Mick Jagger

  Mick had always regretted not being at Woodstock and, even before his alfresco Hyde Park triumph, had talked about such a Californian festival, as had Keith, with the Grateful Dead’s manager, Rock Scully. Performing for free at this “Woodstock West” would not only be one in the eye for Gleason but a thank-you to all the American fans who had taken him to their bosoms, or whatever, once again. It would also provide a climax to the film which Albert and David Maysles had been shooting throughout the tour. Such was Mick’s enthusiasm that, while the Stones recorded at Muscle Shoals, key members of their tour team were sent to help put together the event from the Dead’s communal house in Marin County. Not only the Dead but all the West Coast bands involved hugely revered the Stones and regarded them as the event’s pièce de résistance. Even so, it was never seen as a Rolling Stones concert, but as a multi-act show in which the Stones would give the climactic closing performance. With sunny Hyde Park memories still lingering, Mick expressed the hope that it would continue to “set a standard of how one can behave in large gatherings.”

  The Grateful Dead’s initial planning was quickly revealed to be wholly inadequate. Golden Gate Park had been announced as the festival venue without anyone first ascertaining whether it was available. When belated approaches were made to San Francisco’s parks department, the necessary permit was granted but then revoked because a football game was due to be played there on the same day. An alternative site then materialized in a car-racing track, Sears Point Raceway, in the Sonoma Mountains, whose setting formed a perfect natural amphitheater. The Stones’ production chief, Chip Monck, was immediately dispatched to build a stage which, since it would nestle against a mountainside and command a steep downward slope, needed to be only about three feet high.

  Sears Point had been officially announced as the festival venue when another problem arose. The raceway was owned by a Los Angeles film company, which suddenly added a rider to its original easygoing terms, claiming distribution rights to any film made of the festival. Failing that, a $1 million fee would have to be paid with a further $1 million lodged in escrow against site damage. By ill luck, the company also included the promoters of the Stones’ L.A. Forum shows, who were still smarting from the 75 percent of gate receipts they’d had to hand over, so there was no possibility of negotiation. As a result, forty-eight hours before the festival’s scheduled start, with thousands of spectators already en route, Sears Point Raceway had to be scratched.

  Losing faith in the Grateful Dead’s organizational powers, Mick hired a flamboyant L.A. lawyer, Mel Belli—known as “the King of Torts” and most recently seen in the Manson trial—to conduct the seemingly hopeless search for yet another site. And, miraculously, the world of Californian automotive sport again provided one. This was Altamont Raceway, a stock-car track near Livermore, eighty miles from San Francisco and sixty from Sears Point. The owner, Dick Carter, offered it gratis, provided the festival truly was free; $5,000 was paid for clearing up afterward and a $1 million insurance policy taken out against site damage. Chip Monck and his crew dismantled the stage they’d built at Sears Point and worked through the night to reassemble it at Altamont, while radio stations and the stop press column in that week’s Rolling Stone announced the venue change to the festival goers in transit. The idea of what RS termed an “instant Woodstock” gained further momentum when the promoter of the original New York marvel, Michael Lang, was brought in to advise on the logistical complications involved. The only Cassandra voice came from Lang’s fellow entrepreneur Bill Graham, seemingly puckered with sour grapes: “They’ll never do it . . . it could explode in their faces.”

  Graham knew, if no one else did, that all that Sears Point and Altamont had in common was being called a raceway. While the former was a well-run, well-patronized place of family entertainment, the latter was a run-down resort of mainly rowdy young males which for years had been hovering near bankruptcy, hence its owner’s eagerness to attract high-grade rock performers there. Whereas Sears Point’s steep slope would have made a perfect auditorium, provided good sight lines for hundreds of yards around, and given Chip Monck’s concert stage an unassailable height, Altamont was almost totally flat. But there was no time for Monck to raise the level of the three-foot-high structure he was reassembling.

  Least promising of all was the neighborhood. The hippies trekking out from San Francisco to Livermore would find themselves in the mainly working-class, redneck East Bay area, where long hair was still greeted by howls of “faggot” and fusillades of fist-crushed empty beer cans. It also was the territory of the Oakland Hell’s Angels, the most feared and lawless of their kind in California.

  By the afternoon of Friday, December 5, a crowd of Woodstock proportions, or very nearly, was collecting at Altamont Raceway. One hundred thousand people had already claimed the area nearest the stage, and thousands more were arriving every hour in endless parallel columns, bearing tents, bedrolls, cooking utensils, and musical instruments, like some medieval peasant army. Parking arrangements were shambolic: the nearest place cars could be left was a stretch of unfinished freeway eight miles off. Everyone but artists and VIPs (who used helicopters) had to foot-slog it down neglected access roads or, dangerously, along a railway line.

  The muddy meadows of Woodstock would have seemed Elysian by contrast with these bleak, treeless flats, barely warmed by Northern California’s pallid winter sun. Altamont was, indeed, the only festival site ever to need cleaning up before the event, being littered with the hulks of cars wrecked in its regular demolition derbies and carpeted with a foot-crunching layer of metal fragments and broken glass. The catering, toilet, and first-aid facilities that had been shipped in over the past frantic twenty-four hours clearly were nowhere near sufficient. But festival-going hippies by now had some of the same spirit as Londoners during the Second World War Blitz, and the vibe initially seemed excellent.

  In the early hours of Saturday, the Stones arrived by chopper from San Francisco, accompanied by key members of their entourage (and, as usual, a Maysles brothers film crew) for a first inspection of the stage. Unfortunately, the darkness prevented Mick, or anyone else, from realizing the implications of its minimal height. Later, wearing a pink satin cape and matching Bonnie and Clyde cap, he talked to some of the audience as they shivered in their bedrolls, passing from campfire to campfire rather like King Harry before the Battle of Agincourt in Shakespeare’s Henry V: “a little touch of Jagger in the night.” Someone offered him a joint and—having asked for the camera to be switched off—he accepted it and took a hit.

  The vibe changed drastically the next morning with the arrival of the Hell’s Angels. Though this was Oakland Angels country, they made up a virtual convention from chapters throughout California: the ’Frisco, the San Bernadino, the San Jose—some fifty riders in all, mounted on 850-cc Harley-Davidsons, each in a black leather jacket with a pale horseshoe-shaped insignia across the back; some with an equally tough-looking girlfriend clinging on behind; all bearing as much resemblance to Hyde Park’s pimply faux Nazis as white lightning does to orange Fanta. With the convoy of gleaming, jouncing high-handlebar “hogs” came a yellow school bus, loaded to the gunwales with their private store of beer and rotgut wine.

  The Angels’ recruitment as stewards is always held up as Altamont’s crowning folly—and the ultimate manifestation of Mick’s rock-star vanity and arrogance. Actually, it had been planned by the Grateful Dead, abetted by chic radicals like Emmett Grogan, well before the Stones’ involvement, and did possess a glimmer of sense. Since security staff and even police could not handle the Angels, it was safest to include them in the organization, give them a privileged stage-front view, and cast them flatteringly as a Praetorian guard to the Stones. Previous festivals had found them a deterrent to violence if they were allowed to park near the stage-side generators, so protecting the electricity supply along with the performers. There had never been any serious trouble with them before.

  At noon, with the crowd now cl
ose to three hundred thousand, emcee Sam Cutler announced “Santana, the first band in the biggest party of 1969!” With the first elegaic notes of Carlos Santana’s guitar, violence began erupting all around the stage-front area between two immediately recognizable factions in that overwhelmingly white assembly. One consisted of hippies, male and female, breaking into the jerky lone gyrations music always awoke in them; the others were redneck youths, attacking any long-haired, wavy-sleeved dancer in reach, male or female, with pool cues that seemed to have been issued from some invisible quartermaster’s store. Both factions were already out of their heads, the rednecks on booze and amphetamines, their victims on various types of bad acid that made many strip naked and almost offer themselves to the flailing cues. According to Cutler, the assailants were not fully fledged Angels but would-be recruits, hoping to make their bones by breaking a few hippie ones. The attacks went on in full view of the performers, uninhibited by snapping press cameras or the Maysles brothers’ several film crews. There was not a security man, let alone a police officer, in sight.

  The three-foot-high stage left the musicians horribly vulnerable. Angels stepped on and off it as they pleased, sometimes commandeering the MC’s microphone to make their own private announcements or simply utter obscenities. The school bus had been parked a few feet away and a row of Angels stood on its roof, enjoying the grandstand view and occasionally lobbing an empty beer can or bottle at the performers. As a tactful way to remove this nuisance, Ron Schneider bought the entire beer supply for $500, then gave it back on condition its containers were no longer used as missiles (hence the legend the Angels were paid $500 worth of beer).

  During Jefferson Airplane’s set, vocalist Marty Balin saw a particularly nasty assault going on directly below him. He jumped down to intervene and a vicious blow to the face knocked him unconscious. When fellow vocalist Grace Slick—who had previously told Mick the Angels were “really good”—ventured a cringingly polite protest, one of them seized the mic and roared, “Fuck you!” Panic spread among the other bands scheduled to precede the Stones. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rushed through their set, then bolted for their escape helicopter. The Grateful Dead, who had conceived the event in a haze of hippie idealism, took one look at the crowd and left without playing a note. Only the ethereally pretty Gram Parsons gave a value show with his Flying Burrito Brothers and was brave enough to stick around afterward to watch the headliners.

  The Stones returned in the late afternoon and, there being no backstage VIP area, had to walk the fifty yards from the helipad through the crowd milling around the nearby first-aid tent. Their private security force of NYPD cops had all taken fright and melted away; their only remaining protector was a huge black man named Tony Fuches, who earlier on had hit somebody so hard that his right wrist was now bound in a splint. As the band threaded their way among the punters, a wild-eyed boy lurched up to Mick and clouted him in the face, screaming, “I hate you, you fucker!” Mick shrugged the incident off, however, and ordered Fuches not to harm the boy. The only dressing room was a shabby trailer, with Hell’s Angels posted all around it. If any Stone wanted to venture outside, he had to do so inside a phalanx of Angels.

  Mick had originally planned to go onstage at sunset. But, rather than declining slowly in a crimson-flushed sky, the sun hurriedly popped out of sight, almost as if foreseeing what bad things were to come. Hence the legend that he deliberately waited for darkness, to give maximum effect to his entry and also goad and tantalize his audience beyond endurance. In fact, the delay was largely caused by the Angels, who now occupied the stage in such number that there was no room for any performers. With perilous plain speaking, Sam Cutler announced that the Stones wouldn’t start until everyone got off. One of the few police officers in evidence came to Mick and offered a convoy of squad cars to give him safe passage back to San Francisco after the show, but mindful of his hippie cred, he refused to “go out that way.”

  The stage remained clear only for as long as it took the Stones to take up position and wan cheers to echo back from the three hundred thousand in outer darkness. By halfway through their opening number, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” it was again choked with cracked black leather jackets and pale horseshoe-shaped insignia. “Who was up there?” Sam Cutler echoes sardonically in retrospect. “Who wasn’t?” Normally, Hell’s Angels were Stones fanatics second to none, but tonight Mick’s pink cape, pink-and-black harlequin blouse, yellow crushed-velvet trousers, and burgundy suede knee boots seemed to have aroused their deepest ire.

  In these impossible conditions, he tried to do his usual show, pumping his satin-winged arms and boogying determinedly up and back, from time to time asking the Angels on either side to “give me some room, fellers . . . please?” A further contingent had taken up position below the stage, straddling their bikes and facing the crowd, their pale horseshoe-imprinted backs resembling the shells of poisonous beetles. Smoke from fires that had been lit against the sharp evening chill mingled with Chip Monck’s red stage light to create a hellish effect long before Satan was formally invoked. Most of the crowd that heaved chest-high against the stage were having a good time even so, grooving to the music, making peace signs, offering up draggled flowers, taking photographs—something ferociously forbidden at later rock concerts—oblivious to the whirligigs of violence among them. Near the front was a conspicious figure, one of the very few black spectators among three hundred thousand: a lanky young man in a pale green Beau Brummel suit and a dark fedora.

  Dazzled as Mick was by the lights in his eyes and the high of performing, it took a little time to realize something was seriously wrong. “There’s so many of you,” he observed woozily before going into “Carol,” that good-natured old Chuck Berry favorite. “Be cool at the front there. Keep still, keep together. Don’t push around.”

  “Sympathy for the Devil” was third on the playlist, as throughout the tour. With the first sound of its demented samba beat, a sudden forward surge by the stage-front Angels made the entire crowd retreat several yards. Mick shouted to Keith to stop playing and harangued the invisible troublemakers in flawless hippie-speak, clearly confident that his Hyde Park crowd magic would work again here: “Hey, people . . . brothers and sisters . . . C’mon! Cool out! . . . Who’s fighting and why? Why are we fighting? We don’t want to fight, come on!” Believing he’d sorted the problem, he couldn’t resist adding a little white lie to get them back on the Lucifer kick again: “Something funny always happens when we start that number.”

  He started it again, and managed to reach the end despite distractions that few other star vocalists can ever have faced. At one point, a large and ferocious-looking Alsatian dog wandered across the stage in front of him; at another, a naked, crazed girl in his sight line was set on and obliterated by five pale horseshoes; at yet another, a huge, bearded Angel in a Quakerish broad-brimmed hat stopped him singing to speak at length into his ear. The closing chorus of the devil anthem instead became part of his plea for calm: “Oh yeah . . . awl right . . . ever’body got to cool out . . .” Then, almost in synch with Keith’s final chord, there was another whirligig, and another casualty, a bearded white boy, was lowered to the ground in front of the stage, whether by his assailants or his rescuers it was impossible to tell.

  Mick’s tone by now lacked any trace of the arrogance that had put so many backs up. “San Francisco,” he pleaded in no accent but that of Wilmington, Kent, “this could be the most beautiful night. Don’t fuck it up. All I can do is ask you, beg you, to keep it together. It’s within your power.” In the interest of cooling out, he asked everyone to sit down, a ploy his teacher dad would have approved. The next song was “Under My Thumb,” possibly the most arrogant thing he’d ever put on record, but now softened down almost to a lullaby. A few feet away, a greasy-bearded Angel in the grip of God-knew-what junk narcotic clutched his head and glared upward, with lips grimacing in time like some homicidal mime artist. Once again, the jeering last chorus became hopefully emollien
t: “Baby, it’s awl right . . . I pray that it’s awl right . . .”

  The music died away into stillness which for a moment gave hope that prayer had been heard. Then, before there was even time for applause, a gap in the crowd suddenly opened up twenty feet or so away to Mick’s right. At its center was the young black man in the dandyish pale green suit who’d earlier been standing quietly near the stage. Now he was struggling violently with a young white woman in a cream-colored crocheted waistcoat and brandishing something aloft in his right hand. In an instant, he was yanked aside and obliterated by horseshoe-imprinted black leather. It all happened so fast that even the Maysles’ team cameraman who caught it on film barely saw it happen.

  The stage dissolved into chaos. Keith ran forward, pointed out into the darkness, and shouted that the Stones were “splitting, man, if those cats don’t stop beating up everyone in sight.” Someone shouted back that there was “a guy out there with a gun and he’s shooting at the stage.” But for the present, no one thought the incident any worse than others during the day. At Mick’s appeal over the PA, one of the few doctors in attendance went to the spot and the crowd made way to let him through. A senior Angel in a lion’s-mane headdress commandeered the microphone, ordering his colleagues to behave and assuring those whom they had terrorized that “No one wants to hassle anyone.”

  Nonetheless, the obvious course for Sam Cutler as emcee was to stop the show. Mick was clearly in danger, if not from gunmen in the crowd, then from two or three particular Angels who had kept murderous glares fixed on him throughout the evening. His once-zealous security seemed to have dwindled away, leaving only the small derringer pistol in Cutler’s jeans pocket. In addition, the pilot of his helicopter feared the Angels might wreck it and was threatening not to stick around much longer. But Mick insisted on continuing.