The Hells Angels were vulgar fascists, bored by ideology or doctrine but loosely espousing a belief in order and the rule of force and the inherent transformative force of technology. “The Angels are prototypes,” Thompson argued. “Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment … and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity.”
No one was badly injured at the Oakland rally, but the day’s events galvanized the Berkeley political set. There were genuine enemies within, intent on establishing their patriotic bona fides at the expense of the counterculture. The Angels eventually issued a statement that they would avoid attending, or being in close proximity to, future antiwar rallies because “our patriotic concern for what these people are doing to our great nation may provoke us to violent acts.” The Angels, inconsistent as ever, were politically apolitical. They chose to stay out of politics because they were too moved by political issues to stay calm. Moreover, the wording of the statement reflected the Hells Angels’ self-image as defenders, not instigators. They would not assault demonstrators, but might nonetheless be provoked to violence by the demonstrators’ outrages.
Much of this burgeoning conservatism came from what the Angels and other groups perceived as a governmental attack on bikers. In 1966, the federal government requested that states write their own laws requiring the use of helmets while riding motorcycles. Many motorcyclists, including the Angels, were aghast at the government’s seeking to regulate their passion, and took an impassioned stance against the proposed helmet laws. America was a land of freedom, they argued, and as proponents of a furious individualism, they refused to be boxed in by bureaucracy. Their anti-regulation campaign dovetailed nicely with the burgeoning conservative movement, which also sought to limit governmental intrusion into private affairs. Moreover, conservatism’s impassioned defense of the war in Vietnam aligned with many bikers’ belief in American exceptionalism and military might. To ride a bike was to be free, and freedom had to be defended at all costs.
* * *
As loath as they were to talk about it, bikers were often the products of broken childhoods, meager lives, and diminished ambitions. Riding a motorcycle made them feel strong in a world that insisted on their weakness. Associating with a motorcycle club held prestige, too. To ride with a club was to be part of a confederation of real men. Clubs like the Hells Angels were strict about their membership in part to emphasize the desirability of joining, but also to maintain a barrier between themselves and the world they scorned. They were a family, but one that defined itself in opposition to all those other bland families.
The emblem of the new, useless man described by Thompson was a young biker named Alan Passaro. His father, Michael, was an Italian immigrant who had lifted himself up in the world. Michael was the proud owner of a barbershop in San Jose and property back home in his native Italy. His son had dreams of being a lawyer, a force in the world—anything, in fact, other than a barber. But the law required an academic diligence that Alan could not quite muster.
When high school came to an end in 1967, he enrolled in a barber college. He met his girlfriend Celeste while they were both in high school in Santa Clara, and now she, too, prepared for a life of scissors and hair clippings and dryers, taking classes at beauty school. Alan had been the boy she met in art class, the one who made pocket money by painting nativity scenes on the windows of local gas stations. Now, here they both were, in love but on the fast track to lives they did not truly want.
Passaro had a job at a barbershop in Milpitas, north of San Jose, and he and Celeste got married. They bought a two-bedroom house in San Jose. They were living their own modest version of the American dream, and yet for Alan, it did not feel like enough. He found drinking and drugs, elemental American distractions, and then came something even better. Motorcycles were loud, brutal, masculine, unflinching—everything he saw as missing from his milquetoast life. He got himself a Harley-Davidson, chopped it to his specifications, and made a new frame for it. He joined the Gypsy Jokers, a motorcycle club in San Jose. Celeste was not enamored of the motorcycle, or the club, but was pleased her husband had found a pastime. He was a father now, and his newborn son Michael (named after his immigrant father, the barber) needed him clean, needed him present. If motorcycles would smooth the way, it was a welcome diversion.
Soon, Bob Roberts, the president of the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels, approached the Gypsy Jokers. If they would voluntarily give up their colors, he offered, he would enroll them en masse as a new San Jose chapter of the Angels. They agreed, and handed over their colors. They were stunned when the Angel leadership summarily turned them down for membership. Roberts, seeking to salvage a fraught situation, told the disappointed former Gypsy Jokers that all sixty of them should come to San Francisco that week for a chapter meeting. There, they would all be accepted as prospects in the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels, on the way to full membership.
Roberts saw the new prospects as having already demonstrated their bona fides through their loyalty to their new club. Nonetheless, a certain process would have to be followed. The club was like a fraternity, and there would be some hazing before anyone could become a full-fledged member. Some of it was long-standing Angel practice. The new Hells Angel would attend his initiation in brand-new jeans, and a sleeveless jean jacket with a Hells Angel emblem sewed onto the back. Then he would take them off, and the members would dump a bucket of shit and piss onto the unsoiled clothing, taking care to trudge and plod over them until the filth was irredeemably caked into the fabric. The soiled clothes were the initiate’s new uniform, the daily costume of the new Hells Angel.
But there were also smaller tests. Roberts would ask men to go to the pharmacy and pick up tampons for his girlfriend. It was intended to be demeaning, a diminishment of his manhood, to do so, and any red-blooded man would be well within his rights to reject such a task. The men who unblinkingly followed orders, though, would most likely become full-fledged Hells Angels. Masculine bluster and paeans to freedom were the public face of the Hells Angels, but to become a member, such matters had to be put aside, and unquestioning fealty was the order of the day.
For Passaro, though, becoming a prospect, even a Hells Angels prospect, was a demotion in status, one that would have to be remedied by diligence and faithfulness. “I will prove that I’m good,” he told Roberts, intent on demonstrating his devotion. When they were not out riding or tinkering with their bikes, the San Francisco Angels liked to hang out at a pool hall on Hay Street. Many of them had grown proficient enough at the game that they had purchased their own cues, which they would bring along with them to the pool hall, and elsewhere.
Try as he might, the straight and narrow eluded Passaro. He had been arrested in 1963 when still a teenager, accused of stealing a car. In May 1968, he was arrested on automobile theft charges once more, and discovered to have marijuana in his pockets. Passaro, like the young man with whom he would soon be forever conjoined, seemed to live in the revolving door between the bedroom and the jail cell, freedom and incarceration. He grew long hair, a beard, a droopy mustache. The look was emblematic of the Angels, but also a symbolic severing of his ties with his past. Who would go to a longhair barber for a trim?
His understanding of who he was changed on becoming a Hells Angel. “I tried all that straight shit, and it wasn’t me,” he later said. “All my life I wanted to be a Hell’s Angel. Like some dudes want to be lawyers and some dudes want to be barbers, I wanted to be an Angel. I can’t tell you why. How do you describe love?”
The Hells Angels were a fraternity, a guild of true men, and Passaro desperately wanted to be accepted, to be the truest of the true. Pleasing his new masters, though, meant letting down the woman he had pledged to spend his life with. His relationship with Celeste grew rocky. Alan loved his son M
ichael, and cared for his wife, but the club came first. Alan ended up moving out of the home they had purchased, crashing on his fellow biker Dennis Montoya’s couch. He and Celeste were still close, but they needed some breathing room while each figured out what they wanted from life.
* * *
The Hells Angels were proudly exclusionary. There were no women in their ranks, and they were unblinking in their racial preferences. The Hells Angels attracted the bikers too raw, too devil-may-care even for other outlaw groups. For many Angels and Angels-to-be, the bikers were attractive primarily as defenders of an ironclad racial hierarchy. The Hells Angels had a long history of violent outbursts against African-Americans. In one incident reported in Thompson’s book, a fight had broken out between some Angels and a seven-foot-tall African-American biker from a rival club. They claimed that he had pulled a knife, and beat him mercilessly while attempting to subdue him. No knife was ever found, and the police let the matter go, seemingly content with the Angels’ explanation.
The Angels defined themselves as rip-roaring symbols of white, working-class macho vigor. They were threatened by expressions of black power, whether from rival motorcycle club members, the civil-rights movement, or the Black Panthers, then popular in the black neighborhoods of Oakland. They never expressed it quite so bluntly, but for the Angels, to be black was to be lesser, and any attempt to reorient the balance of power was viewed as an affront. The Angels’ long history of violence against African-Americans demonstrated that belief, with fists and boots and pool cues and knives doing the work of reminding them who was boss.
While many saw them as the counterculture’s police force, and others noted their propensity for fisticuffs with the authorities, it was possible to see the police and biker gangs like the Hells Angels as fundamentally allied. Bikers and cops may have regularly done battle, but both saw themselves as protectors of order in the communities they patrolled. Each identified a common enemy against whom they stood in unison. The police and the bikers may have squabbled like brothers, but they likely would have agreed that the political radicals, and the African-American community, were common threats.
Biker-led attacks on African-Americans often met with a muted response from the police. Many believed that the Angels and other biker groups functioned as a first line of defense against African-Americans, an unacknowledged paramilitary force. “There were blacks raping our kids, our women,” Bob Roberts, the leader of the Angels’ San Francisco chapter, would later argue in defense of the Angels’ rearguard work. Roberts would walk the length of Page Street, in the Haight, wearing a HUEY P. NEWTON button covered in etched notches affixed to his jacket as a provocation. Each notch stood for a black man he had assaulted in his self-declared mission to clean up the streets of his neighborhood.
An incident that had taken place in San Francisco in September 1969 underscored the Angels’ unpredictability, and helped to explain why they were perpetual targets of police surveillance. Moreover, it offered clear evidence of the Hells Angels’ racist predilections. On the night of September 8, the SFPD had received a report that three bikers were assaulting a group of African-Americans outside the Angels’ clubhouse at 715 Ashbury Street. Police came to the scene, and spotted two men pushing a brown 1959 Pontiac down the street, letting it coast unassisted down a hill. They approached and arrested the two men.
One of the men, Ron Segely, attempted to run, and was knocked to the ground by the police. The second man, already cuffed, sought to choke a police officer with his handcuffs, and was also subdued. Then the bikers massed inside 715 Ashbury took notice of the commotion and emerged. There were forty-five or fifty men, along with an unstated number of women, and they began to pull the police officers off their friends. The Angels told the cops that they had guns and were willing to shoot them to protect their brothers. The police officers pulled their guns, and the bikers and their friends dashed back inside. The SFPD wound up arresting twenty-one men and fifteen women that night, including Segely and Roberts.
The three African-American victims told the police that they lived down the block from the Angels’ clubhouse, at 709 Ashbury. They had seen the bikers congregated on the street and approached them, asking “What’s happening?” One unidentified Angel had responded by throwing a can of beer at their windshield, and then twelve Hells Angels gathered to pummel their car. They hit the windows with tire irons, breaking the front and back windows, and assaulted the three passengers. When the victims fled, they gave chase, running after them for two blocks. Having failed to catch them, three of the bikers came back to the Pontiac, pushing it away from the Angels’ clubhouse and allowing it to drift down the street and crash. Racially motivated antipathy and a misguided desire to protect their space had seemingly compelled the Angels to assault African-American bystanders without provocation.
Sonny Barger argued that the swastikas on the Hells Angels’ helmets were mere decoration, with no political significance, but the Angels’ behavior indicated a certain affinity for authoritarianism, and for those inclined to take a stand against minority rabble-rousers. The Hells Angels saw themselves as the tip of the spear defending their communities against all potential infractions from African-Americans. It was not accidental that Barger, in his memoir, observed that there had been little crime in the East Oakland neighborhood where he had been raised, shortly followed by his noting that “few blacks lived in East Oakland.”
* * *
There were two distinct views of the Hells Angels, and of bikers in general, neither entirely accurate. In the first, they were icons of a purer American spirit, their sangfroid and restlessness emblematic of the country’s pioneer ethic and its exploration of unknown frontiers. While the rest of the country had grown fatally limp, the Hells Angels still roared across the nation’s highways, in search of freedom. In the second, the Hells Angels were beasts with the powers of demigods. They were the dark spirit of Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority, a paramilitary force of racist, ultraconservative revanchists intent on stifling dissent and fomenting chaos. The Angels were bits of both, but many of them were also working stiffs with day jobs as machinists and factory workers, and family men with wives and children and mortgages. They were average working-class white men with an interest in motorcycle riding who were so enamored of the masculine, steely, unfettered style embodied by the Hells Angels that they took it for their own.
To be a Hells Angel was to play a role. It was to be the baddest, toughest, most daring, most amoral, manliest man in any room, ready to fight any man or fuck any woman, to be up for any challenge that came their way. They were actors who wore their costumes morning and night, their masks eventually hardening until they had fused with their faces. The Angels performed a role for public consumption and private amusement. The mainstream media were horrified by the Hells Angels, seeing them as the embodiment of all that was wrong with the growing dropout culture, but the Angels could not have taken the form they did without the express approval, and fascination, of the cultural establishment. They needed the media’s attention, and even its alarm. They were bogeymen, and demanded to be celebrated and demonized as such. The role fit them like a second skin. “The Angels play the role seven days a week: they wear their colors at home, on the street and sometimes even to work; they ride their bikes to the neighborhood grocery for a quart of milk,” wrote Thompson. “An Angel without his colors feels naked and vulnerable—like a knight without his armor.”
For all the attention they received, there were surprisingly few Hells Angels in the Bay Area. By the mid-1960s, there were only about 150 Angels in the region, split into chapters in San Francisco, Oakland, and elsewhere. This was due in part to the care the Angels took in selecting new members, with a long and rigorous screening process. It also reflected the Angels’ outsized media presence, which gave off a whiff of a shadow army when it was more like an overgrown club.
When the Hells Angels received the call from the planners of a Rolling Stones concert, the rough outline
sounded familiar: another free show in Golden Gate Park, much like the ones they had worked for the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and others. Everyone involved—the performers, the bikers, and the audience—would likely already be familiar with the venue. The Angels’ responsibilities would be minimal, and even with the substantially larger crowds expected, the Stones show would likely involve nothing more than keeping potential mischief-makers away from the generators.
Then the concert venue changed, first to Sears Point, and then to the Altamont Speedway. The chaotic planning left little time to reassess the arrangements already in place, and so the Hells Angels, fixtures of the San Francisco scene, were carried along to the outer reaches of Alameda County, to a place they did not know, and fans they had never met, under what would prove to be unpredictable, anarchic conditions.
Part Two
UNRAVELING
5. The Outer Circle
Fans stood near the entrance to Altamont, anxiously awaiting the opportunity to pounce on an open gate and stream inside. Some had slept in the junked cars that littered the speedway. For at least one couple, the backseat of a rusted Plymouth provided enough privacy for a rushed sexual encounter. At last, dawn came and the speedway opened to admit the crowds, many of whom had spent the night unprofitably seeking sleep outside its gates. An enormous mass of young people began pouring through, wine bottles and joints and LSD tabs gripped in their hands along with their blankets and coolers, resembling nothing so much as an invading army intent on occupying enemy territory.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 9
