Hells Angels meetings of the early 1970s regularly took up the issue of how to resolve the dispute with the Rolling Stones. The New York branch of the club ultimately decided on an audacious revenge plot: they would assassinate Mick Jagger as comeuppance for his failure to support the men he had hired as Altamont security. (There was a dark irony somewhere in here; the men who claimed to have protected Jagger from an assassin would then assassinate him in a fit of pique over not being properly compensated for their work as bodyguards.) Sometime in the mid-1970s, a New York Angel carrying a gun with a silencer staked out a hidden spot outside a Manhattan hotel where they believed Jagger would be staying, primed to pull the trigger. Jagger never showed, and the plan was aborted.
The Hells Angels regrouped, and in 1979, they made a second attempt on Jagger’s life. They took out a raft and planned a seaborne assault on Jagger’s home in the Hamptons. The Angels would dock near his house and enter his property through the back garden, bypassing the security that ringed the front of Jagger’s home. They would then plant explosives underneath the house, seeking to blow up Jagger’s mansion with the star inside it. On their way to commit murder, the Angels’ boat was hit by a storm and capsized. All the Angels were thrown overboard. No one was injured, but much of the explosive material was lost.
These two opera buffa murder plots were indicative of the mixture of brutality and incompetence that marked the Hells Angels, or at least their New York wing, but even if the execution was often ludicrous, the repeated attempts underscored the seriousness with which the bikers took the perceived affront of Altamont.
The Rolling Stones had either remained ignorant of the Angels’ attempts to harm Jagger, or deliberately chose to ignore them. But in 1983, a Hells Angel turncoat from the Cleveland chapter identified only as “Butch” appeared at a Senate hearing on organized crime and testified to the two attempts on Jagger’s life. According to a former member of the Hells Angels, the Stones belatedly agreed to pay the $50,000 to guarantee no further assaults on Jagger. Half the money stayed with the New York branch, and the other half went to the treasury of Barger’s Oakland Angels.
* * *
Hawkeye met a woman, fell in love, and sold his motorcycle. They had three children, but Hawkeye always missed it: the camaraderie, the raucous good times, the drugs, the feel of a good bike as it revved into a higher gear. He would sit at home silently chewing over the past, craving the feeling that came with being a one-percenter, a Son of Hawaii. He’d occasionally chuckle to himself, and when his kids asked him what he was laughing about, he’d try his best to explain it to them. Lots of bikers were in prison now, he’d think: in prison or in love. Either way, the good times were gone.
* * *
Michael Lydon stopped believing in the artists he had once worshipped. The Stones had no answers to his questions. They were just young men like him—more famous, more beloved, but unquestionably no wiser. Lydon had been a true believer in the power of mass gatherings like Altamont, but no longer. He was not interested in being part of the crowd anymore. He would find meaning by tending to his own garden.
To be a journalist, Lydon thought, was to be a bystander to the work of creation. It was time for him to make something of his own. He met a woman named Ellen who played the piano, and on a whim, he picked up an old guitar. Michael Lydon was now a musician. He might never be Mick Jagger—not that he wanted to be!—but he would find a way to express himself through music now.
* * *
For a year after Altamont, Greil Marcus couldn’t listen to rock ’n’ roll. Marcus was an editor at Rolling Stone, his career unfolding at the white-hot center of rock journalism, but the experience of being present as the music’s grandiose promises of transformation were proven hollow was terribly deflating. How could Marcus summon the enthusiasm for the new Rolling Stones album, or the debut from Led Zeppelin, when the stipulated purpose of the music—creating a kinder, richer, more humane society—seemed to be little more than a fleeting fantasy?
Whenever Marcus approached his turntable, he found himself reaching for one of his country blues records—Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy. The sound was raw, unpolished, as if the reverberations of the guitar were scraping out his insides. The songs were about death and degradation and anguish, inscribed with the daily heartbreak of American racism. They were the only soundtrack Marcus could stand, feeling the sting and shame of having been a cheerleader and house intellectual for a culture that had stood by, helpless, as Meredith Hunter had been killed.
Perhaps in those desolate days Marcus first began to hear the threads that linked the past and the present of American musical culture, that conjoined Robert Johnson to Randy Newman, Elvis Presley to Sly and the Family Stone. The mythology of the music was powerful, capable of speaking to the undercurrents of dread and joy that animated American life.
A few years later, Marcus would publish his book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music, considered by many the finest book ever written on rock, then or now. Altamont was never mentioned in its pages, but reading closely, one could feel the doomed concert’s presence everywhere. The book tunneled into popular culture and emerged with a story of evil and chaos and heartache, salvaged on occasion by moments of grace. It was about the traces of—as another, later Marcus book would have it—“the old, weird America” of fire and brimstone, sin and salvation, terror and bliss. Music had mostly lost the vocabulary for such elemental human experiences, and Marcus—who had watched the Hells Angels mercilessly beat his fellow rock fans, able to do nothing but watch—was prodded into rediscovering it.
* * *
Marcus was not the only denizen of the counterculture nation who went into self-declared exile after Altamont. His boss Jann Wenner, who lost none of his enthusiasm for the daily hustle of covering rock, nonetheless blamed himself, tongue partially planted in cheek, for the end of the 1960s. Peace and love had been the order of the day, the symbols of youthful enthusiasm for a better world. Woodstock had been three days of peace, love, and harmony, and even the Stones’ free show at Hyde Park had sought to lovingly eulogize their lost bandmate Brian Jones. On that gray December day, Wenner thought, the decade had been turned on its head, midwifed by the Hells Angels.
The concert, and its coverage, had also changed Wenner’s relationship with the Rolling Stones. He still has in his possession a cable sent to him by Jagger some months after the concert, as Rolling Stone was following up on the Altamont story. Jagger had written to turn down an interview request, arguing that the band had been persistently misquoted and misrepresented in its pages. For now, they were not comfortable talking to Rolling Stone. Eventually, the Stones and Wenner reached a truce, and the newspaper (soon to become a magazine) continued its mutually profitable love affair with the band. Wenner had gambled and won, preserving a treasured relationship while also demonstrating fearlessness in the pursuit of good journalism. Rolling Stone would win a National Magazine Award in 1971 for the Altamont-themed “Let It Bleed” issue. Wenner did not feel vindicated so much as heard over the cacophony of misinformation available elsewhere. The truth, once reported, was self-evident.
Perhaps the spirit of the 1960s might have lived on, Wenner would often wonder, if only Rolling Stone had not had the temerity to cover Altamont with such diligence. If the concert had remained a bright, sunny day in the life of the counterculture, maybe the 1960s would never have ended. Even Wenner knew this was an unlikely bet, but it said something about Altamont’s place in the mental landscape of the decade that such a proposition could even be made. Altamont appeared like a boulder in a river, damming the flow of water that had heretofore been unimpeded. If only it could have been removed, the stream might have carried on forever.
* * *
For all the light and heat generated by the concert, the 1960s did not come to an end at Altamont in any fashion other than the strictly chronological. To declare Altamont the end of the 1960s was tidily convenient when descr
ibing a disastrous concert that had taken place in December 1969, but it ignored the uneven rollout of what was conveniently summarized as “the Sixties.” Morris Dickstein, in his book Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, defined the spirit of the decade as a new Great Awakening, a quest in search of utopia: “In the 1960s, this kind of spiritual fervor linked the church-sponsored civil rights marchers to the young people who congregated at rock festivals or ‘Human Be-Ins,’ as well as to the antiwar protesters who recoiled in horror from what America’s firepower was doing to Vietnam. This fervor also animated some of those who sought nirvana through sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, along with many others who simply looked for some new sense of purpose in their lives. The same utopian quest pushed others to leave a competitive society behind to go ‘back to nature’ or raise children in communes.”
“The Sixties” were a collective search for transcendence, and no single gathering, however misbegotten or tragic, could be enough to derail the train so long in motion. 1960s youth culture remained convinced that it would transform society, and in many ways it was successful: the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, and the gay rights movement. The sixties would go on well into the 1970s, borne aloft on a wave of enthusiasm and idealism and a deep-seated desire for meaningful change.
Altamont, though, had been a version of the story of 1960s politics in miniature, in which the well-meaning, if oft-blinkered, left was met and overmatched by the ferocious counterassault of the revanchist right. Along with the movement’s successes would come the humbling realities of a country profoundly unchanged: still fighting a disastrous war in Vietnam, still locked in combat between left and right, increasingly enamored of the Cold War realpolitik and law-and-order rhetoric of President Richard Nixon. The 1960s were not over—not quite yet—but a compelling argument was beginning to form that when it did, the liberal utopians who had set the decade’s progress in motion had lost the battle of ideas. Nixon was no Hells Angel, nor were his voters, but they shared a deep-seated antipathy to the New Left and the counterculture, and a desire to strike back in the name of the patriotic center. Altamont was far from the end, but it was a harbinger of further defeats to come. The hippies may have won the social and cultural battles, but the conservatives won all the elections. Republicans would hold the White House for nineteen of the next twenty-three years.
Mick Jagger and his band would expertly pivot from rock to disco, from politics to debauchery, but his fans were slower to adjust. Music would save no one, but the counterculture was to be admired for its willingness to dream. Altamont could not definitively be said to have ended anything, but it did mark a moment at which the idealistic belief in the political potential of music was shattered, at least for a time.
* * *
What Altamont did (mostly) spell an end for was the era of the mass gathering. After Altamont, the dream of the multi-performer outdoor idyll on the model of Woodstock was rendered defunct. The Who’s disastrous 1979 concert in Cincinnati, in which eleven fans were crushed to death, further underscored the fear of the hastily planned, ill-conceived rock concert. There would be no new successors to Woodstock for another generation. It would not be until the early 1990s, and the rise of the Lollapalooza festival, that the massive outdoor concert would return to favor. Woodstock, an evergreen brand, would return with twenty-fifth and thirtieth anniversary concerts, each one marred by poor planning and egregious misbehavior on the part of its crowds—mud-flinging and fire-starting. They may have been branded as successors to Woodstock, but something in their elemental DNA summoned the ghost of Altamont, as well.
* * *
In all the years that followed, the Rolling Stones almost entirely avoided the subject of Altamont. Keith Richards’s much-lauded memoir Life, clocking in at almost six hundred pages, devotes all of three pages to the subject.
The band had been dangerously irresponsible to hire the Hells Angels to provide the security for their biggest-ever American show, and doubly so to pay them in alcohol that they would be given to drink at the concert itself. There was a galling lack of prudence in making such arrangements, and in entrusting the well-being of so many fans to such people. The Stones’ audience had trusted them to provide a safe and comfortable environment, and were sorely disappointed to find themselves at the mercy of a rogue force.
The Stones’ culpability was tempered to some extent by the failings of the Grateful Dead and their advisers, who pushed the Angels on the Stones, failed to anticipate the chaos that would be unleashed, and did not do more to guide a British band that had not visited the United States in three years through the particulars of planning a Bay Area concert.
More troubling, none of the band’s members ever took any initiative to acknowledge Meredith Hunter’s death, or to express their dismay over the events at Altamont. While nothing that Mick Jagger or Keith Richards might have said would have been enough to bring him back, Meredith Hunter’s family sat alone in their too-quiet house in the days and weeks and months after his death, and never heard from any representative of the Stones other than Chip Monck, who had merely designed the stage for the show.
What would have prevented the Rolling Stones from expressing their condolences to Hunter’s family, or apologizing for their role in his death? If the issue were merely financial, the Stones could easily have afforded any additional costs they might have incurred as a result. They wound up paying Hunter’s family $10,000, hardly worthy of mention given the seven-figure haul for their 1969 U.S. tour—or the $50,000 they ultimately paid to Hunter’s killers.
Moreover, why hadn’t the Stones ever apologized to all the fans at Altamont? Meredith Hunter suffered the worst fate, but the security staff hired by the Rolling Stones beat or abused dozens of other fans. Where was the Stones’ sense of shame over the horrific treatment of their own crowd? The Dead had abandoned the ship, and the Stones were to be credited for facing the chaos head-on and attempting to salvage the show. But none of the Stones ever acknowledged that they had committed a ghastly error in failing to adequately plan for Altamont, and that their failures had real consequences for everyone from the dozens of bloodied and beaten fans to Michael Lydon to Denise Jewkes to Meredith Hunter.
* * *
Many of Patti Bredehoft’s friends—the ones who had hung out with her and Meredith in the park outside Berkeley High—wound up strung out on heroin, wasting away. Ronnie Brown, who had accompanied Patti and Meredith to Altamont, died of an overdose. Patti met another man and gave birth to his child. He was never violent, but he was domineering and jealous. He forced Bredehoft to tear up all her photographs from high school, including the snapshots she had of herself and Hunter. He, too, would become addicted to heroin.
As a child, Patti wanted to be a teacher, but now she could not motivate herself to attend college. She had believed she had the ability to accomplish bigger things, notable things, but she now lacked the self-confidence to demand the world’s attention. She would find a comfortable job and stay there, planted in place, for as long as she could. Bredehoft wound up working for a number of small companies before taking a job at a Bay Area naval base. She stayed for sixteen years, until the base closed down, and then spent another four years working for Bank of America. Her mother was elderly by then, and she made caring for her a full-time job. Her life was scarred by what had happened before she had ever had a chance to become herself. Who might she have been if she had not had to witness her boyfriend’s brutal death?
* * *
In the mid-1970s, Porter Bibb developed a film project about the glamorous Bouvier family, and hired the only directors he believed capable of doing justice to the material: Albert and David Maysles. They were to be entrusted with the job of telling the story of the childhood of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill, beginning with a brief shoot with two obscure Bouvier relatives living in squalor in the Hamptons. The two women were fascinating, and a morning shoot stretched to fill one full
day, and then another. After three days, with an increasingly panicked Radziwill demanding action, Bibb ordered Albert and David to continue with the shooting schedule, or he would be left with no choice but to fire them. Albert and David went back to Grey Gardens.
The private travails of two distant relatives of Jackie Kennedy could hardly be more different from a rock ’n’ roll documentary like Gimme Shelter, and yet there was a notable overlap between these two projects. In both, the filmmakers were interested in people irreversibly imprinted by the proximity of celebrity. Big Edie and Little Edie had survived their brush with fame, unlike Meredith Hunter, but the Maysleses’ two films betrayed a persistent interest in the toxic underbelly of celebrity, and the psychic impact of trauma. If Gimme Shelter had ultimately chased an emotional response from the Rolling Stones that had never come, 1975’s Grey Gardens had been a patient study of two women whose entire lives were silent demonstrations of the corrosive effects of lives left unlived. The Beales were as unlike Meredith Hunter and his family as just about anyone in the United States, and yet, when studied in the right light, their story was like the untold half of Gimme Shelter, about people left behind by time and circumstance to ache with old wounds that had never healed.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 28
