Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont

by Saul Austerlitz

  The only thing missing for Hawkeye and his friends was a pad and a pencil. There were so many free-love girls there, all flashing their breasts and flirting outrageously with the bikers, that he later wished he had gotten some of their numbers for later use. This was a party, and they were the guests of honor. They never wanted it to end. Hawkeye and his friends felt free, unquestioned, even loved. They tossed some overzealous band handlers off the stage, and basked in the glow of the audience’s pleasure at seeing this literal leveling. The whole crowd laughed with them, or at least it felt that way for these young men, high on crank—a variant of methamphetamine—and their own authority.

  Four or five plainclothes Alameda County sheriffs stood around backstage, their weapons in their holsters. After intervening in one of the early fights between the Hells Angels and fans, they took note of how thoroughly outnumbered they were, and thereafter ceded the field to the Angels. Few fans or performers saw them for the remainder of the day.

  The counterculture saw the Hells Angels as they wanted to see them, turning a blind eye to their professed love of violence, their misbegotten politics, and their outright racism. That alliance was in the process of breaking down this Saturday, shattered by the overly ambitious professional demands imposed on the Angels, and a creeping rage toward the music-loving masses.

  The bikers’ ferociousness, and their remarkable sense of cohesion, made for a notable contrast with the idealism of the crowd they patrolled. The counterculture believed itself to be an organized mass, intent on fomenting change in the United States: ending a war, returning power to the people. But seeing the Hells Angels was a reminder of the counterculture’s limitations, embodied in the actions of their foes.

  The Angels were violent authoritarians in the guise of bikers, intent on imposing their will on an unruly crowd. They were also a cohesive unit, acting in unison. The Angels had determined who would run Altamont, and what was and was not permissible there, and no one would be permitted to question the new order. This was the day’s new reality. The counterculture spoke of unity, but the Hells Angels lived it. It was so powerful in action that it could hold hundreds of thousands in its thrall. What good was a peace sign against someone wielding a pool cue?

  Sam Cutler speaking from the stage. (Courtesy of Robert Altman)

  Some of the Angels approached Sam Cutler, guiding the action onstage, looking for guidance about how to handle unruly crowd members. This rushed tête-à-tête only further underscored the differences between Altamont and previous concerts, in which the Angels had putatively provided security but rarely interacted with the crowd. “We don’t give a fuck,” Cutler bluntly told the Angels. “Just keep these people away.” Whether or not the Stones and their representatives knew what they were doing in hiring the Hells Angels, they had now given them explicit authority to manhandle the crowd. Passive negligence regarding the show’s security had now become, due to the disinterest of the Rolling Stones and their handlers, an active policy of violence and domination. The Angels were now patrolling deeper into the crowd, targeting the 18-wheelers that had been parked next to the stage. The Angels seized fans sitting atop the trucks and flung them off, a dozen or more feet down to the hard ground.

  * * *

  Once they got settled in, fans began to realize that there would be nowhere to go for the duration of the concert. The crowd kept inching forward, steadily filling what had once been pristine observation points with people. Fans slowly understood that there would be no leaving until everyone around them was ready to depart, too. They would have to hunker down for the duration of the day. The furthest they would be able to make it was to the cars parked nearby, where they might be able to urinate with a modicum of privacy. This was home now.

  Meredith Hunter was one of the thousands of drivers on the highway that day, taking in the sight of the newly sprawling temporary city unfurling its borders at the edge of Alameda County. He pulled his borrowed Ford Mustang to the side of the road, tucking it in behind dozens of other cars on the highway leading to the Altamont Speedway. Cars lined both sides of the highway, the remnants of an armored corps reduced to the level of infantrymen. Hunter and his girlfriend Patti Bredehoft, and their friends Judy (a fellow Berkeley High student) and Ronnie Brown, joined the stream of concertgoers trooping away from the highway and over the hills toward the racetrack.

  The speedway was already crowded when the foursome made their way toward the stage, but there was still enough room amid the crush for them to snag some of the coveted real estate closest to the stage. Glancing around the concert venue, Hunter may have silently taken note of how few other black men were present that day, besides himself and Brown. This was, overwhelmingly and unsurprisingly, a white affair. And at least some of the African-Americans in the crowd seemed to be targeted by the Hells Angels. A longhaired biker threw one young man to the ground for no apparent reason, then proceeded to mouth obscenities at the fallen concertgoer. This was undoubtedly a familiar feeling for anyone, like Hunter, who had spent time at the parties and celebrations of the overwhelmingly white counterculture. Perhaps a fleeting thought of the burning crosses his sister had seen on her excursions into the far reaches of the Bay Area flitted through his mind. Were there people in the crowd who hated him with such fiery passion?

  * * *

  As Santana wrapped up its unremarkable set, the bulk of the audience had gotten itself into place, prepared for local heroes Jefferson Airplane. The Airplane had helped to introduce the concept of the free show to the Bay Area, regularly storming Golden Gate Park and surprising fans with an impromptu concert. Altamont was intended to be a steroidally enhanced version of the Golden Gate Park shows, and while the concert had gotten off to a rough start, many in the crowd hoped that Jefferson Airplane would steady frayed nerves.

  Jefferson Airplane had provided the soundtrack to the hippie homeland of the Haight, their music the aural expression of the counterculture’s rebellious pose. Songs like “We Can Be Together” were anthems of mutiny from the polite consensus, romanticized statements of protest that celebrated, at least metaphorically, the forces of chaos and anarchy.

  The band had come together in March 1965, when Paul Kantner, Catholic military-school alumnus turned LSD connoisseur, took the stage at the Drinking Gourd, a folk club in San Francisco, then decided he would rather not play his set after all. On his way out, a painter, singer, dancer, and actor named Marty Balin stopped him and asked if he wanted to start a band together. Balin had seen Trini Lopez play folk songs with an electric guitar, and was instantly transfixed by the combination of tradition and forward-thinking modernity. They were joined by obsessive blues fan Jorma Kaukonen, who had been granted, for obscure reasons, the nickname Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane. Kaukonen passed on the name to the band, which lopped off the first half and called themselves Jefferson Airplane. Soon enough, the band’s savvy management team was making JEFFERSON AIRPLANE LOVES YOU buttons and bumper stickers, and paid young women to pass them out at other performers’ shows.

  Their sound blended folk, rock, and blues, with a department-store model and finishing-school graduate named Grace Slick joining Balin as the group’s other lead singer. The title of their first album with Slick came from the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, who heard one track and declared it as “surrealistic as a pillow.” 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow made them stars, and featured two era-defining hits: “Somebody to Love” and the Alice in Wonderland–inspired “White Rabbit.” The band played before twenty thousand people at the Polo Grounds in Golden Gate Park at the Human Be-In, celebrated by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ralph J. Gleason as “a statement of life, not of death, and a promise of good, not of evil.” For their fans, Jefferson Airplane were the avatars of a better, kinder world to come, and Altamont would be their victory lap as much as the Stones’ or the Dead’s.

  The Airplane was among the most experienced groups of the era at playing massive outdoor shows. They had been at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967
and at Woodstock, where they had been scheduled to go onstage at 9 p.m. on Saturday and didn’t get to start their set until 7 a.m. Sunday morning. They had played before one hundred thousand people at the Atlantic City Pop Festival in August 1969 alongside the Byrds, Little Richard, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, and had been at the Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival with the Rolling Stones the week prior to Altamont. They had boarded a 7 a.m. helicopter to the speedway, bedraggled and unkempt, after getting in from Florida at 3:30 a.m. The band was used to facing down belligerent police officers and security guards threatening the peace at their gatherings. “Remember,” Kantner told the crowd at one 1967 show in Bakersfield, “there are five of them and five thousand of us.” Jefferson Airplane began their set at Altamont with “We Can Be Together,” but the message stubbornly refused to take hold. Unity was not the tune being hummed on this day.

  There were dozens of fans in the scrum near the stage during the Airplane’s set, with elbows and knees making unwanted contact with nearby bystanders. Fans grew unruly, pushing and shoving. Some stormed the stage in their shambling, drugged-out fashion.

  The crowd was acting out. They would surge toward the stage in regular waves, and intrepid or foolhardy souls would attempt to climb up and approach the musicians. Rampant misdemeanors, many of them fueled by drugs, notably detracted from the crowd’s pleasure of the day, but few crimes required immediate intervention.

  One dancer, the music having wormed its way into that deepest place inside of him, the place where his soul resided and dreams of transcendence lingered, cut loose in front of the stage. Or perhaps he had gotten hold of a batch of the good acid making its way around the Altamont Speedway, and visions of sugarplums and fairy dust danced in his head during their performance of “The Other Side of This Life.” Either way, the man—young, hefty, Hispanic—had stripped off his shirt and twirled unselfconsciously through the crowd. He waved his arms around and clomped his feet, and inadvertently or otherwise, he was stomping on nearby concertgoers. It was an annoyance, not an emergency.

  Then the Hells Angels came roaring down from the stage, dispensing their own brand of mob justice. The Angels selected victims and systematically targeted them, isolating them before pummeling them into submission.

  One shirtless African-American man who was at the center of a struggle early in Jefferson Airplane’s set attempted to hold off an assault from a phalanx of Angels. Another, a bearded young white man wearing a hat, sought to stave off the bikers verbally, holding up his palms in an instantly recognizable symbol of surrender. The Angels knocked him down anyway, proceeding to calmly smash him with their pool cues. A coordinated, lightning-quick array of blows rained down on his head and chest, an act of extreme aggression far beyond any minor irritation the victim might have caused.

  The crowd, hemmed in, found room it did not know existed, collectively surging back to avoid the wrath of the Angels. A semicircle of open space formed around the beating, an empty amphitheater for this symbolic performance of the eternal showdown between the powerful and the powerless.

  The crowd froze in shock and fear. No one knew how to respond, what to do to stop the thrashing. The Hells Angels were vastly outnumbered. There were approximately five thousand concertgoers for each biker present, but only the Angels were willing to be so vicious, so unrestrained. Which attendees would be so foolhardy as to put themselves in the path of a vengeful Angel? And so the Hells Angels imposed their will on an entire concert, their brutality making it increasingly unlikely that they would find any opposition. Instead, lone members of the crowd lifted two fingers into the air, forming peace signs that they hoped would mark their intellectual and spiritual opposition to the Angels’ excesses. The symbol was empty, demonstrating an inability to wrestle seriously with the enormity of genuine malevolence.

  After each Angel incursion, the semicircle of empty space immediately filled in, so rapidly and so thoroughly that some fans were left without room to place both feet on the ground. It was a frenzy, one that had as much to do with the frustrations of the day and the desire to assert some minuscule semblance of authority in a chaotic situation, as with any actual proximity to the musicians.

  The crowd was uncontrolled, and growing uncontrollable. There were so many people at Altamont, and everyone wanted to be close enough to the stage to reach out and touch the musicians. They surged forward, pressed shoulder to shoulder, flank to flank, and no organizer, no star, no calming voice was capable of convincing them to stop. The Hells Angels saw themselves as having been hired to do a particular and limited job. The uncontrolled environment made it increasingly difficult for them to provide security.

  From the stage, Jefferson Airplane could see the Angels darting through the crowd and clobbering people who approached the stage. The band was frustrated by the rampant violence, which they seemed to condone with their presence.

  As the opening notes to “Somebody to Love” rang out, the band’s co-lead singer and guitarist, Marty Balin, was visibly annoyed by what he saw as the Hells Angels’ provocations, and jumped down into the crowd, in an excess of foolhardy courageousness, to break up a fight between the bikers and a young African-American man. Balin saw the Angels targeting people and insisted that they stop.

  The Airplane had spent time with the Hells Angels in the past, and had always been friendly with the bikers, but they were not entirely surprised by the sudden shift in the tone of their interaction at Altamont. To be a musician was to be armed for the unexpected, and to always be prepared for what came next. On this day, the Hells Angels were the problem, and Jefferson Airplane struggled to tamp down the violence already beginning to spread out, beyond the stage and into the crowd.

  The Angels gathered near the stage conferred, and they agreed: something would have to be done. A Hells Angel named Animal was dispatched to speak to Balin, still in the crowd, and plead the Angels’ side. “They’re pushing on the stage. They’re knocking bikes over,” he told Balin. “We’re not trying to be assholes. We’re just trying to protect our property.” Balin, unmoved by the bikers’ concerns, responded angrily: “Fuck you, Animal.” Animal, donning a hat-cum-headdress that made him look like some sort of hybrid beast, half-man and half-predator, shook his head, a tense situation now grown all the more stressful: “Man, don’t talk to me like that.”

  As Balin likely understood, to speak to a Hells Angel with such brazen disrespect invited a fierce and immediate response. The Hells Angels traveled with their own laws, a portable code of ethics that enveloped them like a cloud. The rules were immutable and permanent, and friends and even bystanders were expected to abide by them. Balin, a longtime friend of Animal’s, and of the Angels, was a surprising candidate for such blatant disrespect to the Angel code. Another man might have immediately felt the crunch of a fist breaking his nose, but Balin was being offered a second chance to repent, and to tone down his burning anger when in the presence of a Hells Angel. Balin ignored the warning, and tripled down on his original statement: “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.” Animal—a dead fox, eyes bulging open, propped jauntily atop his head—felt compelled to respond in predatory fashion, and viciously cold-cocked Balin, knocking the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane unconscious.

  The Angels had changed the rules of their encounters, and their demands of fealty now extended to the entire crowd. If the Angels were willing to beat up a musician in the middle of his performance, what could possibly prevent them from doing the same to an anonymous concertgoer?

  “Hey man, I’d just like to mention that the Hells Angels smashed Marty Balin in the face, knocked him out for a bit. I’d like to thank you for that,” guitarist Jorma Kaukonen calmly intoned into the microphone, addressing the Angels. His bandmates were terrified, afraid that Kaukonen’s attitude had him next in line for a beating. Guitarist Paul Kantner was used to these kinds of situations at Jefferson Airplane concerts. He would regularly march into the middle of an unruly audience, his guitar over his head like a mu
sical halo, intent on breaking up any ruckus that ensued. The guitar served as instant identification, but the threat of being whacked on the head with Kantner’s Rickenbacker may have played some part in defusing any tension. Here, though, a guitar would not be enough to calm the audience down, nor would Kantner’s presence impose tranquility.

  Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane arguing with the Hells Angels. (Courtesy of Robert Altman)

  One Hells Angel made his way onto the stage, grabbed one of the microphones, and told off the band for interfering: “Is this on? You talkin’ to me, I’m gonna talk to you.” Kaukonen replied calmly: “I’m talking to you, man. I’m talking to the people who hit my lead singer.” The Angel riposted forcefully but somewhat incoherently, “They’re my people. Let me tell you what’s happening. You are what’s happening.” Having witnessed her bandmate’s beating, co-lead singer Grace Slick got on the mic and sought to spread the blame around evenly: “People get weird, and you need people like the Angels to keep people in line. But the Angels also, you don’t bust people in the head for nothing. So both sides are fucking up temporarily. Let’s not keep fucking up!”