Just a Shot Away

by Saul Austerlitz

  Mick Jagger had flown to the site via helicopter during the evening to check on its progress, accompanied by Keith Richards, bodyguard Tony Funches, manager Ronnie Schneider, journalist Stanley Booth, with the action all filmed by Albert and David Maysles. Jagger briefly pressed the flesh with fans, accepting one young woman’s offer of a yellow scarf to protect his neck. Funches was dispatched to find them a joint. A young woman came by, offering to blow smoke into Jagger’s and Richards’s mouths. Jagger asked for some mescaline to take the next day after his performance so he could luxuriate in the glow of the crowd. Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully gave the band some advice: they should go on at about five o’clock, with sunset the next day set for 4:50 p.m. All seemed well.

  Jagger headed back to San Francisco in the limousine waiting for him, telling Booth: “I’d like to stay but I’ve got to rest.… I’ve got to sing—if I had to play the guitar tomorrow I think I’d stay, but I’ve got to sing.”

  Jagger was conscious of the burden imposed by adulation, and by the increasing weight of his audience’s expectations. To many, he was more than just a singer, more than just a star; he was a leader in training, his songs expressions of a world on the brink of unimaginable change.

  * * *

  Rock ’n’ roll, in its earliest incarnation, had been a primal howl: of sexual need, of dissatisfaction, of satisfaction denied, stymied. As the 1960s progressed, and the musical world shifted, the Stones’ work began to obliquely reflect the world around them. To be young was to live out an intimate relation to violence: to the American soldiers fighting in Vietnam, the disaffected young black men and women in the inner cities, the antiwar protesters clashing with police. Around the world, too, from Prague to Paris to Peking, the armies of youth were colliding with the forces of order.

  In songs like “Street Fighting Man” and “Salt of the Earth,” both from the Stones’ acclaimed 1968 album Beggars Banquet, Jagger and Richards obliquely addressed the volatility of the era. “Street Fighting Man” was an ode to defiance, less a protest song than a statement of support, set to the thrum of marching feet, for those rebelling against the constricting consensus of the mainstream. Jagger seemed to acknowledge his own remoteness from the conflicts he observed, enlisting himself in the cause with the weapons closest to hand: his voice, and his band.

  “Street” was an expression of sympathy that made few promises. Jagger would not be manning the barricades; he would not be fighting in the street. Instead, he would go on doing what he had always done, secure in the knowledge that those doing the fighting would know he was with them. This was compelling, and daring, but it also reflected the fundamental remoteness of the Rolling Stones, better suited as observers than participants. “We take it for granted that people know we’re with you,” Richards had announced during a tour press conference, his statement perfectly articulating that conjoined sense of intimacy and distance.

  Ominous portents emerged over the horizon, and the Stones looked to the horizon with trepidation. If “Street Fighting Man” was a muffled call to arms, “Gimme Shelter,” from the band’s brand-new album Let It Bleed, released the day before Altamont, prophesied unrest to come, with rape and murder, and the intimation of yet worse, just a shot away. The Rolling Stones were not political artists in the fashion of early Dylan, or Creedence Clearwater Revival. Instead, they were mirrors held up to society, their lyrical concerns reflecting those of their fans and compatriots. Something brutish and unrelenting was on its way.

  After Jagger had left, Keith Richards remained behind to wander the grounds, soaking in the atmosphere and enjoying a moment of communion with the crowds. There were, as Rolling Stone would later report, amateur musicians strumming their guitars, joints being passed around, and impromptu games of touch football under the glare of the stage lights. Campfires dotted the speedway, with zealous fans seeking to ward off the fierce chill of a northern California winter night.

  Much of the crowd was living up to the bands’ expectation of mellow revelry, but others seemed to embody the dark side of the counterculture. This segment of the audience comprised, as one onlooker would later describe them, “speed freaks with hollow eyes and missing teeth, dead-faced acid heads burned out by countless flashes, old beatniks clutching gallons of red wine, Hare Krishna chanters with shaved heads and acned cheeks.” They had hitchhiked to the show with strangers, or been abandoned there by boyfriends on the make. Their eyes were hollow orbs, empty shells decimated by drugs. They were the detritus of the counterculture, their very presence a rebuke to its ideals. Music might not do it after all.

  The early word had said one hundred thousand people might make their way to Altamont, but anyone in the Bay Area scene who had polled their friends, or followed the pre-show frenzy, seemingly broadcast twice an hour on KSAN, KMPX, and the other San Francisco rock stations, would have known that the number was likely to be much higher. KSAN had been hyping the concert without pause, spreading the word to the FM-listening cognoscenti about their planned coverage of the earth-shattering concert. The station had plans to cover the concert live, with members of its news crew and DJs broadcasting from the event. Between songs by billed performers like the Stones and Jefferson Airplane, DJs would provide traffic updates for those driving to the show, and even directions for those who had never made it out to Livermore before.

  * * *

  Preparing for the concert, Albert and David Maysles had hired seventeen crews—mostly composed of one cinematographer and one sound operator—to film the show from every conceivable angle. Many had been recruited by Baird Bryant, a highly respected New York cameraman with links to dozens of young filmmakers on the East Coast and in California.

  Before the concert, David Maysles had gathered his film crews, in from San Francisco and Los Angeles, and given them a pep talk, arguing that they were about to be in the presence of history. With their cameras and tape recorders, they would capture another turning point in the story of the American counterculture’s triumphant march to destiny. This was to be another Woodstock, and the camera crews were there to document the peace and harmony and brotherhood. Albert, taking a slightly different tack, asked the crew to maintain an attitude of inquiry. Stories would unfold before them, and it was their responsibility to follow them.

  Most of the film crew was to come to Altamont the morning of the concert, but the Maysles sent out a handful of crews the night before, to film the frantic preparations at the speedway.

  Instructions were minimal. Most of the crew were already experienced documentarians, and instinctively understood how to seek out the best story, the freshest angle on a day expected to be a West Coast re-creation of an event that had already, in a few short months, become a part of living history.

  A concert film held little inherent interest for David and Albert. They could not see, just yet, how to make a worthy full-length picture out of a live performance, but something about the collision of the Stones and the American public nagged at them, too fascinating to ignore. What would happen when an enormous, Woodstock-sized audience encountered Mick Jagger and Keith Richards?

  Altamont had been, as so many of the Maysles brothers’ projects were, something of an accidental convergence of filmmaker and subject. Albert and David were interested in, as one critic had it, finding the regular people inside celebrities or the performers buried inside regular people, and the prospect of a mass rock spectacle, uniting rock gods like Richards with their workaday fans, made for a potentially groundbreaking study of popular culture and its effect on American society. This could be the start of something special.

  For Albert and David Maysles, so much of their careers up until that fateful moment had been a matter of serendipity. Albert had never used a movie camera before heading to Russia with a friend’s borrowed Leica, retrieved out of hock, and shooting a film called Psychiatry in Russia. Its success helped him find work with the dean of direct cinema, Robert Drew, who was just then about to start shooting a film about the tightly
contested 1960 Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin.

  Primary erased the distance between politician and constituent, star and fan. Suddenly, we were able to follow so closely behind a candidate for the presidency of the United States that we could almost feel the flap of John F. Kennedy’s suit jacket lightly brushing our arms as he maneuvered his way to the next crowd, the next microphone.

  After a number of years working with Drew, Albert joined his brother David, who had been working in Hollywood, and started a documentary-production company.

  The Maysleses’ work, documenting the secret lives of the Beatles, Marlon Brando, and Truman Capote, was intended to offer audiences a peek through the looking glass of celebrity.

  1968’s Salesman, the Maysleses’ best-known film, was an exception to their star-studded earlier work, a film deliberately lacking in glamour or romance. At first glance, Salesman, which silently observed a team of Bible salesmen as they knocked on doors, cajoling housewives and retirees to buy overpriced Bibles with a mixture of oozing bonhomie and Catholic guilt, seemed a notable about-face from the Maysleses’ earlier work. What could be further from the hothouse worlds of the movie colony or rock stardom than the lives of itinerant salesmen? And yet, on closer inspection, Salesman was closely linked to its predecessors. What was this film, after all, but another glimpse behind the frayed velvet curtain, peeking at the private lives of professionals whose careers depended on their ability to play a role? We watched the men in a hotel room, practicing their pitches, and came to understand that they, too, were actors, their livelihoods dependent on performing convincingly.

  Soon the film they would shoot would become the primary lens through which the vast American audience not in attendance at Altamont would understand the tumultuous events of the day. Without it, there would be little but rumor and hearsay with which to understand the explosive clashes of December 6.

  All through that night, fans left San Francisco and Berkeley, beginning the fifty-mile drive east through the all-encompassing darkness in the hopes of arriving at Altamont ahead of all the others sure to come. Woodstock had already entered the cultural pantheon as the culmination of the hippie fantasia: three days of peace and love and music. The counterculture had begun to envelop the mainstream, and it was likely only going to grow larger and more fruitful. With the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and the Hells Angels, Ken Kesey and LSD, the Bay Area had been the birthplace of the counterculture, and it galled the musicians, hippies, freaks, burnouts, druggies, and artists who made up its ranks that some no-name town in upstate New York had stolen its fire. This life was not a Madison Avenue affair, and the upper crust of Park Avenue was not invited to its celebrations. The time had come for the West Coast to reclaim its birthright, and Altamont—already called by some, as they hoped it might become, Woodstock West—was to be its coming-out party.

  4. Outlaw Pride

  It was a marriage of opposites, the collision of the middle-class rebels of the local music scene and the working-class motorcycle enthusiasts. Each had seen themselves as refugees from polite society, standing in opposition to the enforced consensus of postwar America.

  For the bikers, the hippies and musicians were well-liked acquaintances, offering entrée to many of the Angels’ favored pastimes. For the counterculture, the feelings were stronger, with the Hells Angels seen as allies in the battle against middle-class bourgeois mores. The counterculture in the Bay Area had long thought of itself as a kind of outlaw posse, living beyond the law and grateful for the company of all who similarly found themselves at odds with the establishment. It believed itself to be a large-tent party, encompassing anyone and everyone for whom the mainstream made no space.

  The Angels were crude and impolite and little better than brigands, but they were the counterculture’s own designated brigands. They were holy outlaws, and fellow travelers on the road to musical and cultural revolution. Their unruliness was a powerful symbol, the corporeal manifestation of the hippies’ idle talk of overturning the system and flouting the law. The establishment was the enemy, and the Hells Angels were the only ones willing to take the fight to them, to risk their own well-being to defy authority. They physically embodied the counterculture’s spiritual struggle.

  The alliance between the counterculture and the Hells Angels was born of a deliberate ignorance, a desire to romanticize the outlaw. The Hells Angels were desperados, dissenting against the stifling consensus of the mainstream. The counterculture and the bikers shared a common enemy: the stultifying order of the postwar consensus, in which women were happy homemakers and men work-minded breadwinners, living at the office to pay for their families’ lives. How could these two groups, each rebelling against the machine in their own manner, not share more than what separated them?

  For all their surface differences, the counterculture and the Angels had an overlapping sphere of interests: drugs, free love, and good music. The counterculture supplied a good deal of each, of which the Angels were only too happy to partake. And the counterculture had a vested interest in putting on safe, secure events without involving the local police. Police departments were, they believed, corrupt, prone to outbursts of violence, and innately hostile to longhairs. They had been the ones responsible for the savage beating of protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. If a good portion of the counterculture’s political energy focused on ending the misbegotten war in Vietnam, the police were seen as the local representatives of the U.S. Army, equally brutal and equally loathed. The Hells Angels were the counterculture’s substitute police force, their ramshackle representatives of law and order. The Angels’ presence at a concert, providing a protective cordon around a band or guarding their equipment, allowed the counterculture to believe it capably and safely policed itself. The authorities were no longer necessary.

  The Hells Angels had had a long and mutually admiring relationship with Jerry Garcia and the members of the Grateful Dead. The Dead were the avatars of the Bay Area scene, pot-smoking hippies with a taste for folk melodies, country instruments, and long, shambling solos. The band cultivated an antiestablishment ethos that it only furthered through its canny association with the Hells Angels.

  Garcia preferred hiring the Angels for his band’s shows to employing private security, or the hated cops. He treated the Hells Angels with deferential respect, letting them in free to any show they might show up at, and the Angels respected him back. The Grateful Dead were the philosophers and court musicians of the new society, and everyone interested in participating was welcome. The exiles from polite society were gathering, and the Angels were only one colorful patch on the crazy quilt of the counterculture.

  Garcia was friendly with a number of the San Francisco Hells Angels, and he regularly defended them against others’ reproaches. When others criticized the Angels for their recklessness, Garcia would note that at least the Angels wore colorful garb that instantly identified them as men to be wary of. What of all those others in their identical suits and ties, wolves posing in sheep’s clothing? The Hells Angels were wolves in wolves’ garb, and when they growled, at least there would be no confusion about just who they were.

  * * *

  The Angels stood in opposition to both the mass of workaday middle-class and working-class drones—whom they referred to, dismissively, as “citizens”—and their fellow bikers, who might have been riding Harleys but were otherwise equally bland rule-followers, lacking the flair and vigor of the Hells Angels. To be a Hells Angel was to be called to live up to an ideal.

  In his essential 1967 chronicle Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, which introduced many readers to the bikers’ subculture, Hunter S. Thompson wrote of one Angel nicknamed the Mute who, when stopped by the police and told to remove a jacket with the Angels’ famous death’s-head insignia, took it off to reveal a second matching jacket with the identical logo. A third death’s-head lay beneath it, followed by a shirt w
ith the logo imprinted on it, a similar undershirt, and a Hells Angels tattoo inked on his chest. The officer let the Mute go before he could show off his death’s-head emblazoned underwear.

  Like the counterculture they now associated with, the Hells Angels had been born out of a desire to sidestep authority, to avoid the constricting embrace of normalcy. For many young men drafted to serve in the Second World War, the war years had been defined by a sense of masculine camaraderie. In the absence of women, in the presence of an enemy committed to their slaughter, these young soldiers found comfort in their comrades. And when the war ended, and so many veterans rushed home to find stability in job and home and hearth, others were interested in prolonging the war’s extended leave from workaday responsibility. The war had exposed many of them to heavy machinery for the first time, and where some vets fell in love with hot rods and formed car clubs, and others took up surfing, many found comfort in motorcycles.

  Motorcycles were relatively affordable, easily customizable emblems of freedom and speed and motion. Many veterans were mechanically adept and capable of fixing and personalizing their bikes themselves. Some of the bikes these early riders purchased were from surplus military stocks, their riders literally bringing the war home for their own pleasure and consolation. Many cyclists likely suffered from what would later be called post-traumatic stress disorder, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, and motorcycles were a homeopathic remedy for the ailments of men who had liberated concentration camps, stormed Omaha Beach at Normandy, and survived the unfathomable depredations of the war in the Pacific. They were not ready to throw on their suits and take up the concerns of middle management just yet.