Francisco. It was a lot edgier, a lot tougher.
On the speedway, the stage was set up only three feet off the ground. With 300,000 people streaming in for a show—on a site that was built for significantly smaller crowds—we needed some kind of security to guard the stage. Nobody hired security. After all, it was a free show. But some members of the Hells Angels had a good relationship with the Dead and at our free shows before this, they would help out by making sure nobody fucked with the generators. Stuff like that. Nobody hired the Hells Angels to work security at Altamont. But somehow a loose kind of deal was struck with them where they would do things like make sure nobody rushed the stage in exchange for free beer for the day. Easy. Who made that call? Fingers point in all directions but at the end of the day, it doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t work like that. Everyone approved it, or allowed it, one way or the other. Either we’re all to blame or else nobody’s to blame.
Yes, concerns were raised about that decision and bigger concerns were raised about the facilities and the staging, but in the end, the desire to make this show happen, even in the face of all this adversity, clouded people’s judgments. Objections became nothing more than duly noted asterisks in the fine print.
The whole gig was just bad juju, man. They were flying bands in via helicopter, so we went to the heliport in Sausalito—the same one we used to practice at—and at one point, as Jerry and I were waiting around, Mick Jagger showed up and he was trying to figure out the score and we were just trying to get to the site and something was off, even then. You can YouTube the footage of all of us there making small talk. Jagger was gracious but there was some kind of charged energy that was just awkward. It was all disorganized and chaotic.
On the ground at the racetrack, it was a grim and grizzly mess. The crowd up front was crazed and they were encroaching upon the stage, or being pushed up on it by the sheer volume of people behind them, hundreds of thousands strong. The bikers were beating them back. But, like, really beating them. Overzealously. They had their bikes out with them and they were protecting those too, of course, but people were stumbling on them or trying to climb over them to get a better viewing position. The bikers started using pool cues as weapons, and some had their knives out. I don’t know—it was just a bad scene.
When our helicopter landed, the drummer for Santana, Michael Shrieve, came up to us—I think he and some of his bandmates were trying to hop on the next copter out of Dodge. He looked a bit roughed up. “What’s happening? You okay?” “No, man, things aren’t right. The bikers are knocking people out.” So, right then, we were like what the fuck did we just fly into? It felt like we landed in the middle of some kind of turf war. And, in a way, we did.
Shrieve told us that when the Jefferson Airplane took the stage, their frontman, Marty Balin, jumped into the audience to stop some of the bikers from beating a fan with pool cues. In return, Marty got punched out. They punched him out a second time, after he came to, for good measure.
Even backstage, the bikers had free rein to bully at will. There was nothing stopping them. No police. No security. The bikers were the security but, of course, they weren’t on the payroll and they answered to nobody. It showed us all that even freedom had an ugly side. It’s true that some of the Hells Angels were our friends and they remained our allies back there. But others, whom we had never seen before, were roughing people up just because they could. One of these unruly newcomers even threatened Phil at one point, seemingly for no real reason. The threat was serious. Phil was forced to retreat to the back of the pickup truck where we were all waiting for our turn to play. We felt like captives. And definitely not safe. When Crosby, Stills & Nash had the stage, we watched as Stephen Stills finished his set while bleeding, because he had been attacked.
The day’s lineup was supposed to be: Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones. But we scratched ourselves off that list. I don’t remember any real discussion about it. There was no way we were playing. No way we were going out there on that stage. Not a chance in hell we were playing under these hostile conditions. It was a simple survival instinct.
The Rolling Stones should’ve gone on at that point, but they waited several more hours until it got dark. Their true motivations came to light: they were filming the concert to use as the climax of their tour documentary. So it wasn’t free after all—they planned to profit from it. Maybe that had something to do with the dark shadow over the event: In our own experience, free concerts only worked when they had no other agenda. We could play or not play at will—there was nothing at stake either way.
We watched the Rolling Stones perform that night and, to their credit, they gave it their all. I couldn’t give it my full attention because I was also watching out for my hide and trying to monitor the chaos. Right in front of the stage, during “Under My Thumb,” another scuffle broke out. This one ended in murder. Someone in the audience, Meredith Hunter, pulled out a gun and he was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel. The courts later ruled that the biker was acting in self-defense. Meanwhile, the Stones kept playing, later claiming that they weren’t fully aware of what just happened. But they did play as if their own lives depended on it. Jagger always held himself as the devil and the band’s newest album was entitled Let It Bleed—all of that stuff kind of factored into the vibe, I’m afraid. It got ugly.
We took a helicopter back to San Francisco, where we were scheduled to play at the Fillmore West for the third consecutive night. I called it off. After seeing all that shit, after a guy got murdered during a concert we were connected with, after all the day’s horror, I didn’t feel like going out and playing music. It just didn’t seem right to me. At dinner, I said, “I’m not doing the gig.” The band backed me up on it. Bill Graham was furious about that, but that’s just how he was. I think everybody understood.
We may not have been a political band but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t have certain principles that we held sacred. We backed out of Altamont mostly out of concern for our own safety, sure. But the decision was also a statement about our views on violence—and our reaction to it. The era of peace and love had come to a close. And our refusal to play even later that night, miles away from the speedway, was our moment of silence.