There was a moment early in The Rolling Stones’ set on
December 6, 1969 at the Altamont Speedway when Mick Jagger – had he been the
kind of man who could size up a situation and take bold, decisive action –
might possibly have stopped the total insanity which, by the time The Rolling
Stones opened their set, had cast a pall over the ill-fated free concert for
hours.
It was a moment that could have potentially averted the
murder of Meredith Hunter. It was a moment that could have prevented Altamont
from being cast by countless mediocre philosophers and critics over the last 50
years as The End of the 60s. It occurred four songs into their set, when the
band – sleep deprived, drug addled, uncomprehending – consciously deviated from
their setlist and played what Jagger called Cool-Down Music: a cover of Jimmy
Reed’s The Sun is Shining.
The horrible violence that consumed the outdoor concert
almost from the outset, and found its denouement in the vicious murder of 18-year-old
Meredith Hunter, was already front and center on the minds of Jagger and his
bandmates when they launched into their set opener, Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Earlier
in the day, the Hells Angels, acting as concert security, knocked Jefferson
Airplane singer Marty Balin unconscious mid-song. Graham Parsons pleaded for
people to stop hurting each other during the Flying Burrito Brothers’ set. The
Grateful Dead, scheduled to go on before the Stones, abandoned the gig
altogether, paralyzed by the savagery that only seemed to get worse the longer
the day wore on.
You won’t find this moment in the Maysles brothers’
documentary Gimme Shelter, as they
left it out. You won’t find it on the Altamont LP or CD, because the concert
was never officially released. And yet, there it was: the Stones realized that
the night had devolved into a horror show, and after three songs decided to
slow things down considerably with a relaxed blues number, if not looking to
stop the violence in its tracks, then at least hoping to not give anyone an
excuse to continue beating people up. The rocking stuff is making everyone crazy, lads. Let’s play slow stuff and calm them down.
It seemed to work. But then, less than five minutes later, they abandoned this
course of action, returning to their regularly-scheduled set list. Approximately
twenty minutes later, eighteen-year-old Meredith hunter was stabbed to death by
Hells Angel Alan Passaro.
***
I find myself thinking about the Stones’ – and Jagger’s –
actions at Altamont every December when the infamous free concert’s anniversary
rolls around. The first thing I think about is the instant where it becomes
abundantly clear that Mick Jagger is in way, way over his head, and is in fact the
very last person in the world you want onstage with a mic in his hand, trying
to bring calm to the relentless turmoil. This is at the beginning of their
third song, Sympathy for the Devil, when the band stops because Hells Angels
are mercilessly beating the crap out of everyone right in front of the stage. Jagger
cynically plays the hippie card as he pleads with the audience: “Hey people…
sisters, brothers and sisters… brothers and sisters, come on now… that means
everybody just cool OUT!”
The first time he says “brothers” his voice cracks. The
great Mick Jagger, the egotistical Rock Star who had been dabbling in occult imagery, who enjoyed playing the bad boy of rock ‘n’ roll, who assumed a satanic persona on Beggars Banquet, and who reveled in his carefully
calculated demonic celebrity, is terrified. He wore the omega symbol throughout
their 1969 U.S. tour, he strutted around the Rock and Roll Circus with Satan himself
painted on his chest, and he scored a film for outre director Kenneth Anger. Boy howdy, he was one badass mo fo. But when confronted with bona fide darkness and violence
in the cold of a fall evening in northern California (not terribly far, it
should be noted, from Anton LaVey’s Black House), the singer wilted, looking
more like a deer in the headlights than Lucifer’s left-hand man.
Photographer Ethan Russell traveled with the Stones
throughout that 1969 tour, and Jagger’s impotence was not lost on him. “… I kept expecting Mick to stop it, somehow.
I naïvely believed he had the power and was disappointed he seemed so timid.” Two years later, in
a 1971 Life magazine article, Richard Schickel accused the singer of
lacking “…the forcefulness of personality to mobilize his followers in support
of anything except adoration of Mick Jagger, as his rather pathetic attempts to
control the Altamont crowd demonstrate. And so, finally, he appears sometimes
to be just another scared boy riding a tiger and hanging on for dear life…”
Is it fair to believe Jagger could’ve brought order to the
chaos? How should he have dealt with it? Nature abhors the meaningless
trope of hindsight, but every December 6 my thoughts drift to Keith Morris of
Hermosa Beach, CA, and his 40+ years record of tolerating absolutely no
violence and/or bullshit during hundreds of performances with, among others,
Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Off! In particular I think about Devonshire
Downs, Northridge CA, on 15 October 1988, when Morris’ commitment to treating
other people with care and compassion saw him threaten to quit the Circle Jerks
mid-set. After watching the ubiquitous Southern California bouncers manhandling
slam dancing kids for eight songs, the singer stopped the band in the middle of
When the Shit Hits the Fan: “You guys, gentlemen of the front here, please.
Staff pro guys? You’re supposed to push them over the front, not by their
faces. Please. Ok?” He then turned to the cheering audience to make clear that
the rules applied to them, too: “We ask them to do a favor for you. You do a
favor for us – and them – and not taunt them. So it turns into some kind of
violent thing. Because that’s bullshit.”
Three songs later, with fists still flying in the middle of
Wild in the Streets, Morris stopped the band again, disgusted: “Um… we hope
that you guys have a good time tonight. You guys (here he looked at his
bandmates), if you wanna continue playing, that’s cool. Gary, you keep your
money that you’re supposed to pay me tonight, because I’m not doing this
anymore.” Morris walked out. Chants of “Bullshit! Bullshit!” started. A few
minutes later the singer returned, brushing off some boos and catcalls: “No,
shut up for one minute. We ask you guys to do some favors for us. We’re doing
favors for you. Now we don’t – we don’t get along with these guys (he meant the
bouncers), you don’t get along with them, I don’t come here to
play, to see people get beat up. So tonight is my last night with the band,
because I don’t wanna be part of all this violent bullshit.”
The band tore through Coup d’Etat, from their third album, ending
with an admonition: “Just because we sing and write songs about violence, doesn’t
mean we’re violent people. And violence is bullshit.”
Amazingly, the next song on the setlist was The Crowd,
bassist Zander Schloss’ paean to universal tolerance, with a chorus tailor-made
for the evening’s ugliness: “You won’t like what I have to say to you – DOESN’T
REALLY MATTER – you won’t like what I have to say to you – SAYING IT ANYWAY –
let your people know all the world must live here.” The crowd sang “all the
world must live here.” “What?” Morris asked. They screamed the words again. “So
why can’t you live by that rule?”
He wasn’t having it. Earlier that same year Circle Jerks
headlined at the Anaheim Celebrity Theater on Valentine’s Day, where feckless
Orange County bouncers who’d never witnessed slam dancing in their lives formed
a human wall in front of the band. You couldn’t see the band. No one could see
the band. After a couple of songs, Morris asked the bouncers to get off the
stage, drawing loud cheers from the anti-bouncer audience. Once again, he made
it clear that the audience had responsibilities, too, telling them the band was
cool with them slam dancing and stage diving, but they had expensive equipment
onstage, and everyone had to aware of this and stay away from it. Later in the
set a couple of kids bumped into one of guitarist Greg Hetson’s cabinets. Keith
was pissed, glaring into the crowd: “I thought we had a deal.”
On New Year’s Day, 1989, at Trenton NJ’s legendary City
Gardens, Morris squared off against a group of skinheads who were beating up
kids, nearly getting himself killed in the process. “I wasn’t really thinking
about the outcome,” he told authors Amy Yates Wuelfing and Steven DiLodovico.
“I was not going to allow them to (be violent), at whatever expense.”
That, right there, is the attitude that was required in the
early evening of 6 December 1969 at Altamont. And perhaps it is rank pretense
to foist that on Mick Jagger fifty years after the fact, to fault him for not
standing up to Hells Angels and getting them to stand down. Those are scary
looking dudes in Gimme Shelter, yeah? Would you want to take them
on with no police or any other security around to back you up?
What is still truly mystifying though, all these years later is why,
after playing Jimmy Reed’s The Sun is Shining, the Stones didn’t abandon their
setlist and make the entire rest of the evening the same kind of “cool down music.” Clearly,
riling people up with faster numbers was making things worse. There
wouldn’t have been any concern about not giving the people the hits they wanted
to hear, because the people – at least the people up front, that the band could
see – were being battered by Hells Angels. And even if it is the worst kind of
armchair criticism, why didn’t Jagger address the Angels directly? Tell them
the band appreciated them being there, but their services were no longer
needed? And then remind the audience that they absolutely had to sit down and
stop jumping around while the band played some more blues numbers? “At the
realization that the circumstances were beyond their control,” Joel Selvin
wrote, “the band recoiled.”
I’m sympathetic to the Stones’ nearly impossible predicament
that night. “We were scared,” Jagger very honestly told documentary
filmmaker Brett Morgen. “These people were crazy. And they were like,
standing next to you. And we didn’t know how to control it, stop it. It was
completely out of our control. And it was just a nightmare.”
“What we should’ve done was just closed shop and gone home,”
Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman told Morgen. “But you couldn’t. You got 300,000
people out there that have come, you know.” And Keith Richards may be correct
when he says, “If we’d have walked off, I think there would’ve been a riot.”
For Jagger, there was a sense of being boxed in. “If you
were in any kind of arena, or theater, you can just leave, you know, off stage.
There wasn’t – you were very aware that were sort of surrounded, so you were
very vulnerable – that was the feeling.”
I want to cut the Stones some slack and think that there was
enough blame to go around for Meredith Hunter’s murder that night, but I just
can’t shake the sound of Mick Jagger’s voice cracking, the only man in the
minutes before Hunter’s senseless death able to challenge Hells Angels,
cowering instead. I know it was scary. I know it was a nightmare. But someone
like Keith Morris was thrust into some nightmarish scenarios himself, and still
managed to compartmentalize that fear, setting it aside and doing the right
thing in the heat of the moment.
But who knows. The 1980s punk scene was a very different
thing than what the Stones faced at Altamont. Maybe even Keith Morris would’ve
been at a loss that night, out in the sticks of Alameda County, surrounded by a
half-insane biker gang intent upon causing as much suffering as possible. I’m
inclined to think not. Watching The Rolling Stones in Gimme Shelter, failing
to change course in the face of all that carnage has me wondering just what the
fuck is going on with those guys, then and now. No one from the band ever
attempted to contact Hunter’s family after his murder. They didn’t even pay for
a headstone, which Hunter’s grave went without until Sam Green’s 2006 short
documentary Lot 63, Grave C brought Hunter’s name out of Altamont oblivion
and into the light again, and enough donations were gathered to purchase one.
The Rolling Stones continued fancying themselves as the bad
boys of rock ‘n’ roll after Altamont, their records and performances getting
more and more decadent and bombastic, until they settled into the safe, comfortable
role of harmless elder statesmen. For all their bad boy affectations – Midnight
Rambler, Sympathy for the Devil, a grotesquely misogynistic billboard for Black
and Blue – the band was utterly helpless and wholly clueless as darkness settled over the
Altamont Speedway fifty years ago. They had no answer to Hells Angels’ fists
and weighted pool cues, no tools to make manifest that violence is bullshit.
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