by Marc Spitz
“The Rolling Stones have always in a sense been in danger of imploding,” Cutler writes. “They always sound rocky to begin with and then they struggle through the barriers together and end up making amazing music. They are the most human of bands, one can sense them holding it together—just. It’s something I’ve always loved them for, their ‘vulnerability’ as a band and their musical courage when you can sense them struggling and working their butts off to make the music happen.”
From L.A., the band flew to Colorado to launch the tour. The lights went down, the group, featuring Taylor and new sax man Bobby Keys (who’d first met the Stones during the state fair circuit of their debut U.S. tour in ’64), began to take the stage. Just then, Cutler—an archetype of the decadent but loyal rock and roll road companion of the pre-corporate era, got on the microphone and spontaneously announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest rock and roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones.” Keith strummed out the chords to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and with that the Stones were back. But were they really the greatest rock and roll band in the world? Was that a prudent thing to say just before their first U.S. date in three years, and after the shambolic set in Hyde Park?
After the show, Mick Jagger found Cutler and asked for a word. “We have to talk,” he said. “Sam when you’re introducing the band, please don’t call us the greatest rock and roll band in the world.” Cutler, without missing a beat, shot back, “Well either you fucking are or you ain’t. What the fuck is it gonna be?”
“At first Mick hated this phrase,” Cutler would later tell me, “but after a while he seemed to mellow with it and accept it. I think he enjoyed rising to the challenge!”
Mick contemplated this in silence and skulked off deep in thought. “I think that Mick simply thought initially that it was an absurdist claim. Hyperbole run amok, which it was, but then I think he thought, ‘Well it’s a hell of a job title, but someone’s gotta have it, so why not us,’ and then he set out to claim the title for his own,” Cutler says. Each following night on that tour, when the lights went down, he would introduce the band the same way, and by the tour’s end, Mick stopped correcting him. The Stones were in a groove; they were proving it. Everyone figured the tour’s final date in San Francisco would be the pinnacle of their career.
What people don’t really talk about when they talk about Altamont is just how sad it was. They say “tragic,” but really it’s just sad: sad for the Hells Angels, sad for the Rolling Stones, sad for rock and roll and its fans to this day; the specter of Altamont still hangs, forty-two years later, over live rock concerts from the most intimate bar back room to the Stones’ 2006 concert on Rio’s Copacabana beach (for a live audience of more than one million). It’s the reason every large venue is teaming with cops and every small club has security standing in front of the stage with walkie-talkies. “It will always be something for critics of rock and roll to use,” legendary San Francisco promoter Bill Graham wrote in his memoir. “You can’t let all these people gather here for a concert. They may hurt each other. Look at Altamont.” It was saddest of all, obviously, for the friends and family of Meredith Hunter, aka Murdoch, the eighteen-year-old kid who was murdered under the stage as the Rolling Stones played for three hundred thousand people. If he’d gone to see Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice instead that weekend, there’s a chance Meredith Hunter would be turning sixty years old in October of 2011. As it stands, he is forever eighteen, forever clad in a horrible lime green suit, matching hat, and black, silk, ruffled shirt. The facts of Altamont are well-known. As with the Blind Faith concert in Hyde Park in July, the three-day Woodstock Festival in August was credited with taking rock and roll and youth culture into previously uncharted realms. Rock and roll had become a massive concern, a hugely powerful and influential force, and the Stones, who did not play Woodstock (their rivals for the “world’s greatest” title, the Who, turned out a memorable set), wanted to show that they could control that force, bend it to their will. They wanted a Woodstock of their own. Yes, it was an ego trip, as many of the critics of the Stones pointed out in their coverage of the event. Rolling Stone magazine called it “the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, and money manipulation.” But it was also a classic case of peer pressure. They dispatched their team, including flamboyant local lawyer and television personality Melvin Belli (who is Gimme Shelter’s sorely needed comic relief as he plays to the camera in his oversized spectacles), to set about looking for an appropriate venue in San Francisco to host it.
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was chosen for obvious reasons : it was the global epicenter of hippie culture, right in the middle of a major city, guaranteeing the band the attention they wanted. But it was also a way for the Stones to tell the people that they were still in touch with the street; they hadn’t crawled into the bubble and isolated themselves from their brothers and sisters. Rolling Stone was founded and is still based in the city. The magazine’s cofounder and San Francisco Chronicle music journalist Ralph J. Gleason had strafed the band in the newspaper for their then high ticket prices and advised that if they were really a people’s band, they would do a show for free. Remember, Woodstock had only become a free concert after tens of thousands of fans crashed the gates. The Stones would do one better: They would conceive and execute the Golden Gate Park show as a symbol of brother- and sisterhood, of peace and harmony, and, most of all, of love for their fans (who Gleason felt were being treated with contempt). It was unavoidably a loud, long photo op for counterculture cred restoration. The true questions were: How much did Mick believe it? Was he using “love your brother” as a gesture to buy off the press, who, at the time, the Stones were certainly not invulnerable to? He certainly kicked the tires of the ’68 revolution before deciding it wasn’t for him. But in Stanley Booth’s breathtaking account of the ’69 tour, True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, he talks about Mick requesting that someone find him mescaline for a planned postshow trip. He wanted to come down from the high and think about what had just happened, what it had meant, how it had furthered humankind. You mustn’t take the philosopher and the searcher out of the Mick equation, even though it’s now become routine to do so. He was certainly warned against examining the possibility of people coming together to be “as one.” Graham, for one, claims to have warned them, “You can’t do a free concert. Not without planning. As big as you are, you can’t do a free show. Free was the dangerous word.” But “free” was the only word that mattered as far as the Stones’ image and possibly Mick’s ideals were concerned.
The city eventually nixed the idea of giving up the park for fear of rampant damage and liability, so the high-concept, long, loud photo op began leaking air as it began its sad troll toward finding a host. It was briefly to be held at the Sears Point Raceway, and finally found a taker at the Altamont Speedway, twenty miles outside of the city. Unlike Hyde Park and Woodstock, Altamont was mostly concrete. It was a cold place, not conducive to the kind of crowds they’d expected, impossible to police, and most readily accessible only via helicopter should disaster happen to strike. Altamont had been a place for gambling, and the Stones took a big one on it. They had reason to be confident. Michael Lang, the promoter who’d pulled off Woodstock, a hippie with an uncanny knack for logistics, was on board, as were local heroes Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, whose manager, Rock Scully, suggested they bring in the local chapter of the Hells Angels to protect the expensive stage gear and crucial power generators and create a practical yet counterculture-appropriate barrier between the band and their fans. There had been Angels at the Hyde Park show. The English chapter was remarkably polite. It seemed like a good idea at the time, as they say . . . The Angels were hired, according to legend, for “five hundred dollars worth of beer.”
There are some who say that the band set the Angels up to be the bad cops. Mick, after all, refused any police intervention or escort for fear of being seen in the company of the local police (still regarded as “pigs” by
the counterculture). When he was punched in the face by a crazed fan upon first surveying the crowd at Altamont, he made sure the kid (who’d shouted “I hate you!”) was unharmed. That the Angels, equipped only with a scattering of weapons (pistols, knives, sawed-off pool cues) would have been able to somehow control what was fast becoming a crush of humanity, many of them surging on shitty West Coast speed (an autopsy of Hunter found meth in his bloodstream) and very bad acid (that some, like Sam Cutler himself, according to his memoir, claim was leaked into the population by a government agency to discredit the hippie movement) was evidence of an utter lack of thought rather than a scheme. The Angels, in their leather jackets, were, despite their strength in numbers, not invulnerable to fear and panic and adrenaline surges . . . and quick, sometimes bad, decision making. Throw in a very long wait for the Stones to come onstage (the reason for the holdup is yet another element of the eternal “Who is to blame” debate) and you have a perfect storm. Those attending Altamont were a lot of things; white, black, free, repressed, rich, poor. What they weren’t, not for one second, was cool. “Woodstock was a bunch of stupid slobs in the mud,” the inimitable Grace Slick once said. “Altamont was a bunch of angry slobs in the mud.”
The footage of the murder itself has become rock’s Zapruder film. Hunter, in his garish green duds, is easy to spot in the crowd. He licks his lips, a classic speed-user move. His girlfriend, a fairhaired teen named Patti Bredahoff, seems equally agitated, trying and failing to calm him down. Patti was a white girl. There are some who claim that the initial altercation with the Angels was racially motivated. Others say it was just random; wrong place/ wrong time. Hunter clearly draws a revolver. You can see it, famously, against Bredahoff ’s light crocheted dress. Was he telling the Angels to back off? Letting them know they weren’t dealing with a punk? Was it self-defense? Or was it, as Rock Scully claimed, the product of a kid insane on speed and intent on doing some damage? “There was no doubt in my mind that he intended to do terrible harm to Mick or somebody in the Rolling Stones, or somebody on that stage,” Scully has said. Hunter doesn’t stay alive long enough to clarify. The crowd quickly gyrates outward, creating a kind of bullring at the first appearance of the gun (Hunter’s) and the knife (Hells Angel Alan Passaro’s). Hunter appears to realize, way too late, that the skirmish between himself and the Angels has escalated and seems to try to flee as Passaro, then several other Angels, grab him and take him down for good. His last words, “I wasn’t going to shoot you,” indicate that perhaps it was all a bluff. It’s impossible to watch footage of the murder without returning to that sadness. It wasn’t antithetical to the ’60s; Altamont was so . . . un–rock and roll. It empowered nobody, and this is the true collateral damage that affected the Stones’ spirit even as it glamorized and darkened their rep. And so, 1969, an annus horribilis for Mick Jagger (despite releasing some timeless music), ended with another ghost straight out of Macbeth, which would circle him for the rest of his life. The day after Altamont, Mick and the band’s new business manager, Prince Rupert Lowenstein, flew to Geneva to deposit the profits of the North American tour in a Swiss bank account. It was money that the alternative press considered highway robbery, and those outraged by the violence of Altamont considered blood money. The Rolling Stones had become both the greatest rock and roll band in the world, as Sam Cutler had so boldly declared, and not a rock and roll band at all. They were something else now; beyond rock and roll in a way, but also a little lost without it.
10
“The New Judy Garland”
“Some would say that Bianca Jagger is nothing but a creation of the media,” Bob Colacello writes in his November 1986 cover profile in Vanity Fair. The Bianca Jagger that still lives in the public consciousness despite decades of activism and philanthropy on behalf of oppressed people from the Amazon to Afghanistan, her association with the International Red Cross, various green ventures, and her own Human Rights Foundation is often that media creation: decadent, gold-digging, shallow, a hag for the swish designers of the disco era. That Bianca Jagger is frozen in time atop a white horse, bareback in couture as she is led into Studio 54 by a naked man with a porn-star mustache. That Bianca sits astride a white horse. It’s her birthday party. Despite centuries of “women on horseback” imagery and mythology, Jagger looks impassive, even bored by the spectacle. Her smile is faint, not broad. It’s the lack of reaction that makes the image enduring, a great symbol of the disco daze. “If Bianca was mediagenic and muse appropriate in the time of disco,” says author Anthony Haden-Guest, who chronicled the rise and fall of Studio 54 in his book The Last Party, “it was a combination of her own nature, at once opaque and hungry for attention.”
Getting older is a bitch it’s true, and you can’t really begrudge someone for wanting to blur their vision with spectacle to avoid looking at the hard truths of growing up, but this was 1977. Down at CBGB, the grubby young punks were reinventing the music that Bianca’s husband had made so exciting a decade and a half earlier, and here she was, the finale of a grand production number arranged by 54’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, doing absolutely nothing. What did that Bianca do exactly, besides party and allow fashion designers to drape her skinny frame with new frocks?
Today of course, in an age of Hiltons and Kardashians, we can consider her fabulous idleness pioneering. Bianca was the first apparently tradeless celebrity. She was simply . . . Bianca, with a smear of red rouge on her full lips, draped in a Grecian dress, a regal shoulder bared and Halston or Andy Warhol whispering a bon mot into her bejeweled ear. She was, by now, one-name famous. But when combined with her husband, like Jack and Anjelica or Woody and Mia, she entered the zeitgeist with blunt force, leaving many confused and a few hostile. Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston were actors; they made films. Bianca flirted with the idea of becoming an actor but never did. Mick Jagger was an actor and a rock performer; he also was virtually managing the Rolling Stones operation the year that they met. Bianca was . . . what exactly? A very pretty vacuum with caramel skin, dark hair, dark eyes, a glamorously flat chest, a vaguely contemptuous bedroom gaze? The media that created her adored her, but everyone else injected resentment, jealousy, envy, and cattiness into that void. At first Mick suffered collateral damage, as did the Stones. What were they thinking?
But Bianca, as we will examine more closely a bit later, was likely part of a larger plan, one that would actually help the Stones in the bigger picture and carve a niche for them that a rougheredged (if equally brilliant) band like Led Zeppelin could never hope to occupy. The arrival of Bianca Jagger, it should finally be said, made the Stones a little bit lame, sure—especially in an age of Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Johnny Rotten, but like Marianne and Anita before her, she deepened them. Bianca gave the Stones a celebrity sheen and an air of high society that mixed very nicely with their nitty-gritty, torn, and frayed image and created, essentially, a brand-new rock and roll aesthetic. She marks the apotheosis of Mick’s quest for a combination of high and low culture, penthouse and pavement. Studio 54, which would become their playground, was where sounds, fashions, and personalities from each echelon clashed in one sweaty clinch under neon. Unlike Marianne and Anita, Bianca is still not cool, and therefore never gets any credit for her crucial contribution to Mick’s building of a’70s Stones model, only the lashing blame for exposing them to toxic celebrity culture. “Say what you will, but Mick did very well putting the Rolling Stones into this world of celebrity,” says Peter Rudge, the band’s Cambridge-educated road manager during this Bianca-guided phase. “It benefitted Keith, too. Now Keith could be the dark guy sitting in this world of celebrity-studded rooms, and that was fascinating to people. Mick knew it was. He knew the value of Keith being Keith. Now the band worked on many levels. It differentiated them from Page and Plant, Daltrey and Townsend, Roger Waters and David Gilmour [of Pink Floyd]—they lived completely different lifestyles to the Stones now.”
The “real” Bianca Pérez-Morena De Macias was born in
to a well-to-do family in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1945. Her father was a wealthy businessman, but when Bianca was a child her parents divorced and Nicaraguan culture at the time didn’t really protect the female divorcée. This is likely the nexus of Bianca’s complex relationship with both wealth and austerity: the partying in nightclubs and the mercy missions to climates torn by war and natural disaster. She knew what it was like to have money but in an instant, money became an issue. It’s also why she was initially flagged as an opportunist, after Mick’s fortune.
“I saw how difficult life became for my mother from that moment on,” she has said of her parents’ divorce when she was seven. “And how my life changed as well. After having an easy life suddenly my mother had to work and suddenly my mother was treated completely differently. I saw the fate that women in countries like Nicaragua were condemned to have to be: second rate citizens. I didn’t want to have the same future that my mother had.”
Like Mick, Bianca had a great curiosity for how things worked: She read about economics, political hierarchies, and systems, having received a scholarship to the Paris Institute of Political Studies as a teen. By the late ’60s she found herself in the London of protest marches and the waning psychedelic age. A fling with the actor Michael Caine placed her at the right parties, where her beauty and fierce intellect impressed. She knew Donald Cammell, the perverse director of Performance, as well as Turkish-born soul music impresario Ahmet Ertegün of Atlantic Records. Ertegün was, as the ’70s began, very busy courting the Stones, as their deal with Decca had recently ended. They owed the label one final single after completing work on what would be their final Decca album, the live Get Your Ya Ya’s Out. Mick offered the label an acoustic folk song with no hook and profane lyrics. The title was “Cocksucker Blues,” taken from a chorus that asked: “Where can I get my cock sucked? Where can I get my ass fucked?” The label let the Stones go. They signed to Atlantic and hired Marshall Chess to head their own imprint, Rolling Stones Records. “They had a real problem,” Chess says. “They were broke. It was fucked up. They didn’t like their manager. Didn’t like their label. There were many new acts that had been eaten up by barracudas in the business. [In the early ’60s] no one thought it would explode like it did.” Through his London social circles, Mick found a private banker, the aforementioned Prince Rupert Lowenstein, to completely restructure their finances. “He worked for a private merchant bank, Leopold Joseph and Sons [Ltd],” Chess says. “He was a virgin [as far as the music business went]. He’d never made a record deal.” As with the launch of any venture, early plans for Rolling Stones Records were wildly ambitious, but it soon became apparent that the only real project was survival. “We were going to sign other artists to the label. We were negotiating with Hendrix—and then he died. He could have been our first artist. Then one day they called me into a meeting and said, ‘We have no budget. We have this tax bill.’ So I had to make a decision. It would be just about the Stones. And I loved it. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. It was fabulous.”
