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

by Saul Austerlitz

  * * *

  The Rolling Stones, the ostensible stars of the day, perched above the hellish scene, utterly unable to prevent the violence. Guitarist Mick Taylor was stunned by the uncontrolled environment, and found himself incapable of enjoying what should have been a triumphant moment for his new band. He thought about walking off the stage, but was worried that this would only exacerbate the calamity unfolding at his feet.

  Sam Cutler approached Jagger with a message about the violence, but Jagger waved him off. The lead singer called out to Richards to halt the song: “Will you cool it and I’ll try and stop it.”

  Jagger asked the crowd to sit down, hoping that if more fans got off their feet, the less pushing there might be, and the sooner calm might be restored. The Angels began flapping their arms, gesturing to those fans near them to sit. Jagger called out to his “brothers and sisters,” pleading with them: “Everybody, just cool out!” The crowd reoccupied the space that had been emptied out by the Angels. Watts played drum fills to occupy the silence and Richards fingered his guitar. “All right?” Jagger asked the crowd. “Is there anyone here that’s hurt?”

  “Something very funny always happens when we start that number,” Jagger impishly told the crowd. The Rolling Stones had only been too happy to seize on others’ claims of the band’s demonic powers, and now Altamont would be further evidence of their dark hold on their audience. The band started up “Sympathy” once more, Richards’s guitar shooting off sparks as it let loose. Richards, framed by the darkness, calmly let loose thunderbolts of rhythm. The elegant, woozy riff appeared to have momentarily lulled the audience into tranquility. As Jagger sang of czars and ministers, a dog casually strolled across the stage. The day had entered the realm of the surreal. But the violence had only temporarily abated.

  As Richards let loose a beautifully limber solo, fluid and relentless, the music was overpowered by the sound of a horrified crowd. The Angels were beating a young man whose overly exuberant dancing—so daring when in the presence of such violence—had irritated them. An Angel shoved the dancer, and another biker began swinging his pool cue wildly at the crowd. The audience members in closest proximity to the Angels surged away from their reach, and the dancer took the opportunity to run away from the stage. The Hells Angels caught up with him, raining blows on his head with their pool cues and kicking him mercilessly, all for the crime of having momentarily enjoyed the concert.

  The Maysleses’ cameras caught a goateed young man in a newsboy cap looking at Jagger, silently pleading with him to intervene on behalf of the audience. As Jagger kept dancing, his hands atop his head, his elbows out, encased in his own private world of pleasure, it was clear, to one concertgoer at least, that the lead singer of the Rolling Stones was ill-inclined to help. It was a damning moment. “The Stones’ music was strong but it could not stop the terror,” Stanley Booth would later write of the scene. “There was a look of disbelief on the people’s faces, wondering how the Stones could go on playing and singing in the bowels of madness and violent death.”

  One young woman, close enough to rest her fingers on the stage, nodded her head as tears ran down her cheeks. Meanwhile, the fan next to her smiled beatifically, thrilled by his proximity to the Rolling Stones. It was a study in contrasts, with the unrest and uncertainty of the day parceled out unevenly and inconsistently. Some fans were overwhelmed by the chaos, while others were intent on boxing out all such distractions from the music.

  A close look at the Maysles’ footage would also later reveal a brief glimpse of a young black man in a black shirt and lime-green suit, surrounded by the crush of fans near the stage. Meredith Hunter would appear for about eight seconds in his penultimate appearance onscreen, looking mostly calm and untroubled, even as he stood in the eye of the oncoming storm. He raises his head, the wide brim of his black hat ascending to reveal his face. He is sticking out his tongue, his eyes lifting to take in the stage, but the most telling detail is just how close he is to the Hells Angels. The burly biker in the black watch cap and the Angels jacket would seemingly only need to briskly shove two young women out of his way to stand chest-to-chest with Hunter.

  The Angels were not merely the accidental purveyors of fear; they were studied practitioners of low-grade terror. By the Angels’ warped logic, their opponents understood violence would be the bikers’ response to all assaults on their honor. Altamont, by this logic, was less a mistake, or a wildly excessive counterattack, than simply a larger stage for what the Hells Angels had always done. The Angels were intent on dominating and terrifying all opponents, real and imagined; today, their enemies ran three hundred thousand deep. “Who’s fighting, and what for?” Jagger asked the crowd. “Who’s fighting, and what for? Why are we fighting?” “The fuckin’ Angels,” shouted a disembodied voice in the crowd.

  Keith Richards, never as enamored of hippie romanticism as Jagger, harbored no illusions about who was at fault for the disorder in the crowd. “Listen, man. Either these cats cool it, man, or we don’t play,” Richards announced from the stage, taking a notably more confrontational stance than Jagger had by pointing directly at the Angels below him. The stern warning, clearly directed at the Hells Angels, had little effect on the chaos below. An Angel grabbed one of the microphones and implored the crowd to calm down, as if they had been the instigators of the chaos: “Hey, if you don’t cool it you ain’t gonna hear no more music! Now, you want to all go home, or what?” Stones roadie Ian Stewart frantically called for a doctor to approach the stage, and Sam Cutler made an announcement about a five-year-old girl who had gotten separated from her parents. Jagger conferred with Animal, still highly visible in his fox-head hat, who seemed to be keeping the Stones singer informed about disturbances in the crowd.

  Patti Bredehoft would have been just as content to leave, having had more than her fill of the festival ambience, but Meredith Hunter was intent on staking his claim to the Stones, and she was there because he wanted her to stand with him. In the ongoing melee near the stage, Bredehoft was separated from her boyfriend, but still able to see him. She could see Hunter, like many other concertgoers positioned near the stage, still aggressively attempting to lay claim to his own space. He had climbed onto one of the speaker boxes set up just next to the stage, in search of the best view, and the modicum of protection it granted.

  “Let’s play cool-out music,” Richards told Jagger, uncoiling a languorous blues melody on his guitar. Sonny Barger later claimed that, at this point, he approached Richards and pointed his pistol at him. Keith would play his guitar, he claimed to say, or he was dead. “He played like a motherfucker,” Barger crowed. But Barger could not be seen next to Richards in the film footage shot that day, nor was his bragging entirely believable. If Barger had pointed a gun at Richards, the Rolling Stones would have had a legitimate claim to playing Altamont as hostages to a hostile, armed force, compelled to play by the threat of being maimed or killed. The Stones never made such a claim, nor did they ever mention it in the years and decades that followed. Barger likely confused fantasy with reality here, mistaking his undoubted verbal intimidation of the day’s headliners with a more physical brand of assault.

  “If we are all one,” Jagger announced, “let’s show we’re all one.” “Preach it, brother,” a voice called out from the crowd, and Jagger called on the crowd once more to sit down, hoping to cool some of the overheating tempers on the speedway. Jagger called for a doctor to come up front, next to the scaffolding, and Mick Taylor snuck a quick drag off the cigarette stuck into the fretboard of his guitar before launching the languorous melody line of “Under My Thumb.” The song felt stretched out now, elongated to encompass the crowd, the night, the enormity of this moment. Here was the Stones’ moment of triumph, feted and adored in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands.

  As the drums entered once more, and Jagger repeatedly intoned the line “I pray that it’s all right,” another space ominously began to clear in the audience below. The huge mass of people ne
ar the stage, pressed together so tightly that they had practically formed a single, many-limbed organism, Homo rockismus, was now disintegrating, crumbling under the weight of the fear sweeping its ranks. The Hells Angels swooped into the crowd, a leather-clad phalanx wading into the morass, and the fans in their vicinity rapidly backpedaled, seeking daylight from whomever or whatever had sparked the Angels’ ire.

  The Rolling Stones had initially instructed the Hells Angels that their main responsibility was to keep the audience off the stage. The Angels had devoted much of their day to throwing fans off the stage, often with more enthusiasm than the bands might have envisioned or desired. During the Stones’ set, too, the Angels intended to keep the stage unoccupied. Their charge, as they saw it, extended beyond the stage to the bands’ equipment. One of the people in the crowd standing on a speaker box was Meredith Hunter.

  A hefty Hells Angel jerked roughly on Hunter’s ear and hair, chuckling all the while at his daring as he yanked Hunter down from the speaker box and onto the ground alongside him. Hunter shook off the Angel, and the Angel grabbed him by the arm and hand. Hunter pulled back, and the Angel punched him in the mouth.

  When Bredehoft glanced in his direction, having missed the opening beats of the skirmish, she thought she saw Hunter turning around and being approached by first one Angel, and then two or three more. The Angels knocked Hunter to the ground, and he leapt up, intent on defending himself against their assault.

  Hunter attempted to flee into the crowd. The Angel then leapt off the stage and chased after Hunter, joined by four of his fellow bikers. They stepped on bystanders’ fingers and feet in their haste to pursue him. Five bikers surrounded one teenager, assaulting him without justification or fear of interruption, as on so many other occasions that day. Meredith Hunter pushed the crowd away from him in his desperate flight from the Angels, looking fiercely at his tormentors in a doomed attempt to scare them off.

  Meredith Hunter was in flight from the Hells Angels who had beaten him. He had watched the pool cues raining down on concertgoers all day, had seen the manic glee with which the bikers had beaten others for the crime of enjoying themselves. He had undoubtedly noticed, as well, the viciousness with which the Angels had singled out other African-Americans. What thoughts must have surged through his mind in the moments during which he desperately sought to escape their frenzied grip?

  Perhaps, too, the methamphetamine Hunter had taken during the day had lowered his inhibitions, and dulled the innate caution that anyone would have when surrounded by weapon-wielding bikers. But Hunter was not just another concertgoer. He was a black man amid a sea of white faces, and perhaps his reckless calculation was predicated on the knowledge that he had already been singled out for punishment by a group of white men known to target black people.

  Reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket, he pulled out his .22 Smith & Wesson pistol and held it up in the air. Both his arms were spread, with his left hand, clutching the gun, outstretched in the direction of the stage. Bredehoft shouted at Hunter not to shoot and pulled closer to her boyfriend. She grabbed at Hunter, then turned, spun around by the momentum of the fracas. Hunter was still running away, even as he began to lower his gun. A short, stocky Angel wearing a sleeveless light-brown vest with a FRISCO patch over the left breast jumped on him from behind, grabbing at his arm. The biker almost rode on his back as he raised his arm over his head and brought his knife down in a long, curving arc, stabbing Hunter twice. Bredehoft was now alone in the empty circle cleared out by the fearful audience as Hunter was carried away from her.

  If we were to pause here, we could picture a moment when the clash might have been resolved in markedly different fashion. The danger had been mostly checked. The gun had likely already been wrenched away from Hunter, and even if it had not yet been, he was hardly in any position to fire it anymore. If the Hells Angels had believed in good faith that Meredith Hunter was a threat to the Rolling Stones, or to the crowd, they might have hauled him away, and dispatched one of their men to call the police. The threat would have been defused, and Hunter might have been taken to the hospital, his wounds serious but quite likely, given their location, not life-threatening. Meredith Hunter might have eventually been arrested, and charged with possession of a deadly weapon. But this was not the story of the day, nor of the men tasked with protecting the crowd. Vengeance, not justice, carried the day. Punishment was dealt out swiftly and brutally. The momentum of the scuffle carried Meredith Hunter toward the nearby scaffolding, where he disappeared from sight, surrounded by Hells Angels intent on teaching him a lesson.

  The Hells Angel stabbed Hunter no less than four more times, his knife repeatedly piercing his back. Hunter, wounded, dropped to his knees. The Hells Angel gripped him by the shoulders and kicked him in the face, over and over. The Angels surrounded him in a loose circle, pounding him with their boots until he collapsed face-forward. The Angels punched and kicked Meredith as they dragged him away from the stage and toward the scaffolding. Hunter fell to the ground, and bumped against some part of the scaffolding, perhaps its pillars. Hunter softly told his attackers, his strength already beginning to fade, “I wasn’t going to shoot you.”

  Bredehoft watched as a small group of Hells Angels surrounded Meredith and pummeled and stomped him, their boot-clad feet and fists surging into his helpless body with terrifying relentlessness. She screamed at the Angels, pleading with them to stop: stop the fighting, stop the assault on her boyfriend, stop the madness. Bredehoft grabbed the jacket of one Angel near her, attempting to pull him off her boyfriend, but he simply threw his arms back, shrugging her off without lifting a hand to her. The Angels were now locked in on Hunter, and Bredehoft’s efforts were incapable of distracting them from their vigilante justice.

  Meredith Hunter was in front of them and under their feet, and something had enraged them, something had set the Hells Angels into a frenzied motion that would not be sated. Any threat that Hunter’s gun might have posed had long since been quelled, but the assault went on until he was battered and bruised and completely still.

  “Look, we’re splitting!” Keith Richards angrily shouted into his microphone. “If those cats don’t stop beating everyone in sight. I want them out of the way!” A Hells Angel instantly approached Richards, and began tugging on his arm. “Hey!” he yelled at the Stones’ guitarist. “The guy’s got a gun out there and is shooting at the stage.” The story of Hunter’s shooting at the stage, however implausible, was spreading from the moment of the encounter with the Angels. (How had Hunter fired his gun in the crowd without hitting anyone or anything? And where had the bullets that had supposedly been fired gone?)

  Hunter was now down on the ground under the scaffolding. One of the Angels grabbed a cardboard garbage can with a metal rim and proceeded to bash it against Hunter’s skull. He then dropped the garbage can and, joined by his fellow bikers, kicked Hunter repeatedly in the head. The Angel who had stabbed him, not yet done with Hunter, stood on top of his battered head for a full minute before finally stepping back. “Don’t touch him,” he told a bystander who had been watching the fight. “He’s going to die anyway.”

  Giving up on fighting off the Angels herself, Bredehoft stepped out from under the scaffolding and approached the nearest members of the crowd. Please, she asked, would somebody help out her boyfriend? No one moved. They had seen what the Hells Angels were capable of, and were frightened of becoming their next victims. They moved back, still able to see a fellow audience member being assaulted by the bikers, but out of the reach of their fists and pool cues. They warned her to get back, otherwise she might be the next one hurt.

  Bredehoft attempted to break through the tight circle of bikers, hoping to pull Hunter out to safety, but a burly Angel stopped her, telling her that he was not worth it. “He was gonna kill us,” the Angel told Bredehoft. “He deserves whatever he gets.” Why was she trying so hard to help him, anyway? The Angel appeared not to realize that Bredehoft was Hunter’s girlfriend,
assuming, perhaps, that she was merely a well-intentioned hippie girl hoping to intervene to protect a stranger. He shoved Bredehoft back, and an onlooker caught her before she crumpled to the ground.

  Bredehoft gave up. She had tried to stop the fighting herself, and had futilely attempted to enlist the help of others in fending off the Hells Angels. Nothing had worked. She could do nothing. She sat there crying, pleading with them to stop, watching helplessly as they pummeled her boyfriend. She was still begging them to stop, but the hope she had had, only a few minutes prior, that she might convince them to behave rationally had dissipated into despair. They would not be done until they said they were done—until they had extracted payback from Meredith Hunter for his perceived crimes against the collective body of the Hells Angels.

  The whole scuffle, from start to finish, had taken not more than five minutes, but for Bredehoft, it felt like an entire lifetime had passed—an eternity of bearing helpless witness to a terrifying assault. At long last, when most of the Angels moved on from Hunter, and the beating came to a halt, she made her way over to him. An Angel stepped into her path and asked her where she was going. She told him that she was going over to help Hunter, her boyfriend. “You shouldn’t be crying over him,” he responded. “He was gonna kill innocent people and he should be dead.”

  The Angel stood in her way, and would not let Bredehoft approach Hunter. She remembered that earlier in the day, she had spotted a first-aid station nearby. She stumbled over to the Red Cross tent, hysterical but resolute, and pleaded with them to help. The Hells Angels had beaten someone up, and he was lying nearby, just around the corner.

  A pair of bystanders, including a young man who called himself Paul Cox, and had witnessed the entire ordeal, helped flip Hunter onto his stomach, hoping to clear the blood away in order to assess the severity of his wounds. He had wounds at his temple, and on his upper and lower back, and Cox had the horrifying sensation of looking directly into another human being’s lacerated body. The wounds were at least an inch deep, and soon enough, Cox was soaked in Hunter’s blood. A doctor examined Hunter’s wounds and asked the Rolling Stones to call for an ambulance.