Altamont

Joel Selvin

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062444271
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive, never-before-revealed details, celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont concert, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s.

In the annals of rock history, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December 6, 1969, has long been seen as the distorted twin of Woodstock—the day that shattered the Sixties' promise of peace and love when a concertgoer was killed by a member of the Hells Angels, the notorious biker club acting as security. While most people know of the events from the film Gimme Shelter, the whole story has remained buried in varied accounts, rumor, and myth—until now.

Altamont explores rock's darkest day, a fiasco that began well before the climactic death of Meredith Hunter and continued beyond that infamous December night. Joel Selvin probes every aspect of the show—from the Stones' hastily planned tour preceding the concert to the bad acid that swept through the audience to other deaths that also occurred that evening—to capture the full scope of the tragedy and its aftermath. He also provides an in-depth look at the Grateful Dead's role in the events leading to Altamont, examining the band's behind-the-scenes presence in both arranging the show and hiring the Hells Angels as security.

The product of twenty years of exhaustive research and dozens of interviews with many key players, including medical staff, Hells Angels members, the stage crew, and the musicians who were there, and featuring sixteen pages of color photos, Altamont is the ultimate account of the final event in rock's formative and most turbulent decade.

PART

1

1

Pipe Dreams

Rock Scully had passed through Heathrow Airport in London many times before. Growing up as the stepson of a respected international scholar and journalist, Scully had spent years living abroad, attending private schools and universities in Europe. He was not especially alarmed to be greeted in the almost friendly, official tone of the British passport officer.

“Mr. Scully? Right this way, sir.”

In October 1969, six weeks after Woodstock, it had become increasingly common to see visitors to England arrive wearing long hair and hippie garb, but Scully—the twenty-four-year-old manager of the Grateful Dead, ringleader of the most resolute gang of San Francisco freaks, house band to the dawning of the LSD apocalypse and pioneer explorers of inner space—was a prince among California hippies and looked it. Scully appeared like nothing so much as Rasputin, his scarecrow frame topped with scraggly dark hair and an unkempt wispy beard. He had taken so much LSD, his pupils were little more than molten brown orbs floating in buttermilk. He was dressed head to toe in denim, his feet encased in exquisite hand-tooled cowboy boots. He had the odd feeling he had been expected.

Rock had arrived with Frankie Weir, the formidable girlfriend of Dead guitarist Bobby Weir, close enough to him to have assumed his last name, who was headed to London to take a job with Derek Taylor, press secretary for The Beatles and Apple Records. It was only on the flight to England that Rock realized that his ticket, which had been arranged for him by Lenny Hart, the father of Dead drummer Mickey Hart, who had recently taken over some management responsibilities in regard to the Dead’s business affairs, was one-way. That struck him as odd, but so did a lot of things, and he put it out of his mind. Rock had their ticket stubs in his pocket.

Rock was coming to London to show the Brits how real San Francisco hippies threw free concerts in the park. He was to meet with a production company called Blackhill Enterprises, which only three months before had presented a huge free concert in London’s Hyde Park with the Rolling Stones. The company had invited Scully to meet with them to discuss similar possible concerts with the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, the other leading San Francisco hippie rock band. The Dead and the Airplane were closely associated, and Scully had gone to the airport straight from a meeting at the Airplane mansion in San Francisco to discuss the prospect of the London concerts. In addition to talking business, Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner had handed Rock a small brown vial filled with pure Merck pharmaceutical cocaine. Scully tucked the vial in his pants pocket and headed for London.

The passport official took Rock upstairs and showed him to a small room in Heathrow where two customs officers waited. One of the agents had a newspaper clipping with a headline about the Grateful Dead planning an LSD fest in Hyde Park. They started to paw through Rock’s luggage. The first thing that came to their attention was Rock’s mojo, the eagle feather and bear claw and other Native American artifacts that he routinely traveled with. He had also loaded up on turquoise jewelry and bracelets that he knew the English would love. But when they picked up the Polaroid film canister and shook it, dozens of tiny purple pills fell out and rolled all over the floor.

It was the finest LSD in the world, Owsley Purple, manufactured by Augustus Owsley Stanley III himself, longtime benefactor, resident audio genius, and elixir mixer to the court of the Grateful Dead, the first private party in the world to synthesize the mind-altering compound. More worried about the marijuana in his luggage, Rock had practically forgotten about the LSD. It wasn’t a lot of doses—maybe fifty or sixty. The small pills resembled the tiny jacks of heroin dispensed to addicts in England.

“What’s this? Morphine?” said the customs agent.

The two men whisked Rock away by his arms into an interrogation room and he was quickly stripped to his boxer shorts. The younger man started thoroughly going through Rock’s pants, while the older agent played with the bear claw and the feather, fascinated by the exotic Americana. Then he pulled out another bottle of pills, Rock’s Entero-Vioform, diarrhea medicine. The older agent recognized the prescription. “Do you have a problem?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” said Scully, “and I actually need to go to the bathroom—right now.”

He reached out and snatched his pants, clutched his stomach, and was led out of the room by the younger agent to a small bathroom. The agent let Rock inside, who closed and locked the door behind him and retrieved the vial of cocaine from the pants’ watch pocket. With one massive snort, he inhaled the contents.

He pulled out Frankie’s ticket stub, tore it into pieces, and flushed it down the toilet. Without that, there was no way the authorities could connect them. He rinsed the empty brown vial in the sink and put it back in his pants pocket. Outside, the younger agent waited to take him to yet another room where now the police wanted to talk with him. They sat him down and started asking questions, but Scully couldn’t speak. The cocaine had completely frozen his larynx. The best he could manage were some distressed, garbled squawks.

They arrested Rock for importing a controlled substance and took him to the Feltham police station, a small jail in a remote London borough adjacent to Heathrow largely used for airport arrests, and as a result a tidy, welcoming neighborhood establishment that did not truck with the usual criminal element but attracted a higher-class clientele. They served Rock tea and left his cell door open, even took him with them when they went on their rounds. He passed the weekend pleasantly enough in custody.

Frankie Weir went to town and worked the phones, beginning a long trail of calls. She raised bail from Lenny Holzer, a New York City scenester who was living in London at the Dorchester Hotel and had first met Rock years before when the Dead played the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. Frankie also called Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and Sam Cutler of Blackhill Enterprises, the rogue concert producer who’d invited Rock over in the first place. In turn, Cutler contacted Chesley Millikin, who was running Epic Records in England at the time and consulting with Rock about landing a record deal for the Dead with mighty CBS Records. Millikin then phoned home to Marin County, California, and spoke with Rock’s new girlfriend, Nicki Rudolph, who flew to the rescue. With money suddenly needed for Rock’s legal defense, Nicki arrived in England the next day, four and a half months pregnant, her bra filled with thousands of hits of acid. The English had little or no access to this quality product, and the California contraband disappeared in one smooth transaction.

On Monday, with Holzer’s money in his pocket, Millikin picked up Cutler in his well-worn Bentley and drove to the police station to fetch Rock, smoking a joint and chatting about Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones guitarist who had drowned in his swimming pool that July, only a few days after being fired from the band. They took Rock by Keith Richards’s place on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea to pick up keys to a flat Millikin had arranged for Rock, a giant Victorian home nearby with a grand staircase in the middle, sometimes inhabited by members of the Pink Floyd crew and shared by a pair of blonde Scandinavian hookers. But when Richards learned that Rock had left high-grade California marijuana in his unclaimed luggage back at Heathrow, he insisted that Rock go pick it up immediately.

Wrapped in tinfoil, the weed was concealed in large star-shaped Christmas candles, Big Sur bud unknown to England. Inside the candles were branches containing fat clumps of sinsemilla, a new wrinkle in marijuana cultivation and a great leap forward—female plants deprived of male companionship that produced rich, fragrant, especially potent flowers with no seeds. A botanical miracle fresh from the greenhouses of enterprising, imaginative California pot growers and a wonder from the New World on the other side of the Atlantic, the marijuana was something that Richards was adamant could not be left behind.

With some reasonable trepidation—he was fresh from the weekend in jail—Rock dressed in a suit and tie and took a cab back to the airport. He had himself dropped off at the underpass that leads to Heathrow and waltzed into the cavernous arrivals hall. He had no passport—they had taken it when they arrested him—and he had no claim checks, but there was his luggage sitting there waiting. He picked up the bags, walked outside, and hailed a cab. That night, he took the pot over to Keith Richards.

The Rolling Stones were coming out of a long dark period, and Scully’s fresh West Coast pot was just the beginning of daylight. The band had not been seen much in public for the past three years. The rock scene was a different world, and the Stones were unsure of their position in the altered landscape. They were currently planning their first U.S. tour since 1966, back when the Dead and the Airplane weren’t known outside a few neighborhoods in San Francisco. Now these San Francisco bands were leaders of the new rock movement, and Scully was an esteemed emissary from the faraway land of California. In London, Rock was like Marco Polo returned from the Orient, bearing precious jewels.

In the years since 1966, the fashion-conscious English pop scene had been transformed by West Coast psychedelic rock, although British impressions of what that was were formed largely by speculation and inference. LSD itself was rare in the U.K. The members of Pink Floyd, for instance, had built England’s top psychedelic band without the benefit of having actually taken LSD (vocalist Syd Barrett was the sole exception). The English rock poster artists imitated what they saw from San Francisco. The culture was being passed around on scraps of paper. In England they were adopting new traditions they had heard about but didn’t entirely understand, like the free concerts in the park.

In San Francisco, free outdoor concerts had been a fixture since the start of the rock scene. The whole Haight-Ashbury rock world sprung up in a neighborhood adjacent to the enormous Golden Gate Park and bordered by a block-wide median called the Panhandle that extended several blocks from the park. While Golden Gate Park’s meadows sometimes held larger, more formal gatherings, it was the Panhandle where the impromptu performances by neighborhood rock bands had the hippie girls dancing barefoot in the park. Jefferson Airplane, the Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company all lived within blocks of each other and routinely threw unscheduled shows in the grassy, tree-studded strip. One Sunday afternoon in June 1967, Jimi Hendrix played in the Panhandle for a crowd of a few hundred on a flatbed truck that belonged to the Airplane. When the Dead had moved out of the Haight in March 1968, the band simply pulled up two flatbeds into an intersection and blocked traffic for hours while crowds filled Haight Street for blocks. The Dead played all afternoon, running extension cords out of nearby apartment windows for power, and the police stood by helpless, the entire neighborhood overrun.

Over the years, bands like the Dead and the Airplane, who also enjoyed giving unplanned shows in the sunshine, had developed careful strategies for dealing with—or evading—the rules and regulations of the powers that be, but it was almost always a stealthy operation carried off with an outlaw sensibility.

Word of this new movement spread around the rock scene in the United States, eventually finding its way across the Atlantic and beginning to influence the musicians and rock scene there. In London, Blackhill Enterprises, the managers of Pink Floyd, had thrown the first large free concert in Hyde Park in June 1968. Called “Midsummer High Weekend,” the show featured Roy Harper, Jethro Tull, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Pink Floyd. As the headliner of the event, Pink Floyd was introducing new guitarist David Gilmour, who was replacing founding member Barrett, and celebrating the release of the band’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets.

The following year, Blackhill was again enlisted to make the public debut of the new band formed by Eric Clapton after Cream had broken up. The Blackhill fellows convinced the new band’s powerful manager to pay for them to stage a free concert in London’s Hyde Park for the first show by the group named, with some irony, Blind Faith. Along with Clapton, the band included his former Cream mate Ginger Baker and vocalist-keyboardist Stevie Winwood of Traffic (along with lesser light Rick Grech on bass). The uneventful concert in June 1969 by what would prove to be a short-lived enterprise drew a massive crowd of more than one hundred thousand, who amazed authorities by doing little more than peacefully listening to the music.

The concert was a landmark London cultural occasion, and backstage, rock luminaries such as Paul McCartney and Donovan came out to enjoy the day. Mick Jagger and his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, took a full inspection tour of the production. Shortly after the successful event, the Stones office contacted Blackhill about producing another free concert in the park the next month.

Scheduled for early July 1969, the Hyde Park Rolling Stones show was originally planned to pull back the curtain on the new era for the band, introducing new member Mick Taylor on guitar, celebrating the band’s recent hit, “Honky Tonk Women,” and staking their claim to a post in the rapidly evolving rock world. All that changed when, two days before the concert, the guitarist whom Taylor had replaced—founding member Brian Jones—died under suspicious circumstances, drowned in his swimming pool at his home in the English countryside. In an instant, the Hyde Park concert became a memorial.

Dressed in a white tunic, Jagger had the impossible task of quieting down the crowd at the start so he could read some unfathomably bathetic romantic poetry by Shelley, another tragic young Brit killed through misadventure:

He is not dead, he doth not sleep—

He hath awakened from the dream of life.

At the end, white butterflies brought in for the occasion were freed from their boxes, many of which had already suffocated, and what few remained expended their last breaths escaping captivity only to expire in midair above the band. Their carcasses littered the stage.

The Stones, who had not performed in public since a European tour in the spring of 1967, went on to put on one of the worst shows in the band’s history—rusty, sloppy, ill-rehearsed, guitars out of tune. The crowd didn’t care. The huge audience had a great time. There were no arrests, and afterward, everybody who stayed to help clean up was given a copy of the new Rolling Stones single. They left the park immaculate.

Also, following the model of the West Coast free concerts they had heard about, read about, and seen photos of without having actually attended, the concert producers used members of the Hells Angels biker club as security guards. These British bikers fancied themselves overseas cousins of the real-life California ass-kickers, but they were nothing like that. They hung around the stage, drinking tea and wearing old Nazi army helmets and swastikas, but left the security work to the police. These were pretend Hells Angels; their “club” had no official connection with the California-based organization. They stood around backstage and looked colorful, but they served no genuine purpose and were nothing like the real thing. These candy-ass imitations had their colors drawn on their motorcycle jackets in chalk, for Christ’s sake.

Even the worldly Keith Richards knew little about the new San Francisco scene beyond what he had read in Rolling Stone magazine the night Rock Scully and his girlfriend showed up with the Christmas candles from his suitcase. Sitting around a Moroccan hammered copper coffee table in the low light of a brass Arabian table lamp, Rock broke open the candles and extracted the bright green, sticky clumps of marijuana that smoked with a fresh, fruity flavor, almost like tropical lawn clippings. Rock spun golden tales of life in the Wild West, better living through chemistry, a land beyond the sea with rock and roll in the parks and magical marijuana growing in t...