Many would rather forget memories of Altamont
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091206/A_ENTERTAIN/912060327
By Tony Sauro
December 06, 2009
This is one historical relic of the 1960s most people would rather
not remember - no matter what their state of mind might have been.
Drug-altered or not:
Altamont.
For them, it doesn't conjure up visions of cows placidly grazing on
verdant rolling hills or hundreds of windmills spinning hypnotically
as they generate power along Interstate 580.
"We were freezing to death," Stockton resident Marc Corren said. "It
was some real 'Heart of Darkness' stuff. I remember it like is was
yesterday. It's very, very, very vivid in my mind."
"I guess, in some ways, it was a big, resounding thud of the curtain
closing and hitting the floor on the so-called peace-and-love era,"
said Keith Hatscheck, a University of the Pacific professor.
That crash occurred 40 years ago today - Dec. 6, 1969 - at Altamont
Raceway, where the Rolling Stones held a free concert that drew an
enormous crowd and, horrifically, resulted in the deaths of four
people, including a teenager who was stabbed and beaten to death by
the Hell's Angels.
Marty Balin, then a 26-year-old singer in San Francisco's Jefferson
Airplane, was knocked out by another biker.
"All that sort of gee-gaw '60s idealism?" said Hatscheck, 57, an
associate professor and chairman of music management at Pacific.
"Altamont crystallized that as kind of a hoax. It had a tremendously
chilling effect on the culture."
The free fall was fueled by amateurish, last-minute planning;
cattle-call crowds variously (but never definitively) estimated at
200,000 to 300,000 sitting on perilously steep inclines; an absence
of basic provisions; almost no lighting after sunset; and the bizarre
deployment of Hell's Angels motorcycle gang members to "protect" the
stage and band members.
"You felt that in the next seconds or minutes you could die," Stanley
Booth wrote in "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones," his 1984
book chronicling the British Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band's 1969
U.S. tour. "And there was nothing you could do to prevent it, to
improve the odds for survival. A bad dream, but we were all in it."
Make that a nightmare.
"It was the death knell of a great couple of years of concerts," said
Corren, 59, a special-education resource specialist in Stockton for
35 years. "Everything we didn't want was there."
Altamont's 40th anniversary certainly hasn't generated the same
deluge of modern marketing and hippie nostalgia that surrounded a
similar milestone for the iconic Woodstock Music & Arts Fair ("3 days
of peace & music") on Aug. 15 to 17.
"The truth is, most of the same things happened at Woodstock -
without the wrinkle of violence and gang influences," Hatscheck said.
"But Altamont was the first major cataclysm that indicated, 'Hey, the
whole peace-and-love thing is not the future course of America.' "
"What a weird bookend," said Steve Feinstein, 60, a friend of
Corren's who was attending San Joaquin Delta College when he made his
Altamont odyssey. "Having Woodstock and Altamont within months of
each other. Didn't (Charlie) Manson (the Tate-LaBianca murders)
happen in '69? It was just a screwed-up year. The world they were
handing us seemed kind of bleak."
Like Woodstock, the site of what the Stones envisioned as a free
party was shifted three times - from San Francisco's Golden Gate Park
to Sears Point (now Infineon) Raceway in Sonoma County to
comparatively undersized Altamont Raceway, between Tracy and
Livermore in Alameda County.
It was such a mess that all four lanes of freeway - and every other
possible traffic artery - became parking lots (same as the Woodstock
gridlock in Bethel, N.Y.). People walked five or more miles to reach the site.
"It was dark when we left Stockton (on Dec. 5)," said Corren, who got
close in his '68 Volkswagen, but walked the last five miles. "All of
a sudden, we started to see people just parking and walking across the highway.
"It was dawn when we finally got there. When we got over the rise -
as far as the eye could see - there were thousands and thousands of people."
When they arrived, water and food were scarce, sanitation facilities
were limited and the only "seats" were dewy plots of earth.
Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Gram Parsons' Flying Burrito Bros.,
Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Grateful Dead and the Stones were
scheduled to perform.
"The fear and loathing came out when we saw (the Airplane's) Marty
Balin get punched out by the Angels," said Corren, a 19-year-old
Pacific student at the time. "It left a feeling that didn't go away
the rest of the day. It was the first act of physical violence I'd
ever seen. Being violent back then wasn't so cool. It was just a
plague of boils on the whole scene."
Those boils exploded during the Stones' 15-song set. Mick Jagger,
seeming perplexed and shocked, repeatedly begged people to calm down,
stopping and starting the inflammatory "Sympathy for the Devil" as
people began getting knocked around by the bikers.
During the Stones' debut performance of "Brown Sugar," members of the
Angels began scuffling in front of the stage with Meredith Hunter,
18, as his girlfriend pleaded with the Berkeley resident to move away.
Hunter waved a handgun at the Angels, who flattened him, stabbed him
in the back and kicked and stomped him in the head and face. Hunter
died a few minutes later.
Two other young people were killed in a hit-and-run accident and a
third drowned after stumbling into an irrigation canal in the inky,
moonless night.
"It was just compounding the law of unintended consequences,"
Hatscheck said, noting the 600 acres of Max Yasgur's dairy farm at
Woodstock dwarfed Altamont. "The idealism of the musicians was just
was so ill-founded. Something bad had to happen."
Feinstein's sightlines and sound waves were not good.
"Actually, I think I heard some music, but I couldn't see anything
really, the stage was so far away," said Feinstein, a Lincoln High
grad. "Every few minutes or so, I just really hoped to pick up some
of the sound."
Feinstein, a Kensington resident who's been a health care giver in
Mountain Ranch and Lafayette for 32 years, left early to find his way
back to Manteca for a gig with his band: "I didn't find out about the
stabbing and murder till I got to the venue. They told me, and I
couldn't believe it."
The Altamont mayhem and madness, while nothing to celebrate, are
documented in books and, most harrowingly, in "Gimme Shelter," a 1970
film by Albert and David Maysles.
It captured the Altamont horror and pioneered the cinema verite style
of documentary, said Theresa Bergman, who teaches a documentary film
course at Pacific and has used the 91-minute "Gimme Shelter" as an example.
"It illuminates all kinds of assumptions and beliefs about what's
right or wrong," Bergman, 53, said of the film's reliance on reality
as the arbiter. "One thing I never really understood completely,
though. I'm still baffled by who in their right mind would hire the
Hell's Angels to do anything in that area."
Members of the Grateful Dead's posse suggested the idea. The Angels
were given $500 worth of beer, essentially for guarding the four-foot
high stage and protecting Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Charlie
Watts, Mick Taylor and their entourage.
When the Dead arrived, however, the mood was so dark and menacing
that Jerry Garcia and the rest split without performing.
As well as ending a turbulent decade on a depressing note, the
Altamont debacle, said Hatscheck, prompted more introspection and
less polemical posturing, helping germinate the gentler sensitive
singer-songwriter and smoother Philadelphia soul sounds of the early '70s.
"The MC5 was out," Hatscheck said with a laugh. "There was more
navel-gazing and more an attempt at healing."
The grim situation at Altamont didn't improve for the thousands of
people stuck in 30-degree temperatures when the Stones finished their
show and rode an overstuffed helicopter to safety.
"Have you ever walked with 50,000 lost and stoned people in total
darkness trying to remember where your car was or what you thought it
looked like before the show?" Corren said. "We could have been
walking toward Stockton or L.A. We couldn't tell.
"It was like an army of the night. It was pitch black. No moon. When
I finally found my car, I threw myself on the hood just hugged it."
--
Contact Tony Sauro at (209) 546-8267 or [email protected].
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