The green-suited young black man was named Meredith Hunter, and despite his willowy height and street-smart air, he was only eighteen years old. He had been stabbed in the neck with a seven-inch knife by a Hell’s Angel wearing the horseshoe of the Oakland chapter after a scuffle in which Hunter pulled a handgun from inside his faux-Regency coat. Other Angels had then weighed in, smashing him over the head with a trash can and kicking him as he lay on the ground. Hundreds of people had been standing nearby, listening to “Under My Thumb,” but only his seventeen-year-old white girlfriend had attempted to come to his aid. While the Stones’ set continued—“Little Queenie,” “Midnight Rambler,” “Brown Sugar,” even, amazingly, “Street Fighting Man”—Hunter was receiving emergency treatment on the ground, then being carried, by Sam Cutler among others, to the stars’ helipad, back of the stage, to be flown to the nearest ER. Before the chopper lifted off, he was dead.
The Stones were due to leave America the next day, December 6, having already extended their tour time by a week. Since none of the band had even seen the attack on Hunter, there was no attempt by the police to detain them. Sam Cutler offered to stay behind and answer any official queries, having been assured that his expenses would be sent to him along with his fee for emceeing the whole tour (never mind thinking up “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band”). He is still awaiting the check.
The benign tradition of rock festivals was by now so well established that the media at first could not imagine this one being any different. The following Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle hailed Altamont as a brilliant success, only slightly marred by the stabbing of Meredith Hunter and the accidental deaths of three other male spectators (two accidentally run over by a car as they lay in sleeping bags, the third drowned in an irrigation ditch). Back in Britain in the run-up to Christmas—all the more frenetic for also being the run-up to a new decade—Fleet Street reported yet another triumph for peaceful youth power to set alongside Woodstock, Bob Dylan on the Isle of Wight, and, of course, the Stones in Hyde Park. Exhausted and harrowed, even the usually honest, outspoken Keith was not in a mood to argue, telling reporters at Heathrow that Altamont had been “basically well organized, but people were tired and a few tempers got frayed.”
It was only over the next week that the full, grisly story of the festival began to be pieced together. Audience members by the hundreds phoned in to San Francisco music radio stations, like KSAN, to complain about the lack of proper facilities, the unchecked circulation of bad drugs, and the numerous other acts of random, unprovoked violence by the Hell’s Angels that had preceded Hunter’s knifing. In the process, those who had conceived the event—the Grateful Dead and their radical pals like Emmett Grogan—were forgotten. Multi-act Altamont turned into a Rolling Stones concert for which they, and in particular Mick, bore the whole blame.
For the Chronicle’s Ralph J. Gleason, this attempt to give something back to their fans had damaged the spirit of rock far worse than the “greed” for which he had previously condemned them. Altamont, wrote Gleason, symbolized “the end of rock’s innocence, a warning that the vast amount of energy contained in the music and its immense worldwide audience had elements of danger . . . And it seemed significant that all this was presided over [sic] by the greatest live performer in rock history, Mick Jagger.”
“Jagger’s performing style is a form of aggression,” wrote the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. “Not just against the straight world but against his own young audience, and this appeals to them because it proves he hasn’t sold out and gone soft. But when all this aggression is released, who can handle it?” There was even a dig from David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, who had seen plenty of violence during their own set and had fled while the going was good: “The major mistake was taking what was essentially a party and turning it into an ego game . . . I think [the Stones] have an exaggerated view of their own importance, especially the two leaders.”
Most damning of all was the magazine whose raison d’être had once been to celebrate the band now in the pillory. In a twenty-thousand-word reconstruction of the day’s events, published five weeks later, Rolling Stone described Altamont as “the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money, manipulation and, at base, a fundmental lack of concern for humanity”—all implicitly emanating from Mick. As evidence of the Stones’ stone-heartedness, RS pointed to their hasty departure the day afterward—and the fact that not a word of apology or even condolence had subsequently been sent to Meredith Hunter’s family. A subsequent call-in from Mick to radio KSAN, lamenting that San Francisco hadn’t been the “groovy scene” he expected, hardly helped his case. “Some display—however restrained—of compassion hardly seems too much to expect” was Rolling Stone’s very reasonable conclusion. “A man died before their eyes. Do they give a shit? Yes or no?”
Promoter Bill Graham was equally specific in his condemnation, and gave vent to it with the uninhibitedness of a man who never expected to work with Mick again: “I ask you what right you had, Mr. Jagger . . . in going through with this free festival. And you couldn’t tell me you didn’t know the way it would come off. What right do you have to leave the way you did, thanking everyone for a wonderful time and the Angels for helping out? What did he leave behind throughout the country? Every gig he was late. Every fucking gig he made the promoter and the people bleed. What right does this god have to descend on this country this way? But you know what is a great tragedy to me? That cunt is a great entertainer.”
Today, however—despite that long-outstanding IOU—Sam Cutler remembers Jagger the pro rather than the poseur, the orange satin butterfly who, with guns and knives breaking out in his audience and Hell’s Angels looking murder at him from either side, refused to disappoint the peaceful majority and went on to finish his set. “He showed massive, massive courage at that terrible moment,” Cutler says. “To have stayed on that stage and carried on performing needed the balls of a lion, and I take my hat off to him.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce”
FROM THE PUBLIC backlash over Altamont, Mick turned somewhat belatedly to the personal problem of his errant girlfriend and the Italian photographer who’d had the nerve to run off with her. Marianne and Mario Schifano were now back from their Roman holiday and spending Christmas at the thatched cottage in Aldworth, Berkshire, that Mick had given Marianne’s mother. He found out where they were, drove there alone, and confronted Schifano; after what Marianne describes as “operatic” scenes between the rival males, she went to bed with Mick while her erstwhile Prince Charming took the living room couch. The next day, she sent Schifano packing and accompanied Mick back to Cheyne Walk.
As she would write in Faithfull, it was the last thing she wanted to do, knowing in her heart that their relationship was over—and sensing Mick knew, too, but couldn’t stand the thought of any woman dumping him. And he wooed her back with the skill of any Latin Prince Charming, swearing he loved her alone and that everything from here on would be different. The clincher was the Stones’ elegiac country version of “Wild Horses,” that phrase from her Ophelia suicide bed which Mick’s plaintive (indeed, rather whiny) vocal had transformed into a seeming pledge of undying devotion and faith in their future together. While Marianne listened to the finished mix, he knelt in front of her, holding her hands and gazing into her eyes, his full, reddened lips tracing the words: “Wawld hors-es, couldn’t drag me er-way / Wawld, wawld hors-es, we’ll ride them serm-day . . .” How could she not melt?
There was another, less selfish incentive for believing “Wild Horses” and trying to carry on at Cheyne Walk. The affair with Schifano had shown Marianne just how much her five-year-old son, Nicholas, loved and needed Mick, effectively his father since toddlerhood. When Schifano presented her with a sable fur coat, Nicholas waited until the grown-ups’ backs were turned, then purloined the coat and, in a gesture of loyalty to Mick, flung it onto an open fire. Even this not-over
ly-attentive mother realized that for Nicholas to lose Mick a second time, and permanently, could have a devastating effect on him.
One of the biggest British hit singles of early 1970 was Blue Mink’s “Melting Pot,” a plea for worldwide love and racial harmony whose lyrics included a respectful nod to “Mick and Lady Faithfull.” With the public still refusing to recognize John Lennon’s marriage to Yoko Ono or Paul McCartney’s to Linda Eastman—and discounting Sonny and Cher—this seemed the only love affair in pop to have weathered the craziness of the past decade and stand a chance of maturing in the brand-new one.
In reality, Mick and Lady Faithfull teetered on the edge of their own particular melting pot, each lacking the resolution to jump or push the other. In a strange—though far milder—reprise of 1967, they returned to court together for the conclusion of their outstanding cannabis-possession case; Mick was fined a token £200 and Marianne was acquitted. They were back on the front pages a few weeks later, when Nicholas’s father, John Dunbar, finally divorced Marianne on the grounds of adultery, citing Mick as corespondent (“MARIANNE WASN’T FAITHFUL,” the headlines exulted). For most couples, it would have been a moment of liberation, allowing them to legalize their love at long last in church or register office. But Mick these days never mentioned marriage, nor did Marianne expect him to. Despite his protestations, she knew wild horses hadn’t been able to keep him away from Marsha Hunt, never mind the innumerable other willing mounts always on offer.
The most melancholy reminder of what might have been was Stargroves, the Gothic mansion near Newbury where Mick had once planned to live the life of a country squire. His enthusiasm for the house had waned as he discovered just how much he’d have to spend to restore it and carry out Marianne’s grandiose plans for the sixty-acre grounds. As a result, it was still gloomy and univiting, with many rooms still unusable and no central heating. Mick had spent no more than a couple of nights there with Marianne, then moved his parents in as caretakers, succeeded after a time by his brother, Chris, and Chris’s American girlfriend, Vivienne Zarvis. A young man named Maldwyn Thomas, who used to cut Mick’s hair at Vidal Sassoon, acted as caretaker (sharing the gatekeeper’s cottage, for a time, with Brian’s former girlfriend Suki Poitier).
Far more than Mick’s domestic arrangements was bound for the melting pot. Prince Rupert Loewenstein’s investigations into the Stones’ financial affairs had uncovered a devastating fact: that throughout the bumper-earning era with Allen Klein, they had not paid a penny in British income tax. The liberal cash advances Klein had been wont to dole out counted as loans, on which tax could be deferred until they were repaid. The aim had been to provide the band with money to live on while spreading their income to avoid the worst impact of the 90-percent-plus top tax rate which the Labour governments of the sixties had imposed. At the outset, the Inland Revenue had not formulated rules to deal with such a situation, but now they had. Once the Stones parted from Klein, all the deferred tax would fall due in one horrific lump. Even from Bill Wyman, in the far lower-earning second rank, the sum demanded was £160,000, equal to about £2 million nowadays.
Mick, that supposedly beady-eyed economics student, was caught just as unawares as his bandmates. “I just didn’t think about taxes,” he would admit. “So after working for seven years, I discovered that nothing had been paid and I owed a fortune.” Such a fortune, indeed, that all his earnings from the ’69 American tour might be gobbled up, yet still not clear his debt. Prince Rupert advised that there was one way not to go broke, though it would involve major disruption to a band that had already been disrupted more than enough. If they were domiciled outside Britain during the tax year 1971–1972, their 1969–1970 income, including that from the U.S. tour, would escape the Revenue’s clutches.
The last ingredient to be thrown into the melting pot was vinyl. For at the same time as making the final break from Klein, Mick intended to jettison the UK record label on which the Stones had spent those seven years. Their contract with Decca was due to expire in July 1970, and there was not the slightest chance of its being renewed. Despite the millions Decca had earned from Stones records, relations between them had always been strained. And, after the band’s recent spectacular renaissance, every major label on both sides of the Atlantic could be expected to offer them deals that made Decca’s once-stupendous $1.25 million advance look like small change.
Already well ahead of the pack was America’s Atlantic label in the person of its president, Ahmet Ertegun. Forty-seven-year-old Ertegun had the same mixture of exotic, upper-class foreignness and earthy musical taste as every other important catalyst in Mick’s career thus far. Born in Istanbul, the son of a former Turkish ambassador to Washington, he had fallen in love with American jazz and blues as a schoolboy and started Atlantic with a fellow college student in 1947. Aided by the brilliant producer Jerry Wexler, he had brought black music into the commercial mainstream with signings like Ruth Brown, Aretha Franklin, the Coasters, Otis Redding, and, most famously, Ray Charles. Since 1966, he had also been collecting white British rock acts: Led Zeppelin, Yes, and—bizarrely—Screaming Lord Sutch.
Ertegun had made his pitch to the Stones in masterly fashion, striking up an instant rapport with Prince Rupert Loewenstein and recognizing that the only real point at issue was Mick—or, as Prince Rupert discreetly referred to him, “the Artiste.” On top of Ertegun’s immaculate musical credentials, he and his interior-designer wife, Mica, were dedicated socialites with access to the top strata of New York society (in many ways more exclusive than London’s), which Mick had never quite been able to infiltrate. If all that wasn’t sufficient Jagger bait, he also had a passion for sport, especially soccer, and was shortly to cofound the New York Cosmos, one of the most successful teams in the North American Soccer League.
Although the Stones were still theoretically up for grabs to the highest-bidding label, Ahmet Ertegun had become the acknowledged front-runner by the end of the ’69 American tour. Ertegun had arranged their recording session at Muscle Shoals, just before Altamont, and “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar”—those almost schizophrenic manifestations of Mick’s current love life—were earmarked as the basis of their first album on Atlantic.
From the beginning of discussions with Ertegun, Mick made clear that the Stones were no longer willing to be just names in a record company’s catalog, subject to interference and censorship from weak-kneed executives as they had been with Decca all these years. Instead, they wanted their own label, like the Beatles’ Apple but with none of the same extravagance and waste. The label would be under Atlantic’s umbrella, using its production and distribution facilities, but with total creative independence.
The new label’s prospective boss, Marshall Chess, was even more a piece of dream casting than Ahmet Ertegun. Marshall’s father and uncle, Leonard and Phil, had founded Chess Records, the Chicago label which had nurtured all the Stones’ greatest musical heroes, from Muddy Waters to Chuck Berry. As a teenager working in Chess’s mailroom, Marshall used to deal with the orders for Muddy and Chuck albums from a blues-fixated schoolboy named Mike Jagger in far-off Dartford, Kent. The two had finally met in 1964, when Andrew Oldham brought the Stones to Chess to record “It’s All Over Now.” Indeed, that breakthrough session only took place because Marshall persuaded his father to let an upstart young white British band in among the mature black masters.
After Leonard’s death in 1969, Marshall had not inherited Chess as he’d expected to, or received a sufficient legacy from his father to set up his own label. Hearing that the Stones were nearing a breaking point with Decca, he rang Mick from America to see if there was any possibility of working together again. Mick’s U.S. visa being temporarily suspended (because of the recent cannabis case), Marshall had to fly to London to continue the discussion. “I met Mick at Cheyne Walk,” he recalls. “In the room where we met, there was a long table against the wall with about a hundred albums on it, a lot of them blues. Mick put on ‘Black Snake Blues??
? and was dancing to it while we talked.”
Mick then took him along to 3 Cheyne Walk for a reunion with Keith, who was tinkering at a psychedelic piano with Gram Parsons. “They told me they were signing with Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic and they were going to have their own label inside Atlantic that they’d like for me to run. Ahmet was an old friend of my father’s—he’d even been at my Bar Mitzvah—so that was another close link we had. But then I didn’t get any follow-through from Mick, until in the end I had to play games and say I needed to know in two weeks because I was considering other offers. At the eleventh hour of the last day of the second week, I got a Western Union telegram, asking me to head up Rolling Stones Records.”
The final album for Decca could be provided without effort—a selection of live performances from the ’69 American tour, entitled Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! [a line from a Blind Boy Fuller song] The Rolling Stones in Concert. However, this left the band still owing Decca one further Jagger-Richard song, which the label doggedly insisted it must have. Mick and Keith accordingly went into the studio and recorded a track to be played at the final meeting with Decca’s elderly chairman, Sir Edward Lewis. It was entitled “Cocksucker Blues” and featured Mick in the character of a boy prostitute extolling fellatio and buggery (“Where can Ah get mah cock sucked? / Where can I get mah ass fucked?”) and mentioning sex aids including policemen’s truncheons and pigs. Needless to say, no release date was set.