Laurel Canyon by Michael Walker

Author:Michael Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780865479661
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The notion of Altamont as the “anti-Woodstock” was burned into the cultural consciousness practically before the last notes of “Street Fighting Man” decayed in the chilly predawn hours in the countryside east of San Francisco. While there had been, as at Woodstock, three deaths by prosaic mishap, there was nothing at Woodstock remotely like Hells Angels beating audience members with pool cues or the fatal stabbing by an Angel of Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old black audience member in the overwhelmingly white crowd of 300,000, who charged the stage with a gun while the Stones played “Under My Thumb.”

Rolling Stone weighed in six weeks after the concert with “Let It Bleed,” an epic recapitulation of the day’s misadventures; it was followed by Gimme Shelter, a devastating account of the 1969 tour and its benighted finale at Altamont financed by the Stones and directed by the documentarians David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. The Rolling Stone article advanced the theory that the Stones had cynically used the audience at Altamont as “unpaid extras” in the film, with the Hells Angels as their brutal Praetorian Guard hired for the now-legendary “$500 worth of beer.” As the critic Michael Sragow pointed out in his history of Gimme Shelter on its twenty-fifth anniversary, “The legend of Altamont as apocalypse was largely based on that Rolling Stone cover story,” which set the tone for future coverage and may have influenced the rough treatment the film was given by critics like The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael.

Altamont was unquestionably a dark day. Not even the musicians, accustomed to imperial deference from fans to flunkies, were spared. No sooner had Jagger alighted from his helicopter backstage than a bystander coldcocked him in the face. Marty Balin, singer in Jefferson Airplane—Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the Flying Burrito Brothers also performed—was knocked unconscious while attempting to intervene in a skirmish between the audience and the Angels. Says Chris Hillman, who played with the Burrito Brothers: “I went from playing Monterey”—1967’s evanescent Monterey pop festival—“which was one of the greatest musical festivals, to playing Altamont. And that was like going from heaven to hell.”

Altamont was no more inherently evil than was Woodstock. It can in fact be argued that it was the “purer” of the two enterprises . For while Woodstock was conceived as a profit-making venture, Altamont was from the start planned as a free concert, albeit with full understanding of the benefits to be derived from the Stones’ largesse, not the least of which was bonding with San Francisco’s storied hippie culture, whose rapid decline was hard to discern five thousand miles away in London. What prevented disaster from striking Woodstock had more to do with luck and marginally better planning. “As chaotic as Woodstock was, it was relatively well organized,” says Nash. “Altamont was a complete mess. We had no way to get our gear in. I think that was the day that Melvin Belli hot-wired a fucking truck to get our equipment in there to get to the stage.

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