Altamont Free Concert

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The Altamont Speedway Free Festival was a counterculture rock concert in the United States, held on Saturday, December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway outside of Tracy, California. Approximately 300,000 attended the concert, The Woodstock festival had taken place in Bethel, New York, in mid-August, almost four months earlier.

The event is remembered for its use of Hells Angels as security and its significant violence, including the killing of Meredith Hunter and three accidental deaths: two from a hit-and-run car crash, and one from a drowning incident in an irrigation canal. During the Rolling Stones' headline performance, violence erupted close to the stage, resulting in the fatal stabbing of Hunter, a spectator. MusicRadar noted that the tragedy, captured on film in Gimme Shelter, eclipsed the event and marked a dark ending for the 1960s counterculture. The concert featured performances (in order of appearance) by Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY), with The Rolling Stones taking the stage as the final act. Grateful Dead were also scheduled to perform after CSNY, but shortly before their scheduled appearance, they chose not to due to the increasing violence at the venue. "That's the way things went at Altamont—so badly that the Grateful Dead, the prime organizers and movers of the festival, didn't even get to play," wrote staff at Rolling Stone magazine in a detailed narrative on the event, terming it, in an additional follow-up piece, "rock and roll's all-time worst day, December 6th, a day when everything went perfectly wrong."

Filmmakers Albert and David Maysles shot footage of the event and incorporated it into the 1970 documentary film titled Gimme Shelter.

Background

Jefferson Airplane's account

According to Jefferson Airplane's Spencer Dryden, the idea for "a kind of Woodstock West" began when he and bandmate Jorma Kaukonen discussed the staging of a free concert with the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones in Golden Gate Park. Referring to the Stones, Dryden said, "Next to the Beatles they were the biggest rock and roll band in the world, and we wanted them to experience what we were experiencing in San Francisco."

As plans were being finalized, Jefferson Airplane were on the road, and by early December they were in Florida, believing the concert plans for Golden Gate Park were proceeding. But by December 4, the plans had broken down, in Paul Kantner's account, because the city and police departments were unhelpful, reflecting the innate antagonism between the hippies of Haight-Ashbury and the authorities. Sonoma Raceway was then the venue, but its owners wanted $100,000 in escrow from the Rolling Stones.

At the last moment, Dick Carter offered his Altamont Speedway in eastern Alameda County for the festival.

Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead's account

During the Rolling Stones' 1969 U.S. tour, many (including journalists) felt that the ticket prices were far too high. In answer to this criticism, the Rolling Stones decided to end their tour with a free concert in San Francisco.

The concert was originally scheduled to be held at San Jose State University's practice field, as there had recently been a three-day outdoor free festival there with 52 bands and 80,000 attendees. Dirt Cheap Productions was asked to help secure the property again for the Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead to play a free concert. The Stones and the Dead were told the city of San Jose was not in the mood for another large concert and the grounds were out of bounds. Golden Gate Park in San Francisco was next on the list. However, a previously scheduled Chicago Bears–San Francisco 49ers football game at Kezar Stadium, located in Golden Gate Park, made that venue impractical, and permits were never issued for the concert. The venue was then changed to the Sears Point Raceway near Sonoma.

The hasty move resulted in numerous logistical problems, including a lack of facilities such as portable toilets and medical tents. The move also created a problem for the stage design; instead of being on top of a rise, which characterized the geography at Sears Point, at Altamont the stage would now be at the bottom of a slope. The Rolling Stones' stage manager on the 1969 tour, Chip Monck, explained that "the stage was one metre high – 39 inches for us – and [at Sears Point] it was on the top of a hill, so all the audience pressure was back upon them". Because of the short notice for the change of location, the stage could not be changed. "We weren't working with scaffolding, we were working in an older fashion with parallels. You could probably have put another stage below it...but nobody had one," Monck said.

Security

By some accounts, the Hells Angels were hired as security by the management of the Rolling Stones, on the recommendation of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane (who both had previously used the Angels for security at performances without incident), for $500 worth of beer. This story has been denied by some parties who were directly involved. According to the road manager of the Rolling Stones' 1969 US Tour, Sam Cutler, "the only agreement there ever was ... the Angels would make sure nobody tampered with the generators, but that was the extent of it. But there was no way 'They're going to be the police force' or anything like that. That's all bollocks." The deal was made at a meeting including Cutler, Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully, and Pete Knell, a member of the Hells Angels' San Francisco chapter.

Emmett Grogan (founder of the radical community-action group the Diggers), who was intimately involved in the organization of the event (especially at the two earlier-planned venues), confirmed the $500 beer arrangement on that same KSAN forum with Ponek.

"Pete" also tells host Ponek that the Angels were hired by Cutler because of some rowdy, anxious on-stage incidents during the Stones' Oakland and Miami concerts weeks earlier. As security guards, Pete said "we ain't into that security", but that they agreed after the beer offer. He also claimed that, other than being told to "just keep people off the stage," Cutler gave the Hells Angels very little specific instructions for stage security: "They didn't say nothing to us about any of that." And although the Angels are not security guards, "If we say we're going to do something, we do it. If we decide to do it, it's done. No matter what, how far we have to go to do it." The similar lack of detailed security instructions by the concert's management was also mentioned by Barger during his telephone call-in.

Altamont Speedway owner Dick Carter had hired hundreds of professional, plainclothes security guards, ostensibly more for the purpose of protecting his property rather than for the safety and well-being of the concertgoers. Barger mentions these guards, as identified by their wearing of "little white buttons" on "civilian clothes".

Political scientist and cultural critic James Miller believes that since Ken Kesey had invited the Hells Angels to one of his outdoor Acid Tests, the hippies had viewed the bikers unrealistically, idealizing them as "noble savages" Miller also maintains that the Rolling Stones may have been misled by their experience with a British contingent of self-described "Hells Angels", a non-outlaw group of admirers of American biker gear who had provided nonviolent security at a free Stones concert earlier that year in Hyde Park, London.

By the time the Rolling Stones took the stage in the early evening, the mood had taken a decidedly ugly turn as numerous fights had erupted between Angels and crowd members and within the crowd itself.

The Rolling Stones waited until sundown to perform. Stanley Booth stated that part of the reason for the delay was that Bill Wyman had missed the helicopter ride to the venue. When the Stones began their set, a tightly packed group of between 4,000 and 5,000 people were jammed to the very edge of the stage, and many attempted to climb onto it.

Killing of Meredith Hunter

Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger, who had already been punched in the head by a concertgoer within seconds of emerging from his helicopter, Rock Scully, who could see the audience clearly from the top of a truck by the stage, said of Hunter, "I saw what he was looking at, that he was crazy, he was on drugs, and that he had murderous intent. 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." appears in the Gimme Shelter documentary. Saarinen was unaware of having caught the killing on film. This was discovered more than a week later when raw footage was screened in the New York offices of the Maysles Brothers. In the film sequence, lasting about two seconds, a two-meter (six-foot) opening in the crowd appears, leaving Bredehoft in the center. Hunter enters the opening from the left. His hand rises toward the stage, and the silhouette of a revolver is clearly seen against Bredehoft's light-colored vest. Passaro is seen entering from the right and delivering two stabs with his knife as he pushes him off-screen; the opening then closes around Bredehoft, concealing the remaining 14 stabbings. Witnesses reported Hunter was stomped on by several Hells Angels while he was on the ground. Passaro was arrested and tried for murder in the summer of 1971, but was acquitted after a jury viewed concert footage showing Hunter brandishing the revolver and concluded that Passaro had acted in self-defense.

The Rolling Stones were aware of the skirmish, but not the stabbing ("You couldn't see anything, it was just another scuffle", Jagger tells David Maysles during film editing). But it soon became apparent they could see something of what had happened because the band stopped playing mid-song and Jagger was heard calling into his microphone, "We've really got someone hurt here... is there a doctor?" After a few minutes the band began playing again and eventually completed their set. Jagger told Maysles they all agreed that if they abandoned the show at that point, the crowd would have become even more unruly, perhaps degenerating into a full-scale riot.

In 2003, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office initiated a two-year investigation into the possibility of a second Hells Angel having taken part in the stabbing. Finding insufficient support for this hypothesis, and reaffirming that Passaro acted alone, the office closed the case for good on May 25, 2005.

Reactions

The Altamont concert is often contrasted with the Woodstock Festival that took place less than four months earlier. While Woodstock represented "peace and love", Altamont came to be viewed as the end of the hippie era and the de facto conclusion of late-1960s American youth culture: "Altamont became, whether fairly or not, a symbol for the death of the Woodstock Nation." Rock music critic Robert Christgau wrote in 1972 that "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended." Writing for The New Yorker in 2015, Richard Brody argued that what Altamont ended was "the idea that, left to their own inclinations and stripped of the trappings of the wider social order, the young people of the new generation will somehow spontaneously create a higher, gentler, more loving grassroots order. What died at Altamont is the Rousseauian dream itself.".

The music magazine Rolling Stone, in a 14-page, 11-author article on the event entitled "The Rolling Stones Disaster at Altamont: Let It Bleed" published in their January 21, 1970, issue, stated that "Altamont was the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity".

The film Gimme Shelter was criticized by Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby and other reviewers for portraying the Stones too sympathetically, and for staging a concert for the sole reason that it could be filmed, despite all the problems leading up to it. Salons Michael Sragow, writing in 2000, said many of the critics took their cues from the Rolling Stone review, which heavily blamed the filmmakers for being part of a "staged event" so that the Rolling Stones could profit from making a "concert" film. Sragow pointed out numerous errors in the Rolling Stone coverage and added that the Maysles did not make "major motion pictures" in the traditional way; instead, a variety of factors contributed to the tragedy.

The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards was relatively sanguine about the show, calling it "basically well-handled, but lots of people were tired and a few tempers got frayed" Both songs were written and recorded during sessions for the early 1970 album Workingman's Dead, but "Mason's Children" was not included on the album.

Altamont also inspired the Blue Öyster Cult song "Transmaniacon MC" ("MC" means "motorcycle club"), the opening track of their first album.

The incident is mentioned in the film The Cable Guy (1996), in a scene where Jim Carrey's character, Chip Douglas, performs "Somebody to Love" on karaoke: "You might recognize this song as performed by Jefferson Airplane, in a little rockumentary called Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones and their nightmare at Altamont. That night the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels had their way. Tonight, it's my turn."

In 2004, Australian electronic psych group Black Cab released their debut LP Altamont Diary, a concept album based on the concert and its cultural fallout. The LP features a cover of "New Speedway Boogie".

Altamont is also referenced by Don McLean in the song "American Pie" in the song's fifth verse, the majority of which contains symbols related to Altamont: "Jack Flash", a reference to San Francisco ("Candlestick", though that venue was unrelated to the actual concert), (Sympathy for) "the Devil", an enraged spectator watching something on a stage, and an "angel born in Hell". McLean officially refused to confirm or deny the song's ties to Altamont until he sold his songwriting notes in 2015. Within the context of the song, Altamont served as the culmination of a period that had begun with the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in February 1959, during which "things (were) heading in the wrong direction" and life was "becoming less idyllic."

In 2008, a former FBI agent said that some members of the Hells Angels had conspired to murder Mick Jagger in retribution for the Rolling Stones' lack of support following the concert, and for the negative portrayal of the Angels in the Gimme Shelter film. The conspirators reportedly used a boat to approach a residence where Jagger was staying on Long Island, New York, the plot failing when the boat was nearly sunk by a storm. Jagger's spokesperson has refused to comment on the matter.

thumb|Footage of performances from the concert

In January 2022, the Library of Congress shared a 30-minute clip of soundless footage shot from the stage at Altamont. The Library obtained the footage from the Prelinger Archives.

Set list

Santana

"Savor"
"Jin-go-lo-ba"
"Evil Ways"
"Conquistadore Rides Again"
"Persuasion"
"Soul Sacrifice"
"Gumbo"

Jefferson Airplane

"We Can Be Together"
"The Other Side of This Life" (During the performance of this song, Marty Balin was struck by a member of the Hells Angels, causing a temporary halt to the music.)
"Somebody to Love"
"3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds"
"Greasy Heart"
"White Rabbit"
"Come Back Baby"
"The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"
"Volunteers"

The Flying Burrito Brothers

"Lucille"
"To Love Somebody"
"Six Days on the Road"
"High Fashion Queen"
"Cody, Cody"
"Lazy Day"
"Bony Moronie"
"Close Up The Honky Tonks"
"Sweet Mental Revenge"

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

"Black Queen"
"Pre-Road Downs"
"Long Time Gone"
"Down by the River"
"Sea of Madness"

The Rolling Stones

"Jumpin' Jack Flash"
"Carol"
"Sympathy for the Devil" (Interrupted by numerous fights near the stage, causing the band to stop and then restart the song.)
"The Sun Is Shining"
"Stray Cat Blues"
"Love in Vain"
"Under My Thumb" (Stopped following the stabbing of Meredith Hunter, then restarted; after this, the violence subsided for the remainder of the concert.)
"Brown Sugar" (Debut live performance of the song; the studio version had been recorded only two days earlier in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.)
"Midnight Rambler"
"Live with Me" (The scene in the film showing a naked woman attempting to climb onto the stage actually occurs during this song, though it is shown while "Sympathy for the Devil" is played. The performance of the song is also faintly heard in the background as the medical intern talks about Meredith Hunter's death.)
"Gimme Shelter"
"Little Queenie"
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"
"Honky Tonk Women"
"Street Fighting Man"

References

Citations

Sources

External links

Rolling Stones at Altamont--home movie from the Library of Congress