ALTAMONT; THE CONCERT

This is a piece I wrote for a new Facebook page a friend of mine, rock photographer Jim Wiseman, put up called Altamont the Concert: An Oral and Visual History. He and I had been discussing this via Facebook chat and he invited me to share my recollections of that horrifying day. This is sort of born out of a new book by former Stones and Grateful Dead manager Sam Cutler who wrote a bio of his times with the two bands. A rather chilling photo of him onstage with Mick Jagger and a host of Hell's Angels got us talking. I wrote down what I remembered, what I saw and what I thought I remembered. Someone who knows me well says it may be my best piece of writing, yet. I'd love to hear your comments.

Altamont Stories

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David L Mahler

ALTAMONT PART 1

We went to Altamont the night before, left Berkeley in two vehicles; one an old blue panel wagon. Sleeping bags must have been packed, but they weren’t nearly as important as making sure we had enough weed and the “right” acid. I can’t recall that we’d had the good sense to bring any food, but there must have been something for that chilly night before.

My roommate and I were young, still 18, and at the tail end of our Fall quarters at UC Berkeley. We were a bad combination as all we needed was each other’s encouragement to put school and class behind any musical or cultural or political event. We basically majored in the Fillmore (West at the time) and did our share of rock-throwing and window smashing during the peripheral events following the People’s Park riots late in the previous Spring.

The notion of there being a giant free concert featuring the Stones had been weaving its spell through the airwaves from KSAN ever since the Stones had passed through, and was a heavy buzz, at least with the people we hung with. Seemed like every hour there was an update and another amazing band had been added. The location was a secret. No it wasn’t. Yes, it was. And so on.

Calls had been put out to my roommate’s East LA cronies and they were heading up in a van. They were charging up the freeway from Monterey Park and Alhambra. The location of the show had finally been revealed and because I was from the East Bay: born and raised, I was elected to get us out to Altamont, somewhere past Livermore, “wherever that was.” And what it did was get me shotgun, which was fine with me. Shit, I knew how to get to Livermore.

I don’t remember a thing about driving out there that evening, except that it was cold and it was dark. But when we got there it seemed as if a “car city” had grown up out of nowhere on a flat piece of scrub sitting up over the bowl where the concert would be. A lot of people had their headlights on (I always wondered how many people came back to dead batteries), and there were foul smelling fires burning all around. It was as if John Entwistles “hippie gypsys” had all come to roost in the same place. It turned out to be a good bit different than that.

We got good and high and wandered through the "campsites" set up by the early arrivals and things were just plain troubling early. People were fucked up on pills and cleaning products and an assortment of oddities. It was the weirdest energy I'd ever felt before a big show. Nothing like when they bussed us up Mt. Tam in yellow school buses to the Magic Mountain Music Festival. No, not much like that at all. This was BAD; weird drugs, weird crowd, cold and ominous.

In the morning we got up after our few hours of sleep and headed straight for the low, low stage way down in the belly of the property. It seemed so odd for it to be so low. We wanted to get right up front to see all big stars and to see the Stones play for free in California. The morning was a hurry up and wait proposition. You could feel how harried the stage crew was and how impatient the crowd was. Up front where we were, perhaps 20 yards from the stage wasn’t a party, it was a waiting game.

The stage seemed as if was surrounded by hangers on and the Angels were already a huge presence. An old yellow school bus was parked down to the right of the stage and the “security forces” pranced on it, yelling and drinking beer. Beer cans were flying out into the audience. I remember shivering early and often. We had taken yellow sunshine acid and I squirmed, feeling myself come on to it. It already felt as my friends and me were our own little group, circling our wagons against something. We didn’t know what, but things just seemed so WRONG.

When the sound system was finally cleared we breathed a sigh of relief. It WAS going to be alright, wasn’t it? Santana came on and the percussion kicked in and we stood up and leaned forward, ready to “get it on”. But through the music there was yelling and confusion behind us and we jerked our head around to see a giant naked Chicano dude running down the hill, over people and through groups yelling, “I’m going to the front. I’m going to the front”. And so he was until about twenty feet from the stage a Hell’s Angel jumped forward, swung a pool cue like a baseball bat and dropped the guy in his tracks.

We gaped, jaws slack. Did that really happen? Did we see that? We stared as one, but a crowd had gathered round and the mass of people kept pushing forward, as it would all day. It seemed as if the naked fat man had been swallowed up by the crowd. I don’t remember much more about Santana except that I was truly frightened. I kept turning 360 degrees to look at the crowd gathered and that was when I began having those bad trip feelings that the US government had gathered us all here in this one place; all these hippies and druggies and rock and rollers so they could eliminate us; wipe us out, all in one fell swoop. “Just the acid, just the acid”, I said over and over to myself.

And it got worse. After Santana’s weirdly brief set there was a long delay on stage. The crowd shifted and pressed. I had dropped my favorite hash pipe, but was afraid to get down on the ground to look for it. I was sure I’d be crushed. Finally my favorite band, Jefferson Airplane took the stage and I was sure it was going to get better. But oh my fucking Lord, it dissolved into chaos. The Angels were beating up anyone who got close to the stage and we were close enough to see fists swinging and heads fling back from being struck. Grace was pleading with the crowd to back up, but there was nowhere to go.

Marty Balin was yelling from the stage at the Angels to stop beating people and then suddenly he was airborne, leaping off the stage into the middle of a melee. This was hideous, this was Hell, this was the very definition of “chaos and anarchy” to quote from the Airplane themselves. The band ground to a halt. Paul Kantner was yelling into the crowd. Marty was getting beaten up and the stage was so low, it was impossible to see anything over the heads of the crowd. All I could think of was how badly I wanted out, but there was no way at all through the crowd and once out, then what would I do?

The remnants of the Airplane struggled from the stage and we were left with another long period of waiting. The skies had cleared somewhat and the sun came out to warm things up a bit. And the Flying Burrito Brothers bounced on stage singing about how it was “A Lazy Day”. I was obvious they’d just gotten off the helicopters. But it did lighten things a bit, as did the hundreds of plastic coffee can lids being hurled Frisbee style through the air, although my acid dread was so strong at this point that I saw them as a threat too.

The Burritos were done and it was mid-afternoon. It was getting gray again and it was easy to remember that it was early in December. The light would fade soon and it was getting cooler. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came on but with minimal energy and spark. It was obvious that they’d gotten a whiff (so to speak) of the overt weirdness and ugly energy. Plus the Angels were at this point striding around the stage as if they owned it. CSN&Y played a short and lackluster set, as if they couldn’t wait to be anywhere but where they were.

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David L Mahler

Altamont part 2
It was now late afternoon, but not nearly dark yet. The wait began again and with it the swell of the crowd grew like a huge wave behind our backs; pushing, pushing, pushing. It seemed like it took hours for the Stones to come out and it was getting hard to move. The only people on the stage were countless Hell’s Angels, swaggering back and forth; threatening the people being pushed helplessly forward. The stage seemed so close, but it seemed as if the number of people in front of us had doubled, or even tripled. I was in danger of being literally lifted up by the crowd. The acid was wearing off and all I was was jangly and tired and scared.

The pushing at the front was escalating and you could hear the sound of fights even if it was too densely packed to see them. It was cold despite the crush of humanity and now darkness had fallen. There were fires on the hillsides and it appeared (at least to me) that demons were huddling and dancing around them. The Angels were down in the crowd pushing people back and swinging on those who couldn’t /wouldn’t move. It was clearly a vision of hell on earth; a mass of flesh being forced forward where it was met with violent resistance.

It seemed like hours but then the stage lights were glowing bright and there was Mick in his Jack Flash suit. There was Keith and Mick Taylor and they were actually onstage and trying to work their way into position to play. It seemed as if they were jockeying with the Angels for center-stage. It was easy to see at this point that the Angels were relishing their power-grip on the situation and they seemed to almost sneer at the skinny English rockers.

The first chords of “Jumping Jack Flash” were powered out and the massive wall of flesh pushed forward even harder. I was sure I was going to be crushed. As the crowd literally fell into and onto the stage you could see the Angels fists rising and falling into the mass of people, connecting over and over again. Horrifying, just horrifying and the Stones ground on. They sounded ragged and tinny and were at best a sideshow to the violence in the front.

“Chill out , everyone just chill out”, called Mick, in his proper British accent. “Why are we fighting” he said again and again, oh so cluelessly. And he pouted and it seemed as if the band was going to refuse to play if the fighting didn’t stop. Keith took the lead and swung into the Chuck Berry tune, “Carol” and the band fell in but again they were ragged and at this point looked scared, as if they were playing for their lives. Between songs Mick pleaded and begged and scolded to no avail as the fighting went on in front.

And so appropriately enough, they launched into “Sympathy for the Devil” and that’s when the shit really broke loose. We couldn’t see shit and could barely see the Stones faces despite how close we were to the stage, but suddenly they stopped playing and Hells Angels were leaping off the stage into the crowd en masse. There was pushing, screaming and more pleading from Mick. It was everything that can ever possibly go wrong at a concert happening at once. After a few minutes the band picked it up again and an obviously shaken Mick Jagger began to sing again.

The rest of the set is best forgotten. Five skinny, coked out and frightened young Englishmen prancing and playing in front of a chorus of ghouls. It was never so clear as at this moment that the Angels had taken this party over completely. The Stones waded and wallowed through the rest of their set and when it was over, finally, thank God, the crowd began to thin and I could almost feel my feet on the ground. I felt as if I was in shock. I’d never been so glad for an experience to end in my life. Somebody said hopefully that the Dead hadn’t played and that maybe they’d come on next. I could only hope that they were long gone by then.

Our crew straggled back to the cars as fast as we could to try to get the drop on the ugly scene that the mass exit would be.
And here is where my being an East Bay boy paid off. Instead of getting on the freeway and sitting in the giant parking lot created by the concert, I knew how to get us off on a sideroad through the farmland that would swing us out behind Mt. Diablo and bring us down Morgan Territory Road, in through the ass end of Clayton and out onto the freeway near Walnut Creek. We were through the tunnel and back in our Berkeley apartment before a lot of people had reached their cars. We turned on the radio and listened to the reports of the worst traffic jam ever.

We were home, but it wasn’t over; not by a long shot. We were coming down off not just acid, but one of the worst rock and roll days any of us would ever have. It was every cliché we could think of; “The Death of Rock”, “The End of the Hippies”, blah, blah, blah. We talked until we were blue in the face and we talked until we finally just passed out from exhaustion, disappointment and shock. For days later we listened to every version, explanation and rendition we could on KSAN. We heard Sam Cutler give very heartfelt and honest explanations. He took responsibility with dignity and an honest feeling of the pain. At the end of all it he was left to deal with the massive stinking pile of shit the Stones had left behind.

Thank God we had a lovely coda to all of this two weeks later. It was announced on KSAN that to help bring in the Winter Solstice a band whose name meant Happily Deceased would be playing a midnight show at the old Fillmore, now run by the Flamin’ Groovies. Yes, it was the good old Grateful Dead and we went at midnight and danced until dawn in a half-full ballroom. Rock and roll as not dead, it had just taken a horrible wrong turn at a speedway somewhere out past Livermore.

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