Altamont: The Killing Field

I don t know what happened, it was terrible. If Jesus had been there he would have been crucified. Mick Jagger in a radio interview hours after Altamont.

CERTAIN EVENTS cut across chronology, gaining in potency as they recede into history. The murder of Meredith Hunter by Hell s Angels during the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway on December 6th 1969 is one such incident. 30 years after the fact, it remains a bloodstain on rock n roll s permanent record, a Rorschach blot into which we can read any amount of nightmares.
Throughout its brief history, pop music had created its fair share of martyrs Billie Holiday, Bird, Hank, the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Otis Redding, all of whom died as a result of tragic accidents or self-inflicted wounds.
But Altamont was different. Altamont was murder the slaying by white gang members of a black man dancing to a white band playing their version of the black man s blues. If the flower children built all their New Jerusalems at Woodstock, then this patch of Californian desert became their Golgotha. Altamont has been accurately diagnosed as the hippy Vietnam but it equally resembled a Brothers Grimm parable peopled by privileged princelings, knife-wielding knaves and babes lost in woods infested by marauding, bike-riding wolf-packs.
Choose your own Altamont allusion, but in it, from the safe vantage point of the 21st century, we can detect portents of almost every trauma that would afflict the counterculture over the next three decades: gang warfare and firearms (the violent deaths of Marvin Gaye, Tupac and Biggie Smalls); assassination (Hunter was packing heat in the wake of the Kennedy and King deaths, which themselves foreshadowed John Lennon s murder by Mark Chapman in 1980, and the attempted murder of George Harrison 19 years after that), not to mention an unhealthy dose of racial tension.
Consider the effect a pimp-chic black man with a pretty white girlfriend must ve had on the staunchly white, patriotic, anti-commie bikers, many of whom like their spiritual kin the Aryan nationalists and Idaho survivalists were Korean or Vietnam war veterans.
So, if you chart a graph from Me And The Devil Blues through Midnight Rambler to Cop Killer to AntiChrist Superstar, Altamont Speedway looms like a halfway (charnel) house on rock n roll s tragical history tour, the median line of evil. It also represents the queering of the hippy dream, the point where sacred cows got fattened into cash cows, precipitating Watergate, Lennon s lost weekend, Studio 54, Three Mile Island, the gay plague , the baby boomers Big Chill, the harsh, bright suburban purgatories painted in Ang Lee s The Ice Storm and Sam Mendes American Beauty.
It warns us that the permissive fillies who flounced bare-breasted at Woodstock would one day become menopausal neurotics trapped under frosting. It foresees that those hirsute, mutton-chopped, anti-materialistic young bucks would inevitably become viable , recede, go to seed and furtively lust after cheerleaders, trying to feed the parts of a Peter Pan complex a six figure salary can t reach.
It anticipates the disintegration of the nuclear unit, the doping of young Americans with Ritalin, the heroin chic of the 70s and 90s, the culture of despair that would breed bawling suicides like Kurt Cobain and heartlands killers like Columbine s Klebold and Harris. In the wake of trenchcoat mafia paranoia, one could sense a revival of David Crosby s old wives tales about The Devil s Music: sing about Satan and he s sure to appear . . .
Like Kris Kristofferson said, blame it on The Stones.
But Altamont wasn t merely the anti-Woodstock: both happenings were twin barrels of the same loaded gun. It s been suggested that the only reason the east coast event didn t blow up in everyone s faces was wet powder it rained. Nevertheless, it remains one chapter of 60s mythology that can t be repackaged for retro-kool consumption by Nike and Coca-Cola. When in 1994 Q magazine asked Keith Richards if he fancied an Altamont II, he chuckled grimly, We just need to find one sucker who ll get murdered . Besides, who needs a return to Calfornia screamin when Woodstock III can deteriorate into a medieval hell of rapine, looting, rioting and burning sound towers?
Still, The Stones last American show of the 60s in tandem with the Manson murders which had occurred only months previously effectively ended the age of Aquarius. And if the moral guardians of the time viewed the Tate/La Bianca murders as payback for Hollywood Babylon, Altamont was decreed comeuppance for Jagger and co s depravities during the Performance/Let It Bleed era, the point where Robert Johnson s hellhound came home to curl up at the Glimmer Twins feet (the band, after all, were playing Love In Vain on that tour).
In the Albert and David Maysles film Gimme Shelter, when the Stones restart Sympathy For The Devil after one of the Hell s Angels motorcycles has exploded and all hell has broken loose, something so apparently mundane happens in this extraordinary situation, it s surreal. A solitary dog saunters across the front of the stage like a lackadaisical emissary from the anima kingdom, unbothered by all the tumult.
It was time for the pipers to pay.

Just when hedonism and wide-open hopes of the sixties began to shut down, the Rolling Stones met the times head-on, in a volatile mix of art and violence that transformed them, in the course of one astonishing year, into The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World. Jim Miller, Newsweek

By winter of 1969, The Stones were the undisputed heavyweight champions of the world. The Beatles had split in a welter of acrimony. Dylan had geared down from amphetamine symbolist to family man writing plain-spoken parables and goofing off with The Band. Elvis rallied with his leather-clad 68 comeback special, but was still viewed with some suspicion by hippies as a hayseed who d pledged his allegiance to the flag rather than set fire to it. The supergroup supremacy embodied by The Who and Led Zeppelin was still a couple of years away.
Yet, Jagger and co felt they needed some grand gesture to conclude a triumphant American tour (which later yielded the much-praised live album Get Yer Ya-Ya s Out) and to nullify critics particularly San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph Gleason s complaints that ticket prices were too high, seating arrangements bad, and support acts the quality of BB King and Ike & Tina Turner underpaid.
What the band wanted was a PR exercise on the scale of the Brian Jones free memorial gig in Hyde Park, a west coast Woodstock at which to obliterate the ordeals of the last few years and the managerial wranglings of the present. As biographer Stanley Booth saw it, they needed to give some free glimmer to Ralph Gleason s rock-and-roll starved proletariat and to get away from the violence of the system, the cops clubs, (Allen) Klein s mop-handle.
Besides, a free festival would provide the perfect climax to the Gimme Shelter movie. San Francisco was a natural choice of location it had the Head heritage, the merry pranksters, the acid queens, the hippy infrastructure and the Hell s Angels. And if nobody knew what this Californian dream was supposed to mean, it still had to happen.
Such was the thinking of Haight Ashbury ambassador and Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully when he put the idea to Keith Richards at the guitarist s Cheyne Walk pad in the autumn of 1969. And if these two were barely capable of organising anything more than a piss-up in a brewery, the Jefferson Airplane delegation got the reassurance they were looking for when they called on Mick Jagger at his London home. Expecting some foppish heroin horror, Grace Slick and Paul Kantner were much taken with the singer s business savvy and hearty appetite for number-crunching. They duly signed up for the cause, followed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Santana, amongst others.
On the recommendation of Scully, who d worked with them before at Dead gatherings, The Oakland Chapter of the San Franciso Hell s Angels were asked to provide security at the event. The Stones camp had no qualms about this after all, biker bodyguards had worked out fine at Hyde Park. Plus, the idea undoubtedly appealed to Jagger s aesthetic: fluttering butterflies protected by a phalanx of scorpions; drag queens ringed by droogs. After all, hadn t the gangs been okayed by Ginsberg, Kesey and The Dead? He and tour manager Sam Cutler arranged for the Angels to be bought off with a truckload of ice and beer.
It was a bad judgement call that would come back to haunt all concerned. There was a substantial difference between a few longhairs from Stepney and the hard-boiled hoodlums of the west coast (club founder and president Sonny Barger had once telegrammed the US government offering the Oakland Chapter s services as a squad in Vietnam, and they d recently beaten up anti-war demonstrators). David Crosby was heard to grumble, The Rolling Stones are still a little bit in 1965 . . . to them an Angel is something between Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.
But the Oakland Angels had their own reasons for taking part. They had hoped the festival might serve as a means of breaking the cycle of gang violence that had plagued San Francisco over the previous year, skirmishes between Chinese, black and Latino mobs plus rival biker factions. Given that the city itself only had a population of 750,000, this was too much pressure in too small a space, even for the likes of Sonny Barger. The way the Angels saw it, a day of bikes, beer, burritos and blues might clear the air.
The police department granted The Stones the use of Golden Gate Park on condition that no announcements about the location of the concert would take place until 24 hours before the event. Jagger however, let slip the band s plans for a free gig and 20 hours before showtime, the police revoked their permit. The search was on for a new site. The world and his wife already knew that there was going to be a happening there were queues of kids at airports all across the country but no-one could say where. Sears Point was on for a while, then off again. Finally, after some frantic criss-crossing of the state in a helicopter, lawyer Melvin Belli and Woodstock promoter Michael Lang settled on a location the afternoon before the show. Hungry for publicity, the authorities at Altamont Speedway had granted the use of their grounds.

FIRST ANNUAL CHARLIE MANSON DEATH FESTIVAL Note scrawled on blackboard at the Grateful Dead offices at 710 Ashbury by Emmet Grogan of The Diggers a couple of days before Altamont.

Situated near Livermore, a 90 minute drive from San Francisco, Altamont Speedway was hollowed out of a flat expanse of bare scrubland dotted with garbage, car wrecks and bad vibes, suggesting the aftermath of a Mad Max style third world war (or, for that matter, the Manson family s dune-buggy sorties).
On the morning of Saturday December 6th, the multitudes swarmed towards the site despite the previous day s warnings from Bay Area radio stations to stay away. There were tailbacks for six miles in either direction on the highway. Compared to this chaos, Woodstock was a Nuremberg rally. Speaking in Dark Star, Robert Greenfield s oral biography of Jerry Garcia, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the Henry Ford of street LSD, described his arrival on the scene:
We came out of this tunnel into this moonscape of crushed auto bodies. As we drove along, we looked over to the left and we saw this place that looked like a skull. It was the actual arena in which they had these demolition derbies. And I thought, Oh my god. This place smells of death, and of the energy of people who come here to watch other people crashing these cars and hoping they die. I thought, This is the worst possible place to have something like this. I realised that if you took acid at this show, you were going to have a trip you didn t really want to do.
At the concert site itself, the incline of the canyon slope was so severe that intoxicated revellers found themselves rolling down the bald hills towards the stage. The stage itself was so low off the ground that people repeatedly tried to climb on, incurring the wrath of the motorcycle grunts. For those further back, it was almost impossible to see or hear the bands.
Whatever it was that drew us to this place, everybody wanted it, David Dalton wrote last year. Everything about Altamont was compulsive. In retrospect, it seems incredible that everyone scrambled so fiercely to get there walking, riding, hitching, flying into this reckless expedition in a state analogous to somnambulism. Once it had been announced, it had to happen, even if a few details had to be forced to make it happen, like moving the entire site just twenty hours before the performance.
Perhaps the hordes craved some way of reanimating their California Dream, an antidote to all the violence, bad smack, coke, Quaaludes and Manson nightmares, a means of averting the sense of plunging vorticism Joan Didion wrote about in The White Album. Even Keith Richards, from inside the Rolling Stones bubble, had noticed a new kind of madness following the Nixon-Humphrey campaign. In America in 69, he said, one got the feeling they really wanted to suck you out. Yet even if The Stones had known what vague miracle was demanded of them, it s doubtful they could ve provided it all they had were songs about street fighting men, serial killers and Satan. As Stanley Booth had noted, the one song that sounded out of place throughout their 69 tour was I m Free .
By early afternoon, the media put the attendance figure at Altamont somewhere between a quarter and half a million people a mini-nation of twitchy freaks.
There was a lot of bad acid around, and people were freaking out all over the place, Keith s bodyguard and drugs roadie Tony Sanchez recalled in his book Up And Down With The Rolling Stones. Everybody was getting stoned out of his skull to pass the long hours before the music was to start Mexican grass, cheap California wine, amphetamines . . . By midday virtually everyone was tripping . . . A man was almost killed as he tried to fly from a speedway bridge another acid case. On the other side of the site a young guy screamed for help as he fell into the deep waters of a drainage canal. The stoned-out freaks looked on bemused as he sank beneath the surface. No one seemed sure if he had been real or an hallucination. It didn t matter anymore anyway, he was dead. Elsewhere, doctors were kept busy delivering babies to girls giving hysterical premature birth.
The Stones and their entourage arrived during the Burrito Brothers opening set. As soon as Jagger hit the asphalt upon disembarking from the helicopter, he was struck in the face by a boy proclaiming, I hate you! I hate you! Michele Phillips of the Mamas And Papas came into the band s backstage trailer and described how the Angels were fighting with civilians, women and each other, throwing full beercans at people s heads, gobbling handfuls of free acid (distributed by Owsley Stanley) and smearing the rest on their faces. If The Stones were getting protection from these guys, then it was the same deal the fifth century Romans got from the Visigoths.
When Jagger went walkabout in order to see CSN&Y, he found that he couldn t move in the crush. Appeals of Please people, stop hurting each other you don t have to! rang from the PA, highlighting the ineptitude of the love n peace corps when dealing with the bristling hostility of the bike gangs. Inside the Grateful Dead s bus, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh sat squirming, shivering and loading up on dope, opium and mescalin in order to numb the horrible sight of innocent and often incapacitated bystanders being beaten to a pulp.
Garcia himself only ventured out to watch Jefferson Airplane s set. Midway through The Other Side Of This Life , singer Marty Balin attempted to stop Angels beating up a black man in front of the stage, and was briefly knocked unconscious by an outlaw named Animal, who was wearing the head of a wolf for a hat. Grace Slick, who d forgotten her contact lenses, blundered around trying to find out what was going on. When Paul Kantner sarcastically thanked the Angels for knocking out their singer, the stage was overrun with heavies. Garcia retreated to the bus, shaking and pale, muttering that there was no way The Dead were going to play now. Phil Lesh agreed. Let the Stones go on, he decided. This is their madness.
It was a wise decision. More bands than anticipated had shown up, and the show was running late as it was. There were no lit roads out of Altamont, and 200,000 people were effectively stranded. The Dead choppered out just as the headliners took to the stage, glad to be alive, having cancelled another gig scheduled for that night. We said, Fuck it , Garcia later explained. We were too depressed.

They didn t really understand what they were getting involved with. I didn t like any of em. They were all jerks. Mick Jagger s a good singer but he s a fuckin asshole. Sonny Barger, to Richard Fleury last year.

By the time The Stones were ready to take the stage, much of the crowd not to mention the musicians and crew were exhausted. They had waited through at least six hours of badly amplified music and not even the arc lights and banks of electric heaters could take the edge off the cold. Tony Sanchez described how several of the kids were stripping off their clothes and crawling to the stage as if it were a high altar, there to offer themselves as victims for the boots and cues of the Angels. The more they were beaten and bloodied, the more they were impelled, as if by some supernatural force, to offer themselves as human sacrifices . . .
When Sam Cutler warned the assembly that the show couldn t start until the stage was cleared, Sonny Barger took over and in a grizzled voice (he would develop throat cancer years later) ordered everyone off. According to an interview conducted by Richard Fleury, recently published by Himself magazine, the arch-Angel still believes that The Stones deliberately created a dangerous, tense atmosphere. . . They built the stage far too low and kept the restless crowd waiting for hours.
True enough, by the time the quintet eventually lit into Jumpin Jack Flash , with Mick wearing an orange and black satin batwinged cape, they had kept the crowd waiting for over 90 minutes, and the response was not the usual elation, but weariness, wariness and fear. A few people danced, but most were too squashed together to move, and many more were petrified of bumping into a biker or his old lady and incurring the wrath of the pack.
Before Chuck Berry s Carol , Jagger, fearing a surge that could ve resulted in disaster, appealed to the crowd not to push, to keep still. Then, as the band began weaving the spell of Sympathy For The Devil and he delivered the lines, I was round when Jesus Christ/had his moment of doubt and pain there was an explosion to the front of the stage. Immediately, Angels set upon the packed crowd, who cleared a miraculous 20 yard space within seconds, galvanised by pure fear. Mick stopped singing, but Richards continued blaring away until the singer yelled, Keith Keith Keith! Will you cool it and I ll just try and stop it?
It felt great and sounded great, the guitarist later recalled. Then there s a big ruckus about one of the Angels bikes being knocked over in front of the stage. I m not used to being upstaged by Hell s Angels over somebody s motorbike. Yes, I perfectly understand that your bike s got knocked over, can we carry on with the concert? But they re not like that. They have a whole thing going on with their bikes, as we all know now.
When the disruption appeared to have subsided, Jagger quipped, Something always happens when we get into this number, and they began the tune again, playing, according to Stanley Booth, like a wild, whirling bagpipe . Still, the beatings continued.
The violence was incredible, Keith later recalled. I thought the show would ve been stopped, but hardly anybody wanted to take any notice.
One youth seemed to infuriate the mob merely by dancing and having a good time, and after several Angels created a space by flailing around them, he boy was levelled with a pool cue and beaten until he resembled something strung up in a butcher s shop.
Sensing rather than seeing all this, Jagger demanded, Who s fighting and what for? over and over again. No-one had an answer for him, apart from one sagely angel, who reasoned that the brothers had been up all night, were in bad temper, and if someone deserved a stomping, then so be it.
Jagger continued begging the people to keep it together: Hell s Angels, everybody. If we are all one, let s show we re one. Cutler took the microphone and also appealed for peace. Either those cats cool it, Keith added, or we don t play. I mean, there s not that many of them . . . And then: If you don t cool it, you ain t gonna hear no more music. A huge Angel responded to this by grabbing the microphone and screaming, Fuck you!
Sonny Barger claims that I stuck my gun in Keith Richards side and said: You better start playing or I ll blow your fuckin guts out. He played like a motherfucker!
Another Angel took the mike and warned the assembly that if they didn t cool it, there would be no more music, an act akin to, as Booth put it, blaming the pigs in a slaughterhouse for bleeding on the floor.
All around, people were passing out. Girls were crying. Backstage, bikers danced with their tattooed, bouffant-headed women and taunted the paltry police presence. Timothy Leary stood sidestage with his wife and daughter, looking miserable. The band played Love In Vain , but if anyone was listening, they weren t enjoying it. Jagger cramped, caged and out of his depth appealed to the crowd to sit down . . . but it ain t a rule . Beside him on stage, an acid casualty pulled grotesque simian faces until ejected by bikers. At one stage, a helicopter pilot rushed onto the stage and told Bill Wyman that he was the last pilot, and if they didn t come right now he was going to leave without them.
The band began Under My Thumb , sounding sharp, slow and lethal.

Tragedy absorbs the highest orgiastic music
and in doing so consummates music. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth Of Tragedy, quoted in Stanley Booth s The True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones.

Meredith Hunter, nicknamed Murdock, was an 18-year old black kid who had driven to Altamont with his blonde girlfriend Patty Bredehoft a Berkeley High School student and another couple. They all arrived on site early in the afternoon. When the Stones took the stage, Hunter, a tall gangly figure wearing a black hat, black shirt and garish green suit pushed his way to the front, becoming separated from Bredehoft, although she could still see him.
An onlooker named Paul Cox, who had been standing beside Hunter when the violence broke out, described what happened next to both the Almeda County Grand Jury and Rolling Stone. As he saw it, one of the Angels was hassling this Negro boy on the side of me . . . and when he yanked away, next thing I know he was flying in the air, right on the ground, just like all the other people it happened to.
He went on to describe how Hunter scrambled to his feet and tried to outrun the Angels, before producing a gun and holding it in the air, and his girlfriend is like climbing on him and pushing him back and he s trying to get away . . . and some Angel snuck up from right out of the crowd and leaped up and brought this knife down in his back. And then I saw him stab him again, and while he s stabbing him, he s running . . . into the crowd and you could see him stiffen up when he s been stabbed.
According to Cox, Hunter fell down on his knees, then one of the Angels grabbed him by the shoulders, kicked him about five times and let him fall on his face. Another attacker kicked him in the side, and he rolled over, muttering, I wasn t going to shoot you , to which an Angel responded, Why did you have a gun? before smashing him in the head with a garbage can. Then, five of the mob began kicking him in the head, and finally, the biker who started the fracas stood on the boy s head for about a minute. Several people tried to come to Hunter s aid, but were prevented from helping by an Angel standing guard over the motionless body. Don t touch him, he said. He s going to die anyway, so just let him die .
According to Bredehoft s testimony to the Grand Jury, when she moved in to see what was happening to Hunter, one of the attackers was holding the gun in his hand, laying in the palm of his hand, to show it to me, and he said something like, This is what we took from him. He was going to kill innocent people, so he deserved to be dead.
Eventually, Cox and another onlooker managed to turn Hunter over and wipe some of the blood off, revealing a hole in his spine, his side and his temple. A third man, a doctor by the name of Robert Wayatt, tried to help carry Hunter towards the stage but they were blocked by Hell s Angels. It was 15 minutes before they could get him backstage. The medic who saw him there, a Dr Richard Baldwin, said, they got him in the back and it went in between the ribs and the side of the spine, and there s nothing but big arteries in there . . . and if you hit one of those you re dead. You re dead in less than a minute and there s nothing anyone can do.
The Maysles brothers got much of this on film. In one remarkable scene in Gimme Shelter, you can see Mick Jagger asking David Maysles to re-run footage of Hunter s murder, to get a better look at what he couldn t see from the stage. In slow motion, the gun is clearly visible, as is the sight of the Angel bringing the knife down into his back.
That s so horrible, Jagger says, fatigued and shocked.
For his part, Sonny Barger still maintains that Hunter was wired to the gills on drugs and spoiling for a fight after being thrown off stage. He also sticks to his original story that the boy actually wounded a bystander. When he shot the guy in the arm people started stabbing him, he says. To me, that s just part of life in the Hell s Angels. Somebody shoots you, you stab em.
Back onstage, the Stones had once again stopped playing. Richards announced, Okay man, look, we re splitting . . . if those people don t stop beating everybody up in sight I want em out of the way. One of the Angels told him that someone in the crowd had a gun and was shooting at the stage.
I realised I m surrounded by 400 Hell s Angels, he later told Victor Bockris. I didn t lose my bottle, but I swallowed. My thoughts went out the window.
A silence descended on the stage, broken by Jagger, saying, It seems to be stuck down to me. The band restarted Under My Thumb . Again, they sounded freakishly focused, as if all their instincts had been honed by the threat of danger. The crowd became still, sensing that something terrible had happened, not knowing exactly what. With macabre inappropriateness, Angels were tossing flowers into the crowd.
As the last notes of Under My Thumb faded, Jagger sang, I pray that it s all right and then, bizarrely, at Mick Taylor s suggestion, they decided to play Brown Sugar a song of sex, sadism, slavery and/or Mexican smack live for the first time. They followed this with the even bleaker and more blasphemous prayer of Midnight Rambler , replete with stage-whipping theatrics from Jagger. The Stones may have wished to placate the crowd, but they simply didn t have any soothing sentiments in their repertoire. Yet, as Stanley Booth observed, things seemed to be settling down, as if the killer-lover lament had worked some psychic release on the crowd.
But it didn t last. As Live With Me ended, a fat naked girl with black hair tried to climb onto the stage, and five of the Angels kicked and punched her back. Now fellows, Jagger admonished, I m sure it doesn t take all of you to take care of this.
During Gimme Shelter , with its refrain of, Rape, murder, it s just a shot away. more trouble broke out. Booth noted a look of disbelief on the people s faces, wondering how The Stones could go on playing and singing in the bowels of madness and violent death. But play on they did, ploughing through Little Queenie , Satisfaction , Honky Tonk Women , and finally Street Fighting Man . Then they ran for the helicopters, hunched under the whirring blades, the Saigon associations too close for comfort. The vessel was so full, it took off slantways.
Meredith Hunter wasn t the only Altamont fatality. There was also the drowning that Tony Sanchez witnessed, and two more people died sleeping, run over in their sleeping bags. By the time the Stones were back in their Huntington hotel suites, early editions of the San Francisco Examiner were on the streets. Under a banner headline 300,000 SAY IT WITH MUSIC, the report mentioned deaths and scuffles, but the tone of the piece was strangely upbeat, probably due to the fact that it had been filed before the Stones had taken the stage.
Responding to a call from Jagger, Pamela Des Barres rushed to the band s hotel, and was greeted by the sight of the singer saying it was all his fault and talking about quitting rock n roll, of Gram Parsons nodding out in black leather and make up, and of Keith dressed like a Nudie-shirted cowpoke. Everyone was stoned. It was the most intense room to be in on earth, she said. It looked like they were turning into each other.
Local radio station KSAN decided to throw open the phones to the public the following night and let the people tell their own Altamont stories. The tone of the calls was uniformly uneasy. The station also aired a pre-recorded statement from Sam Cutler, admitting that Altamont had been confusing and people had acted on their own initiative, but that the Hell s Angels were as helpful as could be expected in the circumstances. Cutler didn t mention hiring them nor presumed to speak on their behalf.
A caller identifying himself as Sonny Barger however, had plenty to say.
I didn t go there to police nothin man, he proclaimed. I ain t no cop, I ain t never gonna ever pretend to be no cop, and this Mick Jagger put it all on the Angels, he used us for dupes man, and as far as I m concerned, we was the biggest suckers for that idiot that I can ever see. They told me that if I could sit on the edge of the stage so that nobody would climb over me, y know, I could drink beer until the show was over, and that s what I went there to do.
But y know what? When they started messin over our bikes, they started it. I don t know if you think we pay fifty dollars for those things or steal em or pay a lot for em or what ain t nobody gonna kick my motorcycle . . . when you re standin there lookin at somethin and it s your life and everything you ve got is invested in that thing better than you love anything in the world, and you see a guy kick it, (and) you know who he is, you re gonna get him. And you know what? They got got.

After Altamont, the Stones opted for comedy. Stanley Booth

December 7th. The Stones couldn t leave America fast enough. Following a breakfast of whiskey and cocaine, Richards flew into Heathrow, where he was greeted by Anita Pallenberg holding up their son Marlon and beseeching him to marry her so she wouldn t be deported. Mick flew to Switzerland and banked the $1.2 million profit from the tour.
As news of the Altamont debacle broke across Europe, The Stones received harsh criticism. Richards defended the band by reasoning that if the Angels hadn t been invited, they would ve come anyway. In a way those concerts are a complete experiment in social order, he told interviewer Ray Connelly the day before the band s Christmas concert in London. Everybody just has to work out a completely new plan of how to get along. But at Altamont, people were just asking for it. They had those victims faces.
Soon the band had split with Decca and Allen Klein. Sticky Fingers, the first album for their own Rolling Stones Records label, was full of material written and/or recorded pre-Altamont: Brown Sugar , Wild Horses , You Gotta Move and Marianne Faithfull s mesmeric Sister Morphine (predating even Bowie s Velvets fetish).
The band became tax exiles, moving to France in February 1971. Then, Keith s heroin honeymoon yielded the murderous humidity of Exile On Main Street, the last truly great Stones album, described by Greil Marcus as, a nice tour of morgues, courthouses, sinking ships, claustrophobic rooms, deserted highways; the whole record was a breakdown, one long night of fear.
If not for that compelling double set, one could be harsh and say the Stones mythic period died with Meredith Hunter.
No one was ever indicted for his murder. Terrified of retaliation, there were few witnesses willing to testify. On the infamous 1972 summer tour of the US, Richards allegedly punched out a woman attempting to serve Jagger a subpoena for Altamont. In New York, tour manager Peter Rudge met with Hell s Angels who demanded money for legal costs. When he refused, they made death threats, resulting in the band switching hotels and adopting pseudonyms. In March 1983, a former Hell s Angel testified to a US Senate judiciary that: There is an open contract on this one rock band leader (Jagger). There have been two attempts to kill him. Eventually it will happen.
Not yet.
Gimme Shelter is distributed by PolyGram Video.