Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (42 page)

Stadnick looked him straight in the eye and chuckled derisively. “Couple more weeks? I'd be running this place.” Hoots of ominous laughter surrounded O'Neill and his partner.

Later, O'Neill admitted that he thought that the only white prisoner—and a short and funny-looking one at that—would have a tough time surviving in a Jamaican jail. He couldn't have been more wrong. “I thought they'd be frying him up,” he said. “But he made some friends in there and left real cocky.” As the two Canadian cops, aided by a phalanx of Jamaican guards with submachine guns, escorted the diminutive biker leader out of his cell, they were chilled by what they heard. Hoots, hollers, whistles and applause came from what seemed like every cell. “Yo, Walter!” they yelled. “We're with you, man!” Stadnick loved it.

Joanne Carswell saw all her beliefs die in one day. At an event where she expected to celebrate the beauty of peace, togetherness, friendship and tolerance, she was instead a witness to a repulsive display of the strong preying on the weak. She saw a terrifying group of large armed men terrorizing young people, taking their money, assaulting them and generally destroying any idea she may have had about the fellowship of humanity. Before the day was over, Joanne would watch one of that group of men plunge a knife deep into the throat of a kid and see that kid crumple to the ground. She would witness a murder.

It was December 6, 1969. Three and a half months earlier, Woodstock, despite all its failings, had given young people all over the world hope that their ideals could work in real life. Originally intended to be held in Woodstock, a small town in upstate New York, the festival was actually realized 38 miles away on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel after officials in Woodstock and other towns turned it down. Hastily planned for up to 50,000 people, 400,000 arrived. The food, water, sanitary and security systems were immediately and absolutely overwhelmed. Almost nobody paid to get in—the promoters actually lost money until they started selling records a year later. Most people were forced to park at least 15 miles away, there were shortages of everything and people relieved themselves anywhere they felt like, leaving Yasgur's formerly idyllic farm a devastated, litter-clogged mud pit with all 450 of his cows “set free.” Doctors, medicine, water and food had to be helicoptered in at taxpayers' expense. But, to the young people of the time, these were minor quibbles. They pulled it off. Woodstock worked. The hippies got together—almost a half million of them—and had a great time. Although at least three people died at Woodstock, none died as the result of violence. Let the establishment worry about such boring details as toilets, food and water. The people had put together the biggest party in history and proved that the ideals of peace, love and brotherhood had to be recognized.

One group of young men clearly recognized the importance of Woodstock. The Rolling Stones, the reigning kings of popular music since the decline of the Beatles, were conspicuous by their absence at the historic festival. According to rock mythology, author Ken Kesey came up with the idea of “Woodstock West” and presented it to a number of well-known bands. Eager to take advantage of the ground-swell of enthusiasm for mega-parties, the Rolling Stones decided to end their 1969 tour with a bang.

Recruiting Woodstock alumni Santana, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Rolling Stones and the promoters managed to get everything together in just 110 days. As with their colleagues back East, the promoters were rebuffed by a number of potential venues. Frustrated, the band and their promoters turned to
Rolling Stone
magazine publisher Jann Wenner and he sent them to Melvin Belli, a lawyer famous for protecting the interests of California's conservative elite. A little more than 24 hours before the show, he hammered out a deal with Dick Carter of the Altamont Speedway. About as far away from San Francisco as Woodstock was from New York City, the sleepy, nearly bankrupt racetrack was just outside the dusty San Joaquin Valley town of Tracy.

Most of the same problems that plagued Woodstock—shortages of water, food and toilets—hit Altamont as well, and drug use was even more rampant. According to author Robert Sam Anson, the Hells Angels sold thousands of hits of LSD laced with methamphetamines. That potentially deadly mix led to so many painful bad trips and psychotic episodes that the festival's first aid centers were swamped well before the first band went on. “There didn't seem to be any cops around, so people were doing all kinds of illegal drugs pretty openly,” Joanne Carswell said. “It looked like the Hells Angels were in charge, and I don't think anybody thought they'd mind if we got high—hell, they all looked stoned.”

Stoned or not, the Hells Angels were a formidable force. And as tensions mounted they reacted the only way they knew how. According to rock historian Philip Norman: “By halfway through Santana's set, swirls and flurries of violence, at first almost too quick for the eye to follow, were happening all along the stage—from there to its scaffolded corners where massed Hells Angels confronted the ordinary public.” Although Altamont owner Dick Carter may have hired lots of cops and security guards, none could be seen anywhere near the stage once the concert had begun and the Hells Angels were holding sway.

The crescendo of violence at Altamont may have become a long-forgotten item of rock lore if not for the fact that a team of cameramen was shooting a documentary about the Rolling Stones tour. Called
Gimme Shelter
, the film shows a shocking amount of violence at Altamont, virtually all of it performed by the Hells Angels. Although the Hells Angels managed to intimidate most of the crew into not shooting, Stephen Lighthill came up with an ingenious and courageous way to record the event. Since his camera was mounted on a shoulder brace, he simply kept it running and pretended it was turned off. “Hells Angels were hassling me all day and telling me to stop shooting,” he said. “All the stuff with people being beaten on with pool cues was shot by me, and as long as I wasn't looking at what the camera and the microphone were pointing at, nobody was the wiser.”

The Angels, conspicuous by their leather jackets and the club's winged death's-head logo, were armed with sawed-off pool cues reinforced with lead. Although not quite a deadly weapon, a whack in the head with one would leave its victim a crumpled, helpless mess. In an attempt to calm the Hells Angels, promoters moved cases and cases of beer to their positions along the edge of the stage. The bikers began hurling full cans at fans they decided were out of line. Although it was later reported that the Angels were altruistically tossing beer into the crowd, they can be clearly seen in
Gimme Shelter
whipping full steel cans at kids in the crowd. One is said to have fractured a girl's skull.

Things got significantly worse during Jefferson Airplane's set and the fighting became the focus of more attention than the music. Frustrated, Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin told one of the Hells Angels, who was severely beating a young man, to stop. One of the Hells Angels on stage took offense at Balin's indiscretion and punched him in the face, knocking him out. The Grateful Dead and their entourage assessed the scene as too violent for them, packed up and left without playing.

The Rolling Stones, as headliners, didn't have the option of chickening out. They knew that 400,000 amped-up, pissed-off kids would riot. They went on and, to their credit, began a pretty good set. But a great many people in the crowd, especially those nearest the ridiculously accessible two-foot-high stage, had things on their mind other than music. Fights broke out all over. Fists, threats and even dirty looks were met with a smash in the face with a pool cue. Although Jagger pleaded with the crowd to “cool down,” things seemed to ramp up as the Stones played their controversial hit “Sympathy for the Devil.”

After that, things got weird. As the Stones finished their next song, “Under My Thumb,” a young black man approached the stage. In
Gimme Shelter
it's clear he has something in his hand, but it's not clear what it is. Suddenly, he's confronted by a Hells Angel. A scuffle ensues and the two are almost instantly surrounded by a group of bikers. There's a flash of metal as a knife is plunged repeatedly into the throat of Meredith Hunter.

Carswell saw the whole thing. “They surrounded him and stabbed him over and over again,” she said. “He wasn't dead when he was lying there, but he was clearly dying.” According to Carswell, some of the kids in the crowd tried to help the poor young man convulsing in a pool of his own blood, but the bikers kept them away. “I heard one of them say, ‘He's dying anyway' and another threatened some kids who were trying to help him,” she said. “He told them, ‘He deserves to die.' ”

Altamont was a huge failure. When it was over, four people were dead. A couple in a sleeping bag fell victim to a hit and run, a teenager drowned in a drainage ditch and a young man was killed by the Hells Angels.

The police arrested 24-year-old ex-convict Alan Passaro, the biker who killed Hunter. Melvin Belli, recruited by the Hells Angels, got some of the film from the rough cuts of
Gimme Shelter
and showed it to the cops. He convinced them that the object in Hunter's hand was actually a gun. After a while, they agreed, but pointed out that the self-defense excuse would be no good unless the gun was found. Belli quickly made calls to “every lawyer in the area” to track down Ralph “Sonny” Barger, president of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels. The next day, Barger brought him a shoebox. Inside there was a gun that Barger claimed the Hells Angels had taken from Hunter at Altamont. The cops believed him and let Passaro walk. The Rolling Stones allegedly paid Hunter's mother $10,000 not to cause trouble.

By most accounts, the Hells Angels got away with murder at Altamont. Joanne Carswell certainly thinks so. “I saw it all. Hunter wasn't threatening Jagger; it's not like they were protecting him or anything,” she said. “And even if he had a gun, and I still don't think he did, he didn't stand a chance against all those bikers.”

It's unclear why the Hells Angels got off. Maybe it was racism, maybe it was Belli's charm or maybe it was the legendary reputation of the Hells Angels. Whatever it was, Altamont represented the end of the hippie era. The tragedy that sprang from the concert that was supposed to represent the anti-establishment ideals of the hippie generation instead showed the immense flaws in the peace and love philosophy. No matter how peaceful you want to be, there will always be bad men who want to take advantage of you. For every group of people who want to promote peace, equality and free love, there will be men with sawed-off pool cues and knives who will want to sell them drugs and bust their heads. Many saw Altamont as the death-knell of the hippie movement. Carswell, for one, took the flowers out of her hair and moved back home with her parents.

 

While the hippies lost their credibility, the Hells Angels increased theirs. The kind of young men who'd like to become Hells Angels were impressed and emboldened by what happened at Altamont. To them, the bikers at Altamont were doing their job, protecting Mick Jagger and each other from a black man with a gun. These were the kind of young men who saw all morality in absolutes, who saw violence as a natural retribution to those who break their rules and who saw a life outside the often incomprehensible laws of the state as logical, realistic and even romantic.

Such men have been flocking to the Hells Angels since they emerged in California after World War II. The organization was established as an entity in San Bernardino in 1947. Millions of men were coming back from the war and most of them wanted to return to their homes, wives, jobs and normalcy. But some didn't. “Like the drifters who rode west after Appomattox [during the American Civil War], there were thousands of veterans in 1945 who flatly rejected the idea of going back to their prewar pattern,” said journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote a book about the Hells Angels in 1965,
Hell's Angels
, after having lived with them for two years. “They didn't want order but privacy, and time to figure things out. It was a nervous, downhill feeling, a mean kind of angst that comes out of wars.”

There were literally thousands of them—young men accustomed to the thrills and horrors of combat who could find nothing for themselves in normal civilian life. There was one thing, however, that came close. In the late '40s, motorcycles were very different than they are today. In that less sophisticated age, bikes were little more than engines, frames, chains and wheels. To make them even more dangerous and exciting, some riders would lengthen their bikes' forks and handlebars and remove their rear springs, giving birth to what we now know as “choppers.” Many young men, fresh from the bloody fields of France or the vicious beaches of the South Pacific, needed something wild to satisfy their nihilistic urges—and tearing down the freeway on bikes was as close to fun as they could find.