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

by Saul Austerlitz

  Walker embraced Passaro, and shook hands with jury foreman Shields, an executive at a steamship company in Oakland. Walker told a reporter that the film footage had been “a key” to winning the case. Three witnesses—two for the prosecution, and one for the defense—had underscored his argument that what we saw on film was only the tail end of a fight that had begun earlier. Passaro’s efforts, Walker believed, were only incidental, the true killing blows having taken place even before he had joined the ruckus. By the time Passaro grabbed for Hunter’s gun, Hunter had already incurred the lower stab wounds on his left side that would ultimately kill him.

  Walker had succeeded, as good defense lawyers did, by muddying the waters—by crafting alternative narratives and substitute timelines that challenged the assertions of the prosecution. There was little substantive proof that Meredith Hunter had been stabbed prior to Passaro’s twin lunges, but the trial had never truly addressed the question of what had taken place after Baird Bryant’s snippet of film concluded. The centrality of the film footage to the trial rendered Passaro’s guilt primarily a matter of whether what the jury saw onscreen was justifiable as self-defense. But Walker had capably elided the issue of Hunter’s four other wounds, and the question of who had caused them. If it had been acknowledged that Passaro had been responsible for all of Hunter’s wounds, how might that have changed the jury’s perspective?

  George Walker would go on to serve as the San Francisco Hells Angels’ defense counsel for five more years. The Angels would consistently rack up additional prison time for themselves by fighting with the police and leaving themselves open to charges of resisting arrest. Walker advised the Angels, forever in trouble with the authorities, to cooperate with the authorities when being brought into custody. Walker won numerous cases for the Angels, who were subject to persistent police surveillance and occasional harassment. Resisting-arrest charges were harder to contest, though, so Walker, who had beaten a murder charge by presenting Alan Passaro as a soft-spoken, well-dressed defender of the defenseless, sought to remake the Hells Angels into cooperative citizens.

  The bikers didn’t stop getting arrested, but did stop fighting the cops, and a few years later, grateful for his assistance, the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels presented a trophy to their African-American lawyer. Walker displayed it in a prominent spot in his office, in close proximity to the plaque from Harvard. On its face was an inscription: “From San Francisco Hell’s Angels to George Walker, Attorney at Law, for outstanding services.”

  14. 8:15

  Altamont created its own set of memories, not all of them trustworthy. Like any copiously documented event, it warped its own witnesses’ recollections, often replacing their own memories with a set of images culled from Gimme Shelter and other media accounts. For many of the people who attended Altamont, their own memories began to bleed into those preserved for the benefit of posterity. Memory was fallible, deteriorated by time, weakened by alcohol and drugs, but enfeebled above all by the confusion between life and art, the personal and the collective.

  The people I spoke to in researching this book would regularly ask casually if others’ memories jibed with their own. This was, in part, a reflection of the passage of time. Almost half a century had elapsed since that December day. It was hard to remember, so many decades later, what had happened to you as opposed to what you had seen happen to someone else, what you had watched take place in front of you versus what you had watched take place on celluloid. Memories would have to be tested, assessed for their trustworthiness, poked and prodded to ensure their truthfulness. It could be safely agreed that Altamont was like a collective bad acid trip for the entire counterculture, but the specific details still mattered. A young man had died, and if for no other reason than to do honor to his tragically curtailed life, it was important to determine what had really taken place, both during the concert and afterward.

  * * *

  Six combination locks hung on the rusty white gate, with a sign lashed to its front that read PRIVATE PROPERTY: KEEP OUT. The Altamont Speedway was now closed to the public, and the view from outside its gates allowed visitors to just make out the lights overlooking the grandstand of what had once been the racetrack at the bottom of the hill.

  Wind turbines scattered like bow ties towered along the hills leading to the speedway, and the twisting two-lane road that took drivers the last miles was dotted with alternating patches of gold-and-terra-cotta-colored fields. The 580 freeway was like a line of calligraphy drawn across a landscape of undulating hills, with cool air juddering down their ridges on a sunny December day.

  It had been on a day like this, forty-six years prior, that three hundred thousand impassioned fans had piled into their cars or hitched rides to attend the concert of the century, and been grotesquely disappointed for their efforts. ENTRANCE CLOSED read a sign visible in the distance, beyond the gate, and it felt like the sign was here in order to communicate a message. The entrance to the past was closed, and this totem of the unwritten, unwriteable past was a reminder that the entire story of Altamont could never be told. But the grass underfoot felt spongy, and prickly to the touch. I stood there, denied access to what remained of Altamont, and thought about how uncomfortable it likely must have been to sit on such grass. These were the fleeting impressions that slipped through the cracks of time.

  * * *

  The Rolling Stones would endure the backlash from the Rolling Stone exposé, and then again, with renewed vigor, after the release of Gimme Shelter, but kept away from the United States, ill-inclined to answer for their actions. Altamont was yesterday’s news, a set of bad headlines that would soon be buried by other scandals, other crises. Reporters caught Keith Richards at Heathrow Airport, where he offered a blasé assessment of the carnage in the Bay Area. Altamont, he argued, had been “basically well organized, but people were tired and tempers got frayed.”

  Mick Jagger also returned to London, dogged by persistent rumors that his longtime girlfriend Marianne Faithfull had taken up with Italian artist Mario Schifano. He won her back temporarily, but worse news lay on the horizon. After parting ways with the band’s manager, Allen Klein, Jagger hired a new financial adviser, Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein. Loewenstein discovered that Klein had structured the band’s finances in such haphazard fashion that the Stones would owe the entirety of their earnings from the 1969 U.S. tour to the Inland Revenue to pay off their hefty British tax bill. Not only had Klein negligently advised the band, their morally dubious manager had absconded with the copyrights to all their songs from 1965 onward. The Rolling Stones no longer owned the rights to “Satisfaction,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and many of their other classic songs.

  In order to protect their income, the Rolling Stones would have to live overseas. The onetime paragons of hippie idealism moved to the French Riviera in order to protect their earnings from the tax man. Could anything have been less true to the spirit of hippie idealism than becoming a tax exile in the hopes of salvaging a heftier percentage of your income? Did anyone still believe Mick Jagger portended a revolution to come?

  And yet the Stones, like their doppelgängers the Hells Angels, were inclined to surprise, disappointing their loyalists and astonishing their detractors. The album they would record during their Riviera expatriation would be their greatest work yet, and one of the very best records in rock ’n’ roll history: 1972’s Exile on Main Street. The glamorous beach of Villefranche-sur-Mer, foreign soil for these London boys, freed them to repatriate, in their imaginations, to their true home: America. Jagger sang like a Southern good ol’ boy describing his fictional hometown of dirty roads, dirty sex, and dirty secrets.

  The lyrics were mostly impenetrable, and the sound was muddy and grungy, a mash-up of proto-punk rhythm, soul-music horns, and Richards’s magnificent guitar riffs. They were, at long last, the blues masters they had dreamt of as teenage boys with Muddy Waters records clutched under their arms. The album’s penultimate song, “Shine a
Light,” offered a blessing, too, directed to all the lost American souls in search of a good song and a touch of evening sun. Were Jagger and Richards thinking of those fans, in search of their favorite tune, who had been left with tears in their eyes in the evening sun of Altamont?

  The Rolling Stones were still in their most fertile period as musicians, but Altamont, and the Inland Revenue, had scared them away from politics. Henceforth, they would reinvent themselves as gilded hedonists, jaded sensualists with little interest in the world beyond their immediate ken. Jagger’s wife Bianca, whom he married in 1971, would become a star in her own right on the dance floors of Studio 54. Within a decade, the lead singer of the Rolling Stones would be paramour to a disco queen famous for having been photographed on the back of a white stallion.

  They were still a great band, still recording classic anthems like “Midnight Mile,” “Tumbling Dice,” and “Miss You,” but they had pulled away from their audience. They were now rock gods, visiting occasionally from their restricted-access Mount Olympus with the gift of music for the masses. The former promise of ecstatic union with their fans had been abruptly scuttled, never to be revisited. There would be no more intimations of evil, no more Prince of Darkness. Jagger now had, as Stanley Booth put it, “more darkness than he ever wanted.” And for years to come, when each tour was being planned and set lists were being hashed out, one song was silently excluded from consideration: “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  * * *

  The Grateful Dead had been crucial to the early planning for the free show, but in Altamont’s disastrous aftermath, only the Rolling Stones were tarred with its brush. The Dead rendered themselves invisible as the media and counterculture storm raged.

  Jerry Garcia had cowered in his trailer while Hells Angels rampaged through the Altamont crowd, beating and assaulting innocent bystanders with impunity. His ability to go on associating with the Hells Angels on friendly terms, and even consorting with them professionally, betrayed a lack of empathy for the very audiences who had come out to see Garcia’s band perform. The Grateful Dead would play a benefit show for the New York City branch of the Hells Angels less than a year later, and would lend the Angels the money to make their film Hells Angels Forever. Garcia would later argue that hanging around with the Hells Angels made him less of a jerk. “I ought to take you everywhere with me,” he later told Angel George Christie, “because I don’t act like an asshole around you.” The Dead’s calculation was wise; the band sidestepped the avalanche of criticism the Stones received, and would continue to receive for decades to come, over Altamont. Their reputation was secure.

  There was not much that music itself could say about the events that transpired at Altamont. The Dead paid elliptical homage to the concert with their song “New Speedway Boogie,” on their 1970 album Workingman’s Dead. The song philosophically shrugged in the face of the death of a concertgoer. But perhaps it would be better to listen to “New Speedway Boogie” as an acknowledgment of the band’s limitations, and those of the culture from which they had sprung. The Dead had been guided by everything they had ever said or done or thought to Altamont, and even after arriving at a dead end, they knew of nowhere else to go. It was a reflection of their helplessness that they understood so little, and knew they had so little wisdom to share.

  Greil Marcus was not the only one who believed that no one had described Altamont better than Don McLean, who alluded to it in his 1971 hit “American Pie.” McLean depicts Hunter’s death as a ritual sacrifice, a placatory offering to the gods of rock overseen by Satan. The image indicates that McLean had at least a passing familiarity with the argument put forward in the Berkeley Barb in the weeks after Altamont, and juddering through the counterculture in the months that followed, in which a concertgoer claimed that the concert was a musical Black Mass overseen by the Stones, with Hunter the sacrificial offering. McLean was toying with the notion of Jagger as a Satanist, summoning dark forces with his music.

  McLean was composing an elegy to rock ’n’ roll in crude verse, its lyrics a tribute to the celebrated dead of its mythological past. Altamont was the fifth and final of McLean’s representative days in rock history, and the only one in which the musicians were required to share the stage with the fans. Hunter’s death was the final indignity suffered by the music, but once again, and unsurprisingly, the dead man was nowhere, not even summoned as a symbolic figure in the tragedy of rock. He was merely the faceless victim, the helpless plaything of the Rolling Stones’ sacrificial performance.

  * * *

  Sam Cutler wound up hiding out at Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s Marin County ranch. Cutler felt lost, abandoned by the Rolling Stones in their haste to flee the country, and singled out as the designated whipping boy for Altamont. Cutler had undoubtedly failed to plan adequately for the show, and had not covered himself in glory with his seeming lack of concern for fans during the show itself, but he had been a paid employee of the band that had not seen fit to apologize, or even comment on, the failures of Altamont.

  Invited to stay in Hart’s barn, and then Jerry Garcia’s house, Cutler fell in with the band and found himself attracted to their shambling surrogate family. Cutler wound up working for the Dead for a number of years as their tour manager. They occasionally discussed Altamont, and Garcia always made sure to mention that Cutler had not been responsible for the failure of the concert.

  * * *

  Being acquitted of first-degree murder did not set Alan Passaro free. After his yowl of victory in the Oakland courtroom, he returned to his jail cell, there to serve out his sentence on the San Jose grand-theft charge. Passaro was in and out of prison for the rest of his life, never able to break out of the hold that Angel life had on him. In 1985, Passaro’s body was discovered in Anderson Reservoir in Santa Clara County. There was a bag with thousands of dollars in cash slung over his shoulder, and his black Mercedes was left parked by the lake, with the keys inside. The parties responsible for his death were never found.

  * * *

  Passaro had been acquitted, but the Hells Angels had already begun to transform from a motorcycle club into a criminal enterprise. After Altamont, the Angels searched for new friends because the majority of their old compatriots had grown disillusioned with them. Jefferson Airplane, horrified by the Hells Angels’ behavior, cut all ties with the club. The Angels went so far as to reach out to the band, hoping to patch things up with their longtime friends. Grace Slick, having none of it, told the Angels that she was quite content with their current relationship—which was no relationship at all.

  Bill Graham, who would later work with Angel George Christie, jointly promoting some concerts together, warned the club that the music scene was leery of associating with them altogether. They were too volatile, he argued. How could anyone hire them, or even invite them to attend a show, and be confident that chaos would not ensue once more?

  Around this time, organized crime discovered the Angels as trusted accomplices. The mob sought to distribute drugs nationwide, and were looking for networks living beyond the reach of the law to serve as middlemen. The Angels, with their ethic of loyalty and obedience, were ideal candidates, and the Harley-Davidsons crisscrossing America’s highways were now often loaded down with heroin and cocaine. Altamont demonstrated that the Hells Angels were unbreakable. No amount of pressure levied by the government could get them to turn on each other.

  Sonny Barger described himself as having been high on cocaine for the entirety of the 1970s, and many of his compatriots were similarly addled. “The seventies were a gangster era for us,” he would later write. “I sold drugs and got into a lot of shit. Other clubs tried to take our rep from us. The blacks and the Latinos didn’t like us; white people were scared of us; hippies no longer dug us; rednecks couldn’t stand us either. Everybody hated us. We became isolated.” Barger was arrested, charged with selling heroin and kidnapping, and would eventually serve a number of years in prison. Time was, the local cops would panic when the
Hells Angels blew into town, engines roaring. Now, the federal government, employing the RICO Act, originally drafted to counteract the Mafia, was mobilizing to face off with the Angels.

  Barger got out of prison and became an unlikely celebrity, another grizzled 1960s burnout whose very existence testified to the deleterious effects of drugs and the unlikely survival of some of the hardest-living members of their generational cohort. Barger would help transform the Hells Angels into an omnipresent brand, the once-feared death’s-head now imprinted on everything from leather jackets to T-shirts. SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL HELLS ANGEL read the popular T-shirts, selling a counterculture worship of the antihero already well over a decade past its sell-by date.

  Barger made himself a wealthy man monetizing the Hells Angels brand, and in so doing, infuriated many of his fellow Angels. Bob Roberts complained that Barger had enriched himself at the expense of his brothers. Where were their health insurance policies? Where were their benefits? It was almost as if the Hells Angels had doubled back on itself, part criminal enterprise, part pension scheme for aging bikers.

  * * *

  The Hells Angels blamed the Rolling Stones for the disaster of Altamont. The Angels had been left pissing in the wind, facing the unbridled wrath of the authorities and the general public—so this line of thinking went—while the Stones partied in the French Riviera. More than that, the club had to pay Passaro’s hefty legal expenses without the band contributing what the Angels believed was their fair share. The Hells Angels demanded $50,000 for Passaro’s defense fund, which the band flat-out refused to pay.

  The Rolling Stones would eventually send a representative out to see the Angels in New York, informing them that they would not be paying the $50,000, now or ever, and threatening the bikers with a glimpse of the firearm in his waistband. The Angels, twice burned, fixated on Mick Jagger as the source of their difficulties. They had run into Keith Richards a number of times over the years, and found him affable and without a trace of condescension. Richards was not responsible for the Altamont snafu, they decided; it was Jagger who haughtily insisted on cutting the Angels dead. The Hells Angels had always worked on a handshake, and they believed that by hiring them as security at Altamont, the Rolling Stones had also agreed to stand by them in case of trouble. The club was appalled by what they perceived as Jagger’s duplicity, and by the drawn-out war of words over the money they viewed as rightly theirs.