Audio By Carbonatix
Well, we’ve seen the waning of the Woodstock wankarama, thank you very much. Unless newscasters and the glossies run totally out of filler for the next ten summers, we won’t have to hear that story again for a decade.
Today marks the year’s true dash down the gauntlet of memory: December 6, a date that lives in infamy among connoisseurs of chaos not merely as Pearl Harbor’s Eve but as the anniversary of a notorious concert at Altamont Speedway in Alameda County, California.
You remember Altamont–the time the Rolling Stones celebrated the close of their autumn 1969 U.S. tour by inviting 500,000 or so of their closest friends to a party chaperoned by the Hell’s Angels, who kept the peace by beating on people with billiard cues and playing pin-the- Buck-knife-on-the-brother?
One good thing about Altamont: Even though it beats hell out of Woodstock as synecdoche for life in these United States circa 1969, nobody ever talks about Altamont Nation. Nobody bores you with a droning exegesis about how he almost went to Altamont, but had to work carrying Sheetrock. And now that the big day has arrived we probably won’t see too many Altamont parties, either. Nostalgiacs tend to shy away from bloodstains, and rush to embrace the sweet ill-remembered.
Yeah, yeah. I know. At Woodstock, 400,000 groovy people sat around in the rain for three days and had babies, man, and shared their tofu and acid and didn’t kill each other– supposedly. In all that mud, who’d have known if someone did wind up buying six feet of Yasgur’s farm?
Woodstock was a commercial event fervently intended to profit on the hipnoscenti’s herding instinct. The young men with unlimited capital who organized the show did so with intent to commit capitalism; they just weren’t too good at it, although they were among the first to realize a fellow could put on a musical event and get away with listing “music” last among the ingredients.
In contrast, Altamont was a free show from the start, and perhaps that’s why it had far more to do with the mood of those apocalyptic days than Woodstock did–this summer’s mediafest notwithstanding– contemporaneously or in hindsight. And why, three months into nationhood, Woodstockians had to face certain hard truths about the price of getting something for nothing.
Blame it on the Stones, particularly Mick Jagger, who stands like Sweeney Agonistes astraddle the divide between hipness and yuphood. A karma chameleon whose ability to manipulate situations to his advantage makes Gordon Gekko look like a nickel-and-dime lizardling, Mick has never met a social compact he couldn’t violate in some extravagantly self-aggrandizing way, be it public pissing or gender bending or stealing an old black preacher’s blues lyric. You can take the boy out of the London School of Economics but you can’t take the London School of Economics out of the boy. It’s a good act, though, nearly bulletproof, especially stateside, where even the palest echo of a Sloane Square drawl has the colonials eating out of your hand.
Now Mick’s a man of wealth and taste–chateau in the Loire, a couple of yards of prime-grade Texas blonde in the boudoir–wise enough to insulate himself from faux pas, save when he slips the leash held by guardian angel Keith and puts out a solo album. Then, he was a lot less wealthy–albeit rich enough to pull the rank-outsider routine as only an arriviste can–and far less circumspect.
The year before he’d successfully wrapped himself in the cloak of rebellion with Beggar’s Banquet. On 1969’s Let It Bleed, Jagger jacked the ante, casting himself not as the prince of darkness but as the midnight rambler, index finger (or was it a dagger?) jabbed skyward in the direction of all society’s conventions. If a few years ago he’d been a twitching hobbledehoy, he was now king of the sansculottes, a murderous urchin baying at the palace gate, just a shot away shot away shot away-yay- yay-yay-yeah. It was Mick who idly mused about a free concert at a midtour press conference, and with that careless whisper set into motion a vast contrivance of wheels within wheels, many of them equipped with small, very sharp teeth.
Or blame it on the fans, and not merely the besotted masses who trudged out to the cold hillsides encircling the speedway, but all of us who clogged the era’s aisles. If pop music promoters represent an evolution of the old smash-and-grab into a more genteel form of rapine, pop audiences represent a devolution of manners. Before Woodstock, people went to concerts to hear music; after Woodstock, they went to concerts to be at concerts. O Lord, how many geeks have we seen wander around wrapped in a quilt in 80-degree heat, or invade the orchestra without even the pretense of a ticket stub, always managing, like pigeon dung on a windshield, to be exactly where they shouldn’t be? That’s the genuine legacy of Woodstock: the audience as self-celebrating entity–barbaric yawper, singer of its own bloated body electric, crasher of the expensive seats, sasser of ushers, mouther of a million demands for encore upon encore, spurrer into being of Altamont. It was a perfectly balanced equation: If the Stones hadn’t said they’d play, no one would have showed up; if no one had showed up, the Stones wouldn’t have played.
THERE’S A LOT of Pecksniffery these days about the Stones’ motives–um, about 75 million of them, at roughly $30 a ducat, not necessarily including royalties on the $20 tour tee shirt and whatever bundle Budweiser is kicking in to underwrite the tour and buy the band’s services in commercials–for trotting their creaking carcasses out onto the boards yet again, but that’s nothing compared with the static raised back in ’69, when it cost the faithful about $8 to see the band. But it wasn’t enough to see Mick tear his heart out on the stage. Thanks to his posturing, as well as the tenor of the times, the American branch of the wild tribe expected a lot more of Mister Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Mister Born in a Crossfire Hurricane, Mister Say a Prayer for the Common Foot Soldier, Mister Hit ‘n’ Run Raper in Anger than a nod of obeisance to the Zeitgeist. This time around the Mickster couldn’t get over on a pout and a jiggle; he had to jam out the kicks with some overtly radical gesture. When said gesture was not forthcoming, overtly or otherwise, the natives grew restless. Everywhere the Stones went, the grandees of the counterculture harangued them about their commitment to Da Revolushun.
The error was understandable; after all, these were the days when musicians held Plexiglas guitars as if they were M-60s, hip-slung for maximum fire control. It was the dawn of the corporatization of rock ‘n’ roll, then personified by the Stones: dirty, dangerous, violent, and young, as Marty Balin might’ve sung the line, had an Angel not cold-cocked him in midperformance at the speedway while he and the Airplane were warming up for the Grytest Rockarow Bond Inna Wull.
In late 1969, the Stones, then in the prime of their powers, were precisely that. And if their career since has seemed like a succession of variously hedged bets, it’s because at Altamont, Mick and the boys rolled for big casino and came up snake eyes. Which is the essence of rock ‘n’ roll (and quite the opposite of Rock, its bankable and politely distant cousin): the willingness to wager everything that matters on a barred chord. Live fast, die by misadventure, and stay forever young.
Like Brian Jones, who wound up floating face down in his swimming pool on July 3, 1969, and was duly eulogized the next day by the bandmates who’d pink-slipped him. In whiteface and a little party dress Mick read some Shelley in Brian’s honor, then gave a free concert in Hyde Park. The U.K. subspecies of Hell’s Angels guarded the sound system in exchange for some cold ones. Yeah, everyone was so much younger then, even the Stones. The only one who didn’t look young was Charlie Watts. He seemed to be somebody’s uncle who owned the van and the P.A. and so got to sit in with the kids. These days, though, as with Eleanor Roosevelt’s wattles, Charlie’s simian homeliness has grown touchingly becoming, while Mih and Keef have had to endure the erosion of their lean, accipitrine profiles. Like everything made of rock, the Stones have become geological.
The Stones were finishing Let It Bleed as they were starting the tour, so that as summer yielded to fall, the album was pumping through the capillaries of the otherculture like hot plasma. The summer of ’69 might have strutted and jangled to the intro of “Honky Tonk Women,” but the fall was all throb and gristle, punctuated by the whap of a heavy belt slapping a stage during “Midnight Rambler.” Denied airtime, except on the fledgling and scattershot network of “underground” radio stations, the album nonetheless seemed to be everywhere: leaking out through dormitory windows, filling the living rooms of crash pads and overstuffed undergraduate apartments, achieving in the autumnal chill what Sgt. Pepper had achieved two summers before: unanimity, but with a good beat you could dance to, and scary lyrics.
By fall the Woodstock stats had evolved into maxims, whose corollary was that the brothers and sisters could get it together if they just didn’t have The Man messing with them. At Altamont, that was exactly what they got: absolute freedom, defined by those arbiters of absolutism, the Angels. It might seem incredible that anyone would hire the Hell’s Angels to guard anything, but remember, we’re talking about a time when it was possible to convince oneself that Mick Jagger had politics and that they mattered. Such was the decade’s whimsy.
After Mick’s press conference musing, the toothed wheels spun, the Ching was cast, the airline schedules consulted, the map triangulations drawn, and it came to pass that a free concert would be born–first in Golden Gate Park (sorry, thanks but no thanks, said a San Francisco just a leetle tired of living up to its reputation), then at Sears Point Raceway outside the city (er, uh, well, maybe not, the owner said at the last minute, triggering a frenzied search for an alternative site on which to dump the proceedings, in harbinger of other toxic spectacles to come), and finally at Altamont, way out in the uninviting foothills on the lee side of the Coastal Range, the sort of terrain in which the Donner Party might have held its final barbecue. The stage rose up overnight, at the last possible minute, with volunteers working around the clock–my dad’s got a fifty-foot scaffold and an impact wrench, let’s put on a show!–even as the negotiations were taking place that would permit the circus to set up.
AND SOMEWHERE in there the light bulb went on in a brain that remembered the membership of the Hell’s Angels M.C., U.K., drooling beer in Hyde Park. That blithe day everything had gone swimmingly–but assuming a genetic link between the English strain of biker and the domestic specimen can be, and was, a fatal mistake, and one not restricted to English rock stars. Revered by American hipsters for living what everybody else merely sang or wrote about, the Angels had come to be holy goons, transubstantiated from prole brawlers into beat bodhisattvas through the miracle of rose-tinted glass.
Only problem was, along the way to satori, nobody told the Angels to stop being the Angels, and at Altamont, they were themselves and a half, setting what has come to be a standard for brutality among concert security forces everywhere.
Trouble in the front rows? Nemo problemo–the Angels got out their pool cues and whacked the offending parties into a semblance of order or jelly, whichever came first. A big fat girl got naked and tried to stage-dive Mick? Easy–as Stanley Booth writes in his excellent 1984 book Dance With the Devil, in a trice the Angels were “trying to reach the girl with fists or boots, wanting to get down there and smash her face, stomp her throat, kick her tits off and send them sailing over the heads of this dumb sheeplike crowd, and kick her in the pussy till she bleeds to death.” Somebody elbowed over a Harley improvidently parked at the foot of the stage? We’ll show you what rock ‘n’ roll means, sumbitch.
And of course, there was the lonesome death in the crowd of Meredith “Murdock” Hunter, a young black man in a shiny green suit who managed to squeeze his way stageside but then, during “Under My Thumb,” got caught in the discussion involving the horizontal Harley and had the poor judgment to produce as his side of the argument a long-barreled revolver. This prompted an Angel– one Alan David Passaro, according to an indictment handed down by the Alameda County grand jury–to terminate him with extreme prejudice. Appropriate to the affair’s atavistic tone, Passaro dispatched Hunter with that most unmodern of weapons: a folding lock-blade knife of the variety then gaining favor on wide belts everywhere.
THE KNIFE–and Hunter’s gun–are the real stars of Gimme Shelter, a Maysles Films outing that should be getting a bit of well-deserved airtime around now. Altamont-the-movie began, much like the concert itself, as a bit of pop star indulgence. Even before the free-show concept attached itself to them like a limpet mine, the Stones had decided to celebrate themselves on acetate. So they hired Boston-born documentarians David and Albert Maysles.
As the Stones are godfathers to subsequent generations of artists in their chosen field, so are the Maysles, who in 1964 had made a short film on the Beatles’ first week in America. In 1960 Albert Maysles had helped shoot Primary, a behind-the-smoke-and- mirrors documentary about Jack Kennedy’s duel with Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination. Primary set the pace for nonfiction political films in much the same way as Theodore White’s The Making of the President, 1960 forever altered political journalism. Also on the Primary crew: D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock, who collaborated to make Don’t Look Back about Bob Dylan; Pennebaker later made Monterey Pop. Whether in music or politics, the idea was the same: Work light–one or two sixteen- millimeter cameras and a syncsound Nagra tape recorder–stay tight, and get it right while the subjects let it all hang out, hombre. No scriptwriters or storyboarders need apply; we work without a net. Like any simple and good idea, it worked awfully well.
So startling and effective were the sometimes stuttery results that the Maysles’ slangy touch (which they call “direct cinema,” eschewing the Francophiliac cinema verite) has joined the vocabulary of mainstream moviemaking. For years hardly a dramatic film has hit the large or small screen without a scene in which the camera suddenly goes jittery and soft-focus, signaling unsubtly that something major is taking place. And television commercials, to say nothing of music videos! You’d have thought no one got into film school anymore without being able to document a chronic case of tic douloureux in both eyes.
At Maysles Films–David died a couple of years back, but Albert is still punching them out, paying the freight for personal artistic projects by making commercials–the filmmakers refer to such hack lifts as “ShakiCam,” but twenty years ago they were the freshest thing going, and Al and Dave were the masters.
Early in the tour, the Maysles and their trusty gear climbed onto the Stones’ bandwagon, capturing such decisive moments as:
* Tina Turner wearing her high-heeled sneakers and her wig hat on her head as she hand-jobs a microphone during the crescendo of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”;
* Keith Richards (or maybe that year it was “Richard”; for a while there he depluralized himself), in the skewed-rooster ‘do that renders all subsequent rock ‘n’ roll haircuts superfluous, bopping around a hotel suite to a tape of the newly recorded “Brown Sugar,” no more or less pleased with himself than any journeyman coming off the night shift, knowing he’s done a decent bit of work; and
* Mick Jagger in his black Omega Man get-up, prancing around the Madison Square Garden stage like the Emperor of Poovania as he tosses baskets of rose petals to end a show.
But if all the Maysles had had to aim at was happy times on the old tour trail, Gimme Shelter would have about as much clout as three episodes of The Partridge Family played back to back.
No, to make Gimme Shelter worth seeing, the Stones had to agree to do the Altamont gig, had to sign up the Angels as bodyguards, and against all reason had to proceed with the show, even as the forces of entropy that they had gathered were bringing the whole flimsy assemblage down around their ears. Gimme Shelter works because Altamont didn’t, and couldn’t have, and the Maysles were there to get it all: megalawyer Melvin Belli honking into the speakerphone to pummel some poor sheriff–his prescient observation: “I see nothing but trouble; this whole thing is one big pain in the ass”–into letting the concert take place; speedway owner Dick Carter, apparent holder of the Altamont franchise for Snappy Sammy Smoot mustaches, hectoring reporters to be sure they refer to the performance as taking place at “Dick Carter’s Altamont Speedway”; Super Roadie Sam Cutler in spotless white turtleneck and brown leather (his hair, of course, was perfect), lecturing the mob like an assistant prefect of discipline setting forth the rules on Sports Day; a chumpy matronette soliciting contributions to the Black Panther Defense Fund by chirping, “After all, they’re just Negroes, you know”; a surprisingly clean-cut Hell’s Angel staring so balefully at Mick Jagger’s head that you half-expect it to burst into flame.
Word is that the music was pretty fine that cold December day, although you can’t really tell from the soundtrack. The only footage of the Dead in Gimme Shelter is Uncle Jerry and Bob Weir on the helipad, agreeing that getting whomped by the Angels would be a real bummer. What little you hear of the Airplane sounds okay, but then Marty Balin decides to break bad with a biker, and that’s all she wrote. The Flying Burrito Brothers get in a few bars of “Six Days on the Road,” but since the Maysles didn’t have advance notice that Gram Parsons was going to O.D. and get burnt to a crisp by his road manager out at Joshua Tree National Monument and become a posthumous cult figure, they didn’t bother with a straight-on head shot, so all you see is Parsons’ mane from behind, as seen over Bernie Leadon’s shoulder.
The film’s climax–when the avenging Angel spots Meredith Hunter’s hand cannon and flies to the rescue, riding his target to the ground like an Aztec cardiologist–is pure anticlimax, because it’s there right from the start, via the old film- within-a-film gambit, as the Maysles shoot Jagger and Watts watching the rough cut of the murder scene on an editing room Steenbeck.
“Oh, dear,” Charlie says softly. “What a shame.” Mick just sits, dumbfounded at the incivility that he unleashed, and perhaps seeing for the first time that although rock ‘n’ roll flips the bird at matters of well- learned politesse, it really needs them. Were it not for the social compact, the crowds would rise up and crush the security–if half a million people had decided the Angels had to go, no number of pool cues and Buck knives (or Mace and truncheons and stinking badges, for that matter) would have held back the storm–and trample the stage, out of love or hate it makes hardly any difference at all.
end Part 2 of 2
Now that the big day has arrived we probably won’t see too many Altamont parties. Nostalgiacs tend to shy away from bloodstains.
At Altamont, Mick and the boys rolled for big casino and came up snake eyes.
The stage rose up at the last possible minute–my dad’s got a fifty-foot scaffold and an impact wrench, let’s put on a show!
To make Gimme Shelter worth seeing, the Stones had to agree to sign up the Angels as bodyguards and against all reason had to proceed with the show.
