10. Dupes
“300,000 SAY IT WITH MUSIC,” read the newspaper headline that went out to the Bay Area the day after the concert. Inside the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Examiner, word spread of another successful mega-concert, about peace and harmony with an accompanying musical soundtrack. The stabbing of Meredith Hunter was briefly noted, but the news was muted, a fleeting moment of sobriety amid the delighted talk of the counterculture triumphant: “But for the stabbing, all appeared peaceful at the concert.… The listeners heeded the advice of the Jefferson Airplane: ‘We Should Be Together.’”
More than just another story about the Woodstock vibe spreading inexorably across the country, this was a cozy newspaper account of a miracle. The lion had lain down with the lamb, and the spirit of harmony had convinced even the legendarily terrible bikers of the Hells Angels to put aside their own belief in violence as social lubricant: “The action brought a gentle rebuke from the Jefferson Airplane. One told the fighters over the public address system: ‘Violence isn’t necessary.’ Others told the Angels: ‘Hostility isn’t part of this. Don’t spoil the day.’ The Angels backed off. Their leaders told them to ‘cool it.’ The rank and file Angels did.”
In the late 1960s, the Examiner and its primary Bay Area rival, the San Francisco Chronicle, published a joint Sunday edition to cut costs. The arrangement between the Examiner and the Chronicle placed the Examiner’s staff in charge of the Sunday news coverage, and the Examiner had sent out a veteran reporter named Jim Wood, with years of experience covering rock ’n’ roll and Bay Area youth culture, to write about the concert.
Wood’s voice would be the one that San Francisco readers would hear over their Sunday-morning eggs and orange juice, but the tight production deadlines for the newspaper limited how much he would be able to tell them about Altamont. In order to produce the four-pound brick that would be dropped onto doorsteps early the next morning, the newspaper had to close far earlier than for the weekday paper. And so Jim Wood arrived at Altamont early Saturday morning armed with the knowledge that he would only have a few short hours in which to assemble local color, interview concertgoers and performers, and form an impression of the concert as a whole.
At the appointed hour, sometime in the midafternoon, Wood found his car and driver, got into the backseat, and sped the fifty miles back to San Francisco, his blue portable typewriter perched on his lap. As the car wound its way past the streams of cars still heading east to Altamont, Wood furiously pecked away at the typewriter’s keys, hoping to file a legible and honest summary of the brief portion of the day for which he had been present. Wood had been covering these events for years, as his old friend John Burks well knew, and knew how to fill out a spotty firsthand experience with a good reporter’s sense of fullness.
Soon after Wood made it back to the Examiner’s offices, he would have to file his story, leaving little room for error. But as a veteran reporter, he knew the routine, and was confident that the Rolling Stones’ extravaganza was destined to be an enormous success. Any small snafus he might have spotted would likely be long forgotten by the next morning.
Not only did the Bay Area take in Jim Wood’s brief foray at Livermore as gospel; so did the rest of the United States. After being published, the Examiner duly filed its story with the Associated Press, which leaned on reports from local newspapers for its coverage of national events. The San Francisco Examiner had been the closest paper to Altamont, and after a brief, light edit, the AP posted Wood’s story to its wire, giving affiliated newspapers across the country the opportunity to publish the Altamont summary. As far as most Americans knew, Altamont had been a raging success—albeit one at which a concertgoer had been stabbed to death. But then hadn’t people also died at the already legendary Woodstock?
* * *
One of the few voices to counteract the growing mass of huzzahs for Altamont emerged from one of the papers that had published Wood’s account. Rolling Stone veteran Ralph J. Gleason, who had played an inadvertent role in the free concert through his diatribes against what he perceived to be the Stones’ price-gouging, weighed in on the failures of Altamont in his San Francisco Chronicle column.
“Is this the new community?” Gleason asked. “Is this what Woodstock promised? Gathered together as a tribe, what happened? Brutality, murder, despoliation, you name it.… The name of the game is money, power and ego, and money is first and it brings power.” Gleason saw the free concert as a sham, one whose bad faith was being passed along from the con artists to the marks: “The Stones didn’t do it for free, they did it for money, only the tab was paid in a different way. Whoever goes to see that movie paid for the Altamont religious assembly.”
Gleason went further, bluntly calling out Mick Jagger, Sam Cutler, Rock Scully, and Emmett Grogan as the culprits responsible for Meredith Hunter’s death. The mood was righteously contemptuous, and yet it was telling that Gleason referred to Hunter as “that black man,” a rod with which Mick Jagger and his associates might usefully be whipped and little more.
Unlike the Examiner or the Chronicle, Rolling Stone was a publication of the counterculture, as interested in analysis and polemic as reportage. While Wood assembled his impressions, Rolling Stone managing editor John Burks had been walking the grounds at Altamont, mentally cobbling together a list of contributors. Much of the Rolling Stone crew had been at the show. Some had been there for professional reasons, having been asked to cover the concert for the newspaper, while others had been there just to see the Stones. And as Burks wandered the speedway, taking notes and conducting interviews, he also kept an eye out for friends and contributors he might have a brief word with. Burks would pause and ask each of them the same thing: “Get in touch with me after this is over.” He had already spotted Greil Marcus, Langdon Winner, Lester Bangs, Michael Goodwin, and many other Rolling Stone stalwarts, steadily updating his mental roster of writers and photographers he could call on to round out his portrait of Altamont.
In the hours after the concert, Burks sought out all of his troops. He called the writers whom he had seen at the show, and fielded calls from others he hadn’t spotted while making his rounds. For each of them, he had a single request: “Give me what you’ve got.” Burks wanted to hear everything: any memorable run-ins with concertgoers or musicians or bikers, any fleeting journalistic color they might have noted, any conclusions they might have reached about the day’s events.
Film critic Michael Goodwin mentioned that he had brought along his tape recorder, and used it to record Jagger’s comments. Soon after the violence had begun in earnest, Goodwin had realized that readers would want to know what the likes of Mick Jagger were saying from the stage. It was too loud, and Goodwin was too far from the stage, to record Jagger directly, even if he held his recorder over his head. Instead, Goodwin listened intently to Jagger’s announcements, and repeated them directly into the microphone of his tape recorder. The worse the day got, Goodwin believed, the more crucial this material might turn out to be. As it turned out, he had been the only one of the assembled journalists who had thought to record Jagger, and possessing a record of the Stones singer’s simultaneously anguished and anodyne pronouncements would be essential to telling the story of Altamont.
Greil Marcus’s day had begun with a hippie angrily rejecting his proffered food, shouting, “I don’t want any of your fucking sandwich.” Marcus had camped out near the stage, amid a sullen crowd so intent on protecting its hard-won territory that it refused to let him put both feet down on the ground after an Angel incursion into the crowd. He had to be lifted above the audience’s heads and carried onto the stage, from where he could retreat to more hospitable turf.
Later in the day, Marcus ran into Burks. Marcus was frustrated and drained by the free-floating tension hovering just above the crowd, and he was rethinking the maximalist plans Rolling Stone (then a newspaper) had for covering the concert. Perhaps they would be better off limiting the coverage of Altamont to a bland one-column
concert review. How better to express their contempt for this failed spectacle than to treat it as a non-story: “Rolling Stones Play Concert”? The lack of coverage could serve as their final word on the subject. Burks agreed to consider the idea.
Marcus returned to the stage area, where he claimed a spot atop a VW van. Marcus’s line of sight was blocked, but sound carried easily over the noise of the Stones’ amplified guitars. Screams of undiluted terror regularly split the air. The sense of dread was downright unbearable, like watching a horror film in which unspeakable things happened to the helpless characters just outside the frame, and nothing could be done to save them.
The screams were the distilled essence of Altamont, piercing cries of absolute panic and displacement. To Marcus, they were more than just expressions of bodily fear. They were shrieks of existential dismay, wordless expressions of terror at having ended up in this place, at this moment. They were not the kind of screams that expressed concern. They were out-of-control screams, expressions of living through a waking nightmare from which one could not awake. And the screams kept coming, each one a reminder, in case one was needed, of the dire situation down below.
Watching the counterculture pull itself apart had been a wrenching experience for Marcus, exposing many of the comforting lies that it had peddled for too long. There was no community here, only the self-interested and self-absorbed. And there was no peace, only the illusion of comity, pierced at the first outbreak of chaos. Marcus got back to his car, and his radio had been ripped out of the dashboard. He wasn’t upset, or even surprised. It went without saying that a day like today would end with an invasion of his privacy, another assault on common decency.
Marcus left Altamont disgusted by the excesses and obtuseness of the counterculture, so determined on self-congratulation it had failed to anticipate, or even acknowledge, the traitors in its midst. The media’s coverage of the concert only worsened Marcus’s sense of shock. In their telling, Altamont had indeed been another Woodstock. The Rolling Stones had successfully pulled off a coup, and the counterculture would march grandly into a future of its own making.
Everyone associated with Altamont—the bands, the concertgoers, the journalists covering the show—had wanted a triumphant story, and collectively, they insisted on the story, even when the facts demanded otherwise. To Marcus, this was only further evidence of the rot spreading through the innards of the counterculture.
The counterculture had invited its own worst enemies into their celebration, and had allowed them to hold a crowd of hundreds of thousands hostage to their puerile, totalitarian whims. This story—not the comforting fairy tale that had made its way around the country—would have to be told.
Burks, a vet of Newsweek and the daily-newspaper grind, saw himself as a newspaperman covering the rock scene. Burks, with the additional time gifted to a biweekly publication that a daily like the Chronicle or the Examiner lacked, began to assemble the disparate stories streaming in from his contributors, and it was increasingly clear to him that there was a very different story about Altamont than the one being peddled by the Examiner.
* * *
As was the habit of everyone in the Bay Area clued in to the hip life, Burks tuned in to KSAN the day after the concert, and caught Stefan Ponek’s post-Altamont call-in show. Ponek had been present at the concert on Saturday, delivering a steady stream of real-time reports about a show that had not, in actuality, taken place: placid, fun, peaceable, triumphant. Ponek undoubtedly realized he had bungled the story, and took advantage of a typically low-key Sunday to mull over what had taken place.
“Tower Records Presents a Saturday Afternoon at Altamont Speedway,” the program was called, and the anodyne name, like something out of ABC’s Wide World of Sports or a 1950s television series, belied the furious urgency of the conversation. Before the concert, Tower Records had purchased the rights to play back recordings of the show for a next-day special. The recordings had been made, but all plans to relive the musical memories were overwhelmed by the pent-up desire on the part of those who had actually been present at the concert to talk through what had gone wrong at Altamont (which everyone involved with the broadcast insisted on calling, with a Spanish lilt, “Altamonté”). Before the conversation began, a Tower Records ad reminded listeners that the Stones’ new Let It Bleed was now on sale for $2.77.
The tone of the show began in confusion and stumbled chaotically in the direction of anger and self-recrimination. “A lot went on Saturday afternoon at Altamont Raceway, and there are probably about three hundred thousand or more different opinions as to what exactly did happen there,” Ponek blandly noted in his introduction, but his tone rapidly sharpened. “At Altamont, there was a miniature society set up of three hundred thousand and upwards people. It was supposedly a society of the new generation, the love generation, the brave new world, the children of the future. As far as I can say, I don’t want to live in a society like the one I saw yesterday.”
For four hours, Ponek fielded calls from boldface names and faithful listeners. There were accusers and defenders, storytellers and pundits. Everyone had an opinion or an anecdote, everyone had a position they sought to stake out about this latest gathering of the tribes.
Ponek enumerated the failure of the San Francisco papers and the Los Angeles Times to do justice to the story of Hunter’s death. He took particular umbrage with Wood’s story, which resembled “a cookie-cutter Woodstock story … it didn’t sound like anybody had really gone there.”
Even as injured concertgoers were being treated, Ponek argued, people were blindly pushing and shoving: “I didn’t feel any sense of community with many of the people there … they weren’t my people.” If there was a single vibe to Altamont, the participants agreed, it was “the hell with you, brother.” Callers immediately jumped in with anecdotes illustrating that sense of faux brotherhood: women getting dragged by the hair, concertgoers hit by bottles, people kicked and stepped on by oblivious attendees.
What, precisely, had gone wrong at Altamont? One caller saw it as analogous to the story of Kitty Genovese, where thirty-seven onlookers had been said to have watched as their neighbor in Queens was brutally murdered in 1964. Another caller believed the burgeoning cult of the counterculture superstar had doomed Altamont. By “trying to get as close as possible to these superstars,” the crowd had proved they “aren’t so different” from the “so-called Hollywood culture” they disdained. Another caller, concert planner and Digger eminence Emmett Grogan, guided listeners through the planning for the show. He cast blame on the Stones’ New York office for the failure to secure a suitable location or adequately prepare for Altamont. The free San Francisco concert was a utopia that “turned into a Frankenstein.”
Burks, identified as a “Rolling Stone heavy,” wound up calling in, and began with some musical observations: “I tried disengaging myself from all the rest of it, just listening to the Stones as a band performing, and goddamn, they were fine.… it is just as great a rock ’n’ roll band as the finest thing anybody ever said about them.… that part of it is good. I don’t know. Let’s do this Socratically, man. What do you think people went there for?” “I don’t know, man,” Ponek responded, giggling nervously. “Let me interview you, OK?”
The observers were joined by the participants, already defensive about their roles in a rippling disaster. Pete Knell from the San Francisco Hells Angels called in to clarify how his group had first been summoned for Altamont. Sam Cutler and the Stones’ crew had been “a little nervous about the crowd. They had a little trouble in Florida and so on. What they did was, they asked us would we come and keep people off the stage. They didn’t want nobody grabbing the microphone.”
In Knell’s description of the concert, the Angels had participated in a few minor scuffles with fans before settling in to the business of protecting the Stones: “There’s a lot of people that get it because they’re looking for it.… I thought it went pretty good.”
Knell’s clueles
s response only contributed to the growing collective sense of the Angels as a band apart from the counterculture, intent on defending their prerogatives above all. Ponek, treading with exceeding caution, summarized callers’ denunciations of the Angels’ behavior as a polite critique: “Hey man, you didn’t have to be so rough.” Another speaker audibly repeated the word “rough,” and chuckled, as if taken aback by the cop-out word Ponek employed for the sheer unalloyed brutality of the Hells Angels.
Sam Cutler’s complaints about the paucity of concertgoers who had stuck around to clean up after the show were soon followed by a deliberate refusal to take sides: “I myself feel that the Hells Angels were as helpful as they saw that they could be in a situation which most people found very confusing, including the Hells Angels.”
Not content to leave it at that, Cutler asserted that the Angels’ behavior was a matter too furrowed with complexity for him to judge: “If you’re asking me to issue a general putdown of the Angels, which I imagine a lot of people would only be too happy to do, then I’m not prepared to do that.… Fifty percent of the people will dig what they did and fifty percent of the people might not dig what they did.… As far as I’m concerned, they were people who were here, who tried to help in their own way, right? If people didn’t dig it, I’m sorry.”
Oakland Angel chief Sonny Barger followed Cutler on the air, and after pointing out that he had been “pretty loaded” and a latecomer to the show, stuck at a Hells Angels officers’ meeting until the midafternoon, deflected criticism of his group by simultaneously praising the crowd’s cooperation and calling out the loudmouths who had engaged with the Angels. “We come through, and, like, the people there were out of sight,” said Barger of his members’ entry on their motorcycles. “They just stood up and moved their sleeping bags and everything and stepped out of the way and done everything to let us through.”
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 19
