A Long Strange Trip (47 page)

It was a portentous fall. The leader of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, died on September 3. Radical scholar Angela Davis was fired from a teaching job at UCLA on the nineteenth, part of a nationwide effort by the FBI to destroy the Black Panther Party and its supporters. On September 25 the federal government began to prosecute the Chicago Eight, not for what they had done in Chicago—this group could not have unanimously organized a serious tea party—but because they were prominent radical social critics, and the government was out to intimidate. “I wish we had done what they said we did,” wrote Jerry Rubin. “Our myths were on trial.” The cover of the September 10
Life
was a red flag, and the subject was “Revolution.” The
Life
article on the Chicago trial concluded, “It seems less a trial than an act of vengeance.” Early in October the Weatherman faction of SDS committed political suicide, dashing about Chicago breaking windows and hurling itself facedown into the dustbin of megalomaniacal political irrelevance. Later that month Jack Kerouac died, fat and lonely, in St. Petersburg, Florida. And in some cosmic balancing act, one marvelous, magical thing also happened that fall: the once stunningly inept New York Mets won the World Series.

The Dead passed through New York in September, doing shows at the Fillmore East for good money—$5,000 a night—and shows at the Cafe au Go Go and in Boston for closer to $2,000. Of course, not all their pay came in a check; sometimes there were less formal compensations, like their guest list. At the Cafe au Go Go, a long line waited outside penniless, and Pigpen let them all in and then remarked, “I think we just got fired.” Lenny Hart had not yet effected a noticeable improvement in their business affairs. That fall in San Francisco, sheriffs repossessed Pigpen’s organ from the stage as the show was about to begin, settling a $1,200 unpaid bill from the previous year. What the band did not know was that Lenny had just negotiated an extension on their contract with Warner Bros., since their original three-album deal had run its course. The new deal included an advance of $75,000, and Lenny flew to Los Angeles, met Joe Smith at an airline counter, got the check, and returned home. Not only was the band ignorant of the new deal and the money, they did not know about a counteroffer from Clive Davis at Columbia Records. If Lenny was successful at anything, it was at keeping the band in the dark.

At the same time, Rock Scully was out of action, wherein lay a tale. Around Labor Day, Ralph Gleason reported that three San Francisco bands—the Dead, the Airplane, and the newly arrived Crosby, Stills and Nash—were planning a free show in London’s Hyde Park. Early in September Rock went to London to advance the show, but at customs he was called aside and busted for possession of a modest amount of LSD (thirty hits). He attributed the arrest to a Machiavellian plot of Lenny’s, so that in Rock’s absence, the Dead would re-sign with Warner Bros. He told no one of his suspicions at the time, which casts doubt on the theory. In any case, Rock called an old pal, Chesley Millikin, who’d known the band in San Francisco but was now an executive for Epic Records in London. Along with Chesley came his friend Sam Cutler, who worked for Black-hill Productions, and had therefore stage-managed the Rolling Stones’ giant Hyde Park concert on July 5. They bailed him out, and Rock and Sam became fast friends; there was a bond between London and San Francisco, and Rock and Sam were kindred spirits.

Back home, Mickey Hart and Rock’s new lover, Nicki, made candles embedded with the finest pot, and Nicki filled up her brassiere with LSD, then flew off to London to sell the acid to pay the lawyers to get Rock home. The pot they smoked with the Stones. Rock seemed exotic to Sam, who was, he said of himself, “receptive of the West Coast bit, very enamored,” and very much charmed by “the chemicals which coincided with that sort of consciousness.” Part of the West Coast bit was talk of free concerts, and Rock planted the idea early with Sam and the Stones. As the Stones began to prepare for an American tour that fall, they “didn’t have anyone to look after them personally,” said Cutler, and Sam became that person.

As the fall progressed, America shuddered with conflict. Late in October
Life
magazine’s cover asked if marijuana should be legalized. The same week, in the Chicago Eight trial, Judge Julius “the Just” Hoffman ordered Black Panther Bobby Seale gagged and chained to his chair. It was no wonder that the Airplane’s new album,
Volunteers,
would include the line, “Up against the wall, motherfuckers / Tear down the wall.” San Francisco’s musical influence was at a peak; Janis Joplin, Santana, and Creedence Clearwater Revival were all in the Top Ten on November 10, when Warner Bros. released
Live Dead. Rolling Stone
would rave that the album “explains why the Dead are one of the best performing bands in America, why their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists . . . But if you’d like to visit a place where rock is likely to be in about five years, you might think of giving
Live Dead
a listen or two.”

But only one music story really mattered that fall: the Rolling Stones were touring the United States again. In many ways, it was the first great rock tour. When the Beatles and Stones had toured from 1964 to 1966, hardly anyone had listened or been able to hear the music through the screaming. In the ballroom era the ambience was nearly as important as the act. At Woodstock the audience had been the star. Now, with the Beatles off the road and Dylan vanished underground, the Stones were certifiably what Cutler called the “world’s greatest rock and roll band.” Having resolved their legal problems, they were coming to the States to prove it. Brian Jones had left the band in June and died by drowning a month later.
Let It Bleed,
their new album, was demonically brilliant and fit the edgy tenor of the times perfectly. But some things had changed.

On their way to the first show, Jagger told the ubiquitous Bill Belmont, on the tour as one of the road managers, that he planned a half-hour set. Bill warned him that in 1969 an hour was a bare minimum, and so Mick and Keith added some acoustic tunes. Their ticket prices were significantly higher than normal, and the very arrogance that they had used to take them to the top was now interpreted as contempt. In 1969, their press conferences included not only “straight” (conventional) press, who asked stupid questions about hair length, but underground reporters, who asked about ticket prices and the band’s responsibility to the freak community. During rehearsals in Los Angeles in October, Rock, Danny Rifkin, and Emmett Grogan met with Jagger and Sam Cutler to urge again the idea of a free Bay Area concert, with the proviso that it be kept secret until the last possible moment. There was yet another Stones connection with the Dead. Ram Rod and Rex Jackson found themselves with a bit of time off in November, and via Bill Belmont, hired on with the Stones. They would end up working most of the tour.

Writer Stanley Booth accompanied the Stones, and as the tour arrived in Oakland in early November, he noted Rock Scully’s arrival backstage. “Scully was wearing Levi’s and a plaid cowboy shirt, and with his beard and his bright eyes, he appeared a pleasant open-faced charming western guy.” They resumed considering the notion of doing a free show, presumably in Golden Gate Park, using the Hell’s Angels as security. “The Angels are really some righteous dudes,” Booth quoted Scully. “They carry themselves with honor and dignity.” Booth added, “He was so blue-eyed and open about it, it seemed really convincing.” The Stones’ show in Oakland did not go smoothly. Bill Graham did not like Sam Cutler, whom he dismissed as “an opportunist without much talent,” or the Stones’ demands, and he catered the show from a local burger joint. When the Stones took the stage forty-five minutes late, he ended up wrestling with Cutler onstage.

At home, Grateful Dead life only got weirder. Gail Turner was a friend of the band’s who in October had gone to work for Lenny, just as the band closed the Shady Management office on Union Street and moved operations to the Novato warehouse. Lenny was proving to be a peculiar manager. He wouldn’t allow Gail to put stamps on their mail, making everyone pay postage due at the other end. He’d never let Gail or anyone else see the books, and would issue the payroll in the oddest way. But he was a straight family man dropping out and becoming part of the counterculture, and his mantra was, “I love the Grateful Dead, I love this happening to me.” She accepted his foibles and forced herself to believe.

On November 15, 500,000 antiwar activists marched on Washington in an event called Moratorium Day. U.S. military leaders suggested ringing the White House with concertina wire to stop the marchers, though in the end city transit buses proved sufficient. The Dead played for Moratorium Day at a small theater in Crockett, California. Eight days later, on November 23, CBS broadcast a Mike Wallace interview of a soldier who had been at a place called My Lai in Vietnam, and the young man began his story with, “We landed and we began shooting.” The December 5 issue of
Life
led with “The Massacre at My Lai.” The growing realization that American soldiers had butchered civilians would be devastating to support for the war. At the same time, President Nixon began Operation Intercept to slow the influx of pot into the United States from Mexico. Shortly thereafter, any connection admittedly uncertain, heroin began flowing into the United States from Southeast Asia in body bags returning from the war, courtesy of the CIA.

Late in November the Stones performed two blistering concerts at Madison Square Garden, after which Mick Jagger announced that they would end the tour with a thank-you to “the people” with a free show in Golden Gate Park on December 6. Not only would this make up for high ticket prices and late shows, but it would also provide a fabulous climax to the movie that the Stones had hired the Maysles Brothers to film. If they rushed, they could get their movie out before the Woodstock film, once again proving that the Stones
were
the world’s greatest rock and roll band, superior to even a magical three-day event. The free show assumed an inexorable momentum, even as the original site, Golden Gate Park, was automatically eliminated by the public announcement—the city’s Board of Supervisors was allergic to the idea of hundreds of thousands of people streaming into the park due to advance publicity, and refused to approve a permit. The Stones ended the regular part of their tour on November 30 in West Palm Beach, Florida, and then headed to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record. Free-show headquarters were established at the Dead’s Novato warehouse. Cutler, Scully, and Chip Monck chose Sears Point Raceway as the new site for the show. Only ten miles from Novato and thirty-five or so from San Francisco, Sears Point offered good access and plenty of room. They decided to put the stage halfway up the side of a natural bowl, so that while the stage would be low—scaffolding cost money, and it was a free show after all—it would be safe. Sears Point asked for $6,000 rental, plus $5,000 to be held in escrow against possible damages, and all seemed under control.

On December 4, a certain morbid current in the national news began to thicken. In Muscle Shoals, the Stones (and everyone else) opened their newspapers and discovered pictures of hippie and ex–Haight Streeter Charles Manson, now considered responsible for the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles the past summer. In Chicago, the police department quite simply murdered two Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Closer to home, the Stones’ brutal business tactics finally blew up in their faces. Concert Associates had at one time thought they had the right to promote the Stones’ L.A. shows, but in the end these had gone to Bill Graham. Concert Associates was aggrieved. Filmways owned both Concert Associates and Sears Point Raceway. Suddenly, Sears Point wanted a very sizable insurance policy for the event, to be paid for by the Stones, and perhaps a percentage of the movie—the stories varied tremendously. Neither option was acceptable to Mick Jagger, and so just a few days before the scheduled concert, Sears Point was eliminated as a site, and the scramble to find a replacement began. The flamboyant San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli became involved, and his offices replaced the Novato warehouse as control central. Worse, the two Top 40 rock stations, KFRC and KYA, began to run hourly bulletins, each trying to be the unofficial “Stones station,” while Tom Donahue’s more responsible KSAN was edged out. Belli came up with a site in Corte Madera, but it lacked road access and was impractical.

On the afternoon of the fourth, Mel Belli got a phone call from a man named Dick Carter, owner of the Altamont Raceway in Livermore, forty miles or so east of San Francisco. Thinking that it would be great publicity, he offered his raceway as a site for the big free concert.

29

Trouble All Around (12/5/69–3/70)

Sam Cutler was in Alabama when he learned that the Sears Point location was out, and when he heard about the Altamont offer, he sent Rock Scully and Woodstock promoter Michael Lang, who had somehow materialized in San Francisco, in a helicopter to look at it. They came back and said, “Yeah, it’s possible.” They also sketched out a location for the stage, at the bottom of a hill. Later, Jon McIntire would recall that Rock expressed doubts even then, but the dream of the Dead playing with the Stones was too much for Scully’s judgment, and he wouldn’t let go of the idea. “California’s driven by wonderful dreams,” said Cutler. But when he saw Altamont, he saw a “shithole in a desert.”

The San Francisco Bay Area is surrounded by an arc of hills, and one of the major breaks in the arc is the Altamont Pass, which links the greater Bay Area with California’s Central Valley. The gap is meteorologically critical, generating such tremendous air pressure between the cold ocean and warm inner valley that the crest of the pass is lined with hundreds of shiny steel windmills. On the other side of the range, as the road flattens out, there is a demolition derby track on the right. It is cheap and sleazy-looking, an ugly desolation of crushed auto bodies. In December the hills are sere and yellow. The farmers in the Sacramento Delta fifty miles north burn off their rice stubble, and the air is bitter and smoky. From the Altamont Raceway, there is nothing else in sight but the hills and the freeway.

Early in the process of preparing for the concert, Sam Cutler had attended a meeting at Mickey’s barn. Dressed in a fur-collared suede jacket, dripping in turquoise, he must have looked, he later thought, “like a demented rock-glam version of a manager to the assembled denim-clad Frisco people, a visitor from another planet.” After spending the night, he was taken for a ride on Snorter, “frantically galloping alongside up and down the hills of the ranch . . . basically hanging on for dear life.” Having passed this first test, he met with some Hell’s Angels, including Mickey’s close friend Sweet William and Frisco Pete Knell. Every free show in the Bay Area since 1966 had included the Angels, who would assume pride of place with their motorized steeds near the stage and generally behave with equanimity, taking care of lost children, guarding power lines, and so forth. The Angels were elementals in the alchemical sense, not govern-able, physically intimidating, but usually safe enough. Since they’d be at the free Stones show in any case, it seemed reasonable to have them sit on the front edge of the stage. “[Pete] was absolutely adamant,” said Cutler later, “that nobody hires the Hell’s Angels to do fuck all. The only agreement there ever was, basically, was the Angels, if they were going to do anything, would make sure nobody fucked with the generators, but that was the extent of it. And it was $500 worth of beer that we got together for them . . . But there was no ‘They’re going to be the police force’ or anything like that. That’s all bollocks, media-generated bullshit. ‘The Rolling Stones hired the Hell’s Angels’ is one of the great rock and roll canards.”

Bert Kanegson was also at the meeting and recalled it somewhat differently. “I’m storming that this is insane, ‘How can these guys do security? Those guys on top of the Rolling Stones? This is absolute disaster’ . . . They were clearly security; there was no question . . . We discussed it in this meeting . . . And I remember it coming from Emmett [Grogan], and I never forgave Emmett for that.” Sweet William told his friend Peter Coyote that Cutler had asked them to do security, and they had refused— sort of. “We don’t police things,” Sweet William said. “We’re not a security force. We go to concerts to enjoy ourselves and have fun.” “Well, what about helping people out—you know, giving directions and things?” asked Cutler. “Sure, we can do that.” When Sam asked how they might be paid, William replied, “We like beer.” The deal was for one hundred cases.

With around thirty-six hours to move the show from Sears Point to Altamont, a whirlwind descended on the Novato warehouse. The sound system for the day would come from the Dead/Alembic and the Family Dog’s Bob Cohen. Renting cars was passé—now they were renting helicopters, and Alembic got stuck with lots of the bills. In the frenzy, Emmett Grogan wrote on a blackboard, “Charlie Manson Memorial Hippie Love Death Cult Festival.” Point taken. Yet there had never been a big problem with a Northern California free show before, and “the show must go on.” The various problems were simply obstacles to be overcome, and the feat of moving a show in so short a time was a logistical triumph. The omens, if omens they were, were ignored until it was too late. Bear and Dan Healy drove out to the site early on the morning of the fifth, and just as they crossed over the crest of Altamont Pass, they saw a fantastic explosion in the sky from an aborted weather rocket. They wondered if it was a sign. Then they saw Altamont Raceway, and their doubts grew. The stage was only three feet high, and setting up the P.A. largely consisted of trying to meld different sound systems—Healy’s from Quicksilver, the Dead’s, the Family Dog’s—into a unit. With the help of some Orange Sunshine LSD, they worked through the day and night to get things ready. The women of the Grateful Dead scene spent the day tie-dyeing banners for stage decorations. Mick and Keith Richards flew out to look at the site, but when Mick flew back to get some rest, Keith stayed, sleeping in the back of the Hog Farm’s cook tent, so grungy that hardly anyone recognized him. People began to gather and the roads thickened with cars from Friday night on, and for most, it was a pleasant time. Tim Leary’s drive to Altamont was a treasured memory of “passing joints, fruit, wine and beer from car to car as we inched along.”

As December 6 dawned, Peter Monk and Bert Kanegson sat onstage, planning a morning mantra that would chant in the sun’s rays and bring good vibrations onto the scene. As they were about to begin, the audience kicked over the low perimeter fence and came storming down the hill to get in front of the stage. By late afternoon there were about 300,000 people on the site. As showtime approached, the Angels arrived, driving their bikes through the audience to park them in front of and to the side of the stage. The situation was set: 299,000 people had come to see a show and were comfortably arrayed; and then there were the 1,000 desperate to be up front, some of whom were not acting sanely. Some of them were “the weirdos too,” wrote one witness, “speed freaks with hollow eyes and missing teeth, dead faced acid heads . . . Is this [Hieronymus] Bosch or Cecil B. De Mille; biblical, medieval, or millennial?” Perhaps they’d had nasty brushes with Angels in the past. Some of them were temporarily demented on whatever drug was their choice. Between the beer and their favorite amphetamines and/or barbiturates, the Angels were ripped as well. The ultimate job requirement for a good security person is a detached, intelligent sense of humor. The Angels did not qualify. They were also in a completely untenable tactical position, one hundred of them (at most) standing at the bottom of a hill in front of a low stage.

A couple of days after the concert, Sonny Barger, president of the Angels’ Oakland Chapter, would comment, “I didn’t go there to police nothin’, man. I ain’t no cop. I ain’t never gonna ever pretend to be a cop, and this Mick Jagger like put it all on the Angels, man. Like he used us for dupes, man. And as far as I’m concerned, we were the biggest suckers for that idiot that I can ever see. You know what, they told me that if I would sit on the edge of the stage so nobody would climb over me, I could drink beer until the show was over. And that’s what I went there to do. But you know what? When they started messing over our bikes, they started it. I don’t know if you think we pay fifty dollars for them things or steal ’em . . . ain’t nobody gonna kick my motorcycle. And they might think because they’re in a crowd of 300,000 people that they can do it and get away with it, but when you’re standin’ there lookin’ at something that’s your life, and everything you got is invested in that thing and you love that thing better than you love anything in the world and you see a guy kick it, you know who he is, you’re gonna get him. And you know what? They got got. I am not no peace creep by any sense of the word.”

Around noon, Santana took the stage, and trouble broke out immediately. “During our set,” said Carlos, “I could see [an Angel] from the stage who had a knife and just wanted to stab somebody. I mean, he really wanted a fight. There were kids being stabbed and heads cracking the whole time.” The Flying Burrito Brothers played next, and then the Jefferson Airplane. Marty Balin was neither large nor strong, but he lacked for nothing in the
cojones
department. Seeing a group of Angels beating a young man with pool cues, he dove off the stage and was beaten unconscious by an Angel named Animal. Friends dragged Marty backstage, where he came awake, saw Animal, and piped up, “Fuck you,” whereupon he was knocked out a second time. Marty was the only man onstage to resist the Angels. Paul Kantner, always feisty, did remark to the audience, “I’d like to mention that the Hell’s Angels just smashed Marty Balin in the face and knocked him out for a bit. I’d like to thank them for that.” In response, an Angel walked across the stage and challenged him. “You talkin’ to me, man?” Grace Slick kept on singing, she later said, because she’d forgotten to put in her contacts that morning and was thus unable to see the madness going on around her. In the melee in front of the stage, Bert Kanegson, a pacifist who had gotten to know the Angels at the Carousel Ballroom, managed to talk them out of beating one kid. As the kid walked away, he cursed the Angels, who shrugged and then beat Bert senseless.

The Airplane played on, and the members of the Dead arrived via helicopter. On the way from the landing pad to backstage, Phil and Jerry were walking through the audience, and Phil stopped short, smacking Garcia in the head with his instrument case, which felt to Lesh like a “weird start.” Backstage they found chaos. The Dead’s truck was stage left, and the Dead, their family, and various friendly Oakland Angels were there. The stage-right side was seemingly controlled by strangers, Angels from San Jose, and they were coming unglued. At one point an Angel wouldn’t let the Dead out of their truck. He was preparing to rearrange Lesh’s facial features when their friend, San Francisco Angel Terry the Tramp, intervened. Between the beatings of Marty and Bert and this action, the Dead decided they were not playing. Crosby, Stills and Nash went on, and Angels took to poking at audience members and musicians with long bicycle spokes. Stephen Stills was one victim, and though he was bleeding, he decided to keep playing.

Things got worse. For nearly two hours, as the wind picked up and people shivered, there was no music. Later, Cutler would say that Bill Wyman had been missing, shopping in San Francisco. If so, it was a nice coincidence that he turned up just in time for the sun to set. The Stones were escorted from a trailer to the tuning tent, Angels punching at faces that peeked through holes in the canvas, and then to the stage. The lights bled red, the Stones came out to the tune of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and Jagger realized “there’s no control.” Four Angels jumped off the stage, and a pool cue slashed down, hitting an unseen target with a “burst of water as if it had crushed a jellyfish,” wrote Michael Lydon. Stanley Booth described the scene: “Many in the audience nearest the stage are demanding to be made victims . . . stripping nude despite the cold, [they] climb onto the stage only to be thrown off and beaten on the ground below. They raise themselves, hair and faces matted with blood, and climb up again. To be beaten again. Collaborating in the violence.” At “Sympathy for the Devil,” the scuffles between audience members and Angels picked up in intensity, and the Stones stopped. Mick Jagger, cockgod of rock and roll, was terrified. He pleaded, “Sisters, brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters, come on now. That means everybody just cool out.” They began the song again and somehow managed to get through it. Keith Richards shouted, “Kee’ it cool. Hey, if you don’t cool it you ain’t gonna hear no music!” Years later, Sonny Barger wrote that he responded to Richards’s threat by sticking a revolver in his side. The Stones began to play “Under My Thumb,” and a black man named Meredith Hunter wearing a “black hat, black shirt, [and an] iridescent blue-green suit” became visible in the crowd, waving a revolver. Suddenly, Angels swarmed over him, and one, Alan Pasaro, pulled out a knife and stabbed him repeatedly. No one onstage realized immediately that things had come to the ultimate pass, and Jagger called out, “If you move back we can continue and we will continue.” They did so, and the Rolling Stones began to play for their lives.

Many in the audience knew only that they had seen a fantastic concert and were unaware of the horrors. The Grateful Dead family was sickeningly well informed. Dazed and confused, they headed for the helicopter pad, “just trying not to see what was happening to the sides of us,” said Frankie Azzara. They crowded into a helicopter, the door closed, “and it was like a Vietnam sound.” The chopper lifted off. “Then all of a sudden it was stone silence, we were up in the air, everyone is thinking . . . and M.G., out of nowhere, yells, ‘Does anybody know where the constellation Cancer is?’ And we all just sort of automatically looked up at the stars . . . and started bullshitting, ‘Oh yeah, it’s probably that.’ It got real quiet and she gave us a scenic tour of the heavens . . . an M.G. psychological workshop and ‘the project today is look up and we are not going to think about the real world until we land.’ ”

The insane truth was that the Dead still had a show to do that night, at Fillmore West. McIntire did his best to soothe everyone’s nerves with food and drink, taking them to Grison’s, a fancy San Francisco steak house. Toward the end of the meal, Kreutzmann arose and announced that he wasn’t playing, and he and Susila left. “If Billy’s not playing, neither am I,” added Mickey. Poor McIntire was left to journey down Van Ness Avenue to the hall to tell Graham’s manager, Paul Barratta, that the Dead were a no-show. Frantic, Barratta offered the audience free tickets to other shows.

As Scully told the story, later that night Graham accused him of murder for his part in the show. It was true that without Rock’s support for the move to Altamont, his refusal to stop the train when it had been twice derailed, Altamont would probably not have happened. Scully was surely not alone in making abysmal decisions. “We believed—however naively— that this show could be organized by those San Francisco people who’d had experience with this sort of thing,” said Mick Jagger much later. “It was just an established ritual, this concert-giving thing in the Bay Area. And just because it got out of hand, we got the blame
. . . we did not organize it.”
Partly true; Sam Cutler was on their payroll and okayed the arrangements, but he was dependent on Rock. Of course, Jagger established the tone of the event by ignoring advice and announcing it well in advance, by sanctioning business practices that resulted in being blown out of Sears Point, and by delaying coming onstage until dark so that he and the Stones could have their movie. Garcia quoted the San Francisco hippie thinker Stephen Gaskin: “Altamont was the little bit of sadism in your sex life, that the Rolling Stones put out in their music, coming back.” There was truth in that. The Angels were placed in an untenable situation—but they should never have been placed there at all. Meredith Hunter
was
armed, and Alan Pasaro was later found not guilty of murder on the grounds of self-defense.