Some ruminations on the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, December 6, 1969.
The commemorations for Woodstock's 40th Anniversary were mostly positive and nostalgic. The famous grungy blanket couple featured on the "Woodstock" album cover is still united in matrimony, and this past summer,they even posed again for an updated shot in a spiffy new blanket courtesy of Bed, Bath, and Beyond. There was a comfortable vibe around the whole anniversary.
By comparison, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival is Woodstock's evil Cinderella stepsister. The free concert, turned ugly incident in the Bay Area, features a lot of the same supporting characters as "Woodstock" filmed in all their youthful glory on high quality Kodak 35 mm cinema film. The Jefferson Airplane and Santana's lightning hot 20 year old drummer Michael Shrieve grace both the film "Woodstock" and "Gimme Shelter," Michael Lang, the Eddie Van Halen look a like promoter for both events is seen in the companion films in his wavy brunette locks and good nature grin, and even Jerry Garcia makes a cameo in both films.
The early scenes of "Gimme Shelter" are disturbing almost from the outset. The crowd for Altamont was different, decidedly different than the Woodstock concert goers. Who knows the reasons for this. In several morning scenes revelers are seen carrying huge jugs of cheap California wine.The weather is much colder than at Woodstock, and the concert goers seem to be fortifying themselves against the Northern California December morning cold.
Researchers contend that really powerful acid was taking its toll as well. Several acid freak outs are recorded in the wee morning hours, well before the evening appearance of the Rolling Stones. And the autopsy of the 18 year old Meredith Hunter who was stabbed by the Hell's Angels reveals that he was jacked up on methamphetamine. There seemed to be a whole lot of recreational drugs on offer, which proved to be a volatile mix, but something more seems at work that made Altamont into such a beast.
The audience looks too jacked, too stoked,and out for a really good time. Everyone is anticipating the Stones' evening appearance. Perhaps this is why there are repeated attempts on the audience members' parts to get on stage to get close to their idols.
The Rolling Stones were the main staple, and they were riding a huge crest of fame at the time. The Beatles had silently broken up unbeknown to the world until the following year with the release of Paul McCartney's solo album. As John Lennon sometimes remarked, there was a huge vacuum that the Beatles left behind for the Stones to fill. The Stones were in peak form on their autumn tour. They were top billed, and indeed, the free concert was their gift to the American public at the close of highly successful tour. .
At Woodstock there were hugely successful musicians present, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix immediately come to mind as icons of the era, but no one took top billing. There were three days available for all that talent to dazzle the three hundred thousand plus audience. Altamont was packaged into a morning to evening, day long series of performances with the Stones as the climax of the show. It could be that the event started on a note of tension as the youth of the Bay Area wanted to get their kicks in on a Saturday in order to sleep it all off on a Sunday, and then back to work Monday. The energy was too condensed/compacted.
There also seems to be an air of the surreal or absurd present at Altamont. The weirdness is on display with the Rolling Stones' road manager Sam Cutler trying to manage the stage by instructing volunteer personnel to evict unwanted stage squatters, and then turning on the volunteers and ordering them off the stage (a stage that was only four feet off the ground with a collection of Hell's Angels choppers parked in front of the stage.) Cutler's more memorable lines in the film contain the gem, "You're rendering that scaffolding dangerous," which Shawn Ryder of the Happy Mondays would sometimes shout out at random at Happy Monday's concerts two decades later.
As Sam Cutler manages the stage, the Flying Burrito Brothers in their proto Elvis Las Vegas white rhinestone jumpsuits try to sing their wholesome country rock numbers as the first fist fights break out very early on the event. The early fights erupt as a crowd of three hundred thousand and growing pushes forward, and begins to topple the Hell's Angels motorbikes (Hogs!) parked in front of the stage.
Grace Slick maintains her calm as her co-singer Marty Balin takes a nasty punch from a Hell's Angel that lays him out cold. The Angels then threaten to turn on the rest of the band members when the band announces that their singer has been knocked out. Things are clearly ugly at that point. It's at this moment of the film that Santana's drummer Shrieve is captured on film briefing Jerry Garcia about the downing of Marty Balin.
The concert becomes ritual, bizarre, and downright primal "Lord of the Flies" shit with the Stones hitting the stage with "Sympathy For The Devil." The samba beat that makes the song so powerful works its charm on the audience, and not all charms are good charms. The heavy stuff starts to go down. It's kind of ironic, that the Grateful Dead's percussionist Mickey Hart would come to write a book, and record a couple of albums which explored rhythms and their effect on the human psyche some twenty years after Altamont.
The Angels' bikes are toppled, the pool cues come out to beat audience members, and during "Under My Thumb," Meredith Hunter draws a revolver from his lime green superfly suit, and aims it at a Hell's Angel. He is then bludgeoned as his girlfriend screams.
It's all caught by the film maker brothers Albert and David Maysles and their hand held Panaflex cameras with 35mm clarity. These are the same cameras that caught beautiful images at Woodstock, and from which a young Martin Scorcese would have mounds of film to edit for "Woodstock," the movie. Unfortunately for Altamont, these same well made German cameras capture a really gruesome slaying. It's sickening to observe the slayed Meredith Hunter's body laid out on a stretcher, his lime green suit clearly visible with his girlfriend nearby, and in shock.
Another Hunter, this one, named Hunter S. Thompson, commented in "Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas,"
"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time, and which never explain in retrospect what really happened."