Mick Jagger (56 page)

The three-foot-high stage left the musicians horribly vulnerable. Angels stepped on and off it as they pleased, sometimes commandeering the MC’s microphone to make their own private announcements or simply utter obscenities. The school bus had been parked a few feet away and a row of Angels stood on its roof, enjoying the grandstand view and occasionally lobbing an empty beer can or bottle at the performers. As a tactful way to remove this nuisance, Ron Schneider bought the entire beer supply for $500, then gave it back on condition its containers were no longer used as missiles (hence the legend the Angels were paid $500 worth of beer).

During Jefferson Airplane’s set, vocalist Marty Balin saw a particularly nasty assault going on directly below him. He jumped down to intervene and a vicious blow to the face knocked him unconscious. When fellow vocalist Grace Slick—who had previously told Mick the Angels were “really good”—ventured a cringingly polite protest, one of them seized the mic and roared, “Fuck you!” Panic spread among the other bands scheduled to precede the Stones. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rushed through their set, then bolted for their escape helicopter. The Grateful Dead, who had conceived the event in a haze of hippie idealism, took one look at the crowd and left without playing a note. Only the ethereally pretty Gram Parsons gave a value show with his Flying Burrito Brothers and was brave enough to stick around afterward to watch the headliners.

The Stones returned in the late afternoon and, there being no backstage VIP area, had to walk the fifty yards from the helipad through the crowd milling around the nearby first-aid tent. Their private security force of NYPD cops had all taken fright and melted away; their only remaining protector was a huge black man named Tony Fuches, who earlier on had hit somebody so hard that his right wrist was now bound in a splint. As the band threaded their way among the punters, a wild-eyed boy lurched up to Mick and clouted him in the face, screaming, “I hate you, you fucker!” Mick shrugged the incident off, however, and ordered Fuches not to harm the boy. The only dressing room was a shabby trailer, with Hell’s Angels posted all around it. If any Stone wanted to venture outside, he had to do so inside a phalanx of Angels.

Mick had originally planned to go onstage at sunset. But, rather than declining slowly in a crimson-flushed sky, the sun hurriedly popped out of sight, almost as if foreseeing what bad things were to come. Hence the legend that he deliberately waited for darkness, to give maximum effect to his entry and also goad and tantalize his audience beyond endurance. In fact, the delay was largely caused by the Angels, who now occupied the stage in such number that there was no room for any performers. With perilous plain speaking, Sam Cutler announced that the Stones wouldn’t start until everyone got off. One of the few police officers in evidence came to Mick and offered a convoy of squad cars to give him safe passage back to San Francisco after the show, but mindful of his hippie cred, he refused to “go out that way.”

The stage remained clear only for as long as it took the Stones to take up position and wan cheers to echo back from the three hundred thousand in outer darkness. By halfway through their opening number, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” it was again choked with cracked black leather jackets and pale horseshoe-shaped insignia. “Who was up there?” Sam Cutler echoes sardonically in retrospect. “Who wasn’t?” Normally, Hell’s Angels were Stones fanatics second to none, but tonight Mick’s pink cape, pink-and-black harlequin blouse, yellow crushed-velvet trousers, and burgundy suede knee boots seemed to have aroused their deepest ire.

In these impossible conditions, he tried to do his usual show, pumping his satin-winged arms and boogying determinedly up and back, from time to time asking the Angels on either side to “give me some room, fellers … please?” A further contingent had taken up position below the stage, straddling their bikes and facing the crowd, their pale horseshoe-imprinted backs resembling the shells of poisonous beetles. Smoke from fires that had been lit against the sharp evening chill mingled with Chip Monck’s red stage light to create a hellish effect long before Satan was formally invoked. Most of the crowd that heaved chest-high against the stage were having a good time even so, grooving to the music, making peace signs, offering up draggled flowers, taking photographs—something ferociously forbidden at later rock concerts—oblivious to the whirligigs of violence among them. Near the front was a conspicious figure, one of the very few black spectators among three hundred thousand: a lanky young man in a pale green Beau Brummel suit and a dark fedora.

Dazzled as Mick was by the lights in his eyes and the high of performing, it took a little time to realize something was seriously wrong. “There’s so many of you,” he observed woozily before going into “Carol,” that good-natured old Chuck Berry favorite. “Be cool at the front there. Keep still, keep together. Don’t push around.”

“Sympathy for the Devil” was third on the playlist, as throughout the tour. With the first sound of its demented samba beat, a sudden forward surge by the stage-front Angels made the entire crowd retreat several yards. Mick shouted to Keith to stop playing and harangued the invisible troublemakers in flawless hippie-speak, clearly confident that his Hyde Park crowd magic would work again here: “Hey, people … brothers and sisters … C’mon! Cool out! … Who’s fighting and why? Why are we fighting? We don’t want to fight, come on!” Believing he’d sorted the problem, he couldn’t resist adding a little white lie to get them back on the Lucifer kick again: “Something funny always happens when we start that number.”

He started it again, and managed to reach the end despite distractions that few other star vocalists can ever have faced. At one point, a large and ferocious-looking Alsatian dog wandered across the stage in front of him; at another, a naked, crazed girl in his sight line was set on and obliterated by five pale horseshoes; at yet another, a huge, bearded Angel in a Quakerish broad-brimmed hat stopped him singing to speak at length into his ear. The closing chorus of the devil anthem instead became part of his plea for calm: “Oh yeah … awl right … ever’body got to cool out …” Then, almost in synch with Keith’s final chord, there was another whirligig, and another casualty, a bearded white boy, was lowered to the ground in front of the stage, whether by his assailants or his rescuers it was impossible to tell.

Mick’s tone by now lacked any trace of the arrogance that had put so many backs up. “San Francisco,” he pleaded in no accent but that of Wilmington, Kent, “this could be the most beautiful night. Don’t fuck it up. All I can do is ask you, beg you, to keep it together. It’s within your power.” In the interest of cooling out, he asked everyone to sit down, a ploy his teacher dad would have approved. The next song was “Under My Thumb,” possibly the most arrogant thing he’d ever put on record, but now softened down almost to a lullaby. A few feet away, a greasy-bearded Angel in the grip of God-knew-what junk narcotic clutched his head and glared upward, with lips grimacing in time like some homicidal mime artist. Once again, the jeering last chorus became hopefully emollient: “Baby, it’s awl right … I pray that it’s awl right …”

The music died away into stillness which for a moment gave hope that prayer had been heard. Then, before there was even time for applause, a gap in the crowd suddenly opened up twenty feet or so away to Mick’s right. At its center was the young black man in the dandyish pale green suit who’d earlier been standing quietly near the stage. Now he was struggling violently with a young white woman in a cream-colored crocheted waistcoat and brandishing something aloft in his right hand. In an instant, he was yanked aside and obliterated by horseshoe-imprinted black leather. It all happened so fast that even the Maysles’ team cameraman who caught it on film barely saw it happen.

The stage dissolved into chaos. Keith ran forward, pointed out into the darkness, and shouted that the Stones were “splitting, man, if those cats don’t stop beating up everyone in sight.” Someone shouted back that there was “a guy out there with a gun and he’s shooting at the stage.” But for the present, no one thought the incident any worse than others during the day. At Mick’s appeal over the PA, one of the few doctors in attendance went to the spot and the crowd made way to let him through. A senior Angel in a lion’s-mane headdress commandeered the microphone, ordering his colleagues to behave and assuring those whom they had terrorized that “No one wants to hassle anyone.”

Nonetheless, the obvious course for Sam Cutler as emcee was to stop the show. Mick was clearly in danger, if not from gunmen in the crowd, then from two or three particular Angels who had kept murderous glares fixed on him throughout the evening. His once-zealous security seemed to have dwindled away, leaving only the small derringer pistol in Cutler’s jeans pocket. In addition, the pilot of his helicopter feared the Angels might wreck it and was threatening not to stick around much longer. But Mick insisted on continuing.

The green-suited young black man was named Meredith Hunter, and despite his willowy height and street-smart air, he was only eighteen years old. He had been stabbed in the neck with a seven-inch knife by a Hell’s Angel wearing the horseshoe of the Oakland chapter after a scuffle in which Hunter pulled a handgun from inside his faux-Regency coat. Other Angels had then weighed in, smashing him over the head with a trash can and kicking him as he lay on the ground. Hundreds of people had been standing nearby, listening to “Under My Thumb,” but only his seventeen-year-old white girlfriend had attempted to come to his aid. While the Stones’ set continued—“Little Queenie,” “Midnight Rambler,” “Brown Sugar,” even, amazingly, “Street Fighting Man”—Hunter was receiving emergency treatment on the ground, then being carried, by Sam Cutler among others, to the stars’ helipad, back of the stage, to be flown to the nearest ER. Before the chopper lifted off, he was dead.

The Stones were due to leave America the next day, December 6, having already extended their tour time by a week. Since none of the band had even seen the attack on Hunter, there was no attempt by the police to detain them. Sam Cutler offered to stay behind and answer any official queries, having been assured that his expenses would be sent to him along with his fee for emceeing the whole tour (never mind thinking up “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band”). He is still awaiting the check.

The benign tradition of rock festivals was by now so well established that the media at first could not imagine this one being any different. The following Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle hailed Altamont as a brilliant success, only slightly marred by the stabbing of Meredith Hunter and the accidental deaths of three other male spectators (two accidentally run over by a car as they lay in sleeping bags, the third drowned in an irrigation ditch). Back in Britain in the run-up to Christmas—all the more frenetic for also being the run-up to a new decade—Fleet Street reported yet another triumph for peaceful youth power to set alongside Woodstock, Bob Dylan on the Isle of Wight, and, of course, the Stones in Hyde Park. Exhausted and harrowed, even the usually honest, outspoken Keith was not in a mood to argue, telling reporters at Heathrow that Altamont had been “basically well organized, but people were tired and a few tempers got frayed.”

It was only over the next week that the full, grisly story of the festival began to be pieced together. Audience members by the hundreds phoned in to San Francisco music radio stations, like KSAN, to complain about the lack of proper facilities, the unchecked circulation of bad drugs, and the numerous other acts of random, unprovoked violence by the Hell’s Angels that had preceded Hunter’s knifing. In the process, those who had conceived the event—the Grateful Dead and their radical pals like Emmett Grogan—were forgotten. Multi-act Altamont turned into a Rolling Stones concert for which they, and in particular Mick, bore the whole blame.

For the Chronicle’s Ralph J. Gleason, this attempt to give something back to their fans had damaged the spirit of rock far worse than the “greed” for which he had previously condemned them. Altamont, wrote Gleason, symbolized “the end of rock’s innocence, a warning that the vast amount of energy contained in the music and its immense worldwide audience had elements of danger … And it seemed significant that all this was presided over [sic] by the greatest live performer in rock history, Mick Jagger.”

“Jagger’s performing style is a form of aggression,” wrote the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. “Not just against the straight world but against his own young audience, and this appeals to them because it proves he hasn’t sold out and gone soft. But when all this aggression is released, who can handle it?” There was even a dig from David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, who had seen plenty of violence during their own set and had fled while the going was good: “The major mistake was taking what was essentially a party and turning it into an ego game … I think [the Stones] have an exaggerated view of their own importance, especially the two leaders.”

Most damning of all was the magazine whose raison d’être had once been to celebrate the band now in the pillory. In a twenty-thousand-word reconstruction of the day’s events, published five weeks later, Rolling Stone described Altamont as “the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money, manipulation and, at base, a fundmental lack of concern for humanity”—all implicitly emanating from Mick. As evidence of the Stones’ stone-heartedness, RS pointed to their hasty departure the day afterward—and the fact that not a word of apology or even condolence had subsequently been sent to Meredith Hunter’s family. A subsequent call-in from Mick to radio KSAN, lamenting that San Francisco hadn’t been the “groovy scene” he expected, hardly helped his case. “Some display—however restrained—of compassion hardly seems too much to expect” was Rolling Stone’s very reasonable conclusion. “A man died before their eyes. Do they give a shit? Yes or no?”

Promoter Bill Graham was equally specific in his condemnation, and gave vent to it with the uninhibitedness of a man who never expected to work with Mick again: “I ask you what right you had, Mr. Jagger … in going through with this free festival. And you couldn’t tell me you didn’t know the way it would come off. What right do you have to leave the way you did, thanking everyone for a wonderful time and the Angels for helping out? What did he leave behind throughout the country? Every gig he was late. Every fucking gig he made the promoter and the people bleed. What right does this god have to descend on this country this way? But you know what is a great tragedy to me? That cunt is a great entertainer.”