Chapter Thirteen
They should have cancelled. It’s what any other group would have done, as a mark of respect to a bandmate who had died so suddenly only forty-eight hours earlier. It was not as though they stood to lose a fortune if they pulled out. The festival was free. There were plenty of other artists performing. They would have got by without a little help from these friends. So why didn’t they just abandon it, lie low for a while, pause and reflect, put their other plans on hold, show solidarity at Brian’s funeral, washed and brushed, then re-emerge after a respectable mourning period and release a tribute song or even an album in their co-founder’s memory?
Perhaps Jagger perceived that any such deference on their part might be interpreted as weakness. Having never knowingly been the kind to kowtow, they were not going to start now. They had planned to make this, their first public gig for more than two years, the official unveiling of Brian’s replacement. With his blessing, too, because Brian had accepted an invitation to attend. But tragedy overtook. Realising that they would have been castigated otherwise, they hastily reconfigured their performance as a memorial to their late founder, pooling guilt, bewilderment and sorrow in homage to him. The Stones ceased rolling for no man, dead or alive. Not even for one of their own. If nothing else, this show would be the ideal warm-up for the forthcoming US tour.
Two days after Brian died – which seems shocking now – they turned up at Hyde Park to rock London alongside King Crimson, Family, Roy Harper, Alexis Korner’s New Church and more at the free festival. Two hundred and fifty thousand fans? Half a million? Reports varied, but vast numbers, anyway. Introduced for the first time as ‘the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world’, the performance itself fell agonisingly short of what the epithet promised. The band knew they were out of groove and out of tune. The audience didn’t. All these years later, original fans still insist that they were brilliant, that it was a great day and how lucky they were to be there. Others remember a set that hung in the air like crystallised phlegm. How could a garishly maquillaged Mick poncing about in a white frock and studded leather collar reciting highbrow poetry to impress not one but two actress girlfriends present, each of whom was blissfully unaware that she was competing for his affection, have contributed to the solemnity of the occasion?1
Old school friends David Stark and Paul Levett, now a musician and publisher and a lawyer respectively, were in Hyde Park for the Stones gig that day. The then seventeen-year-old rock fans were in their element. ‘People say their playing was terrible,’ says David. ‘It was a very raw sound, I admit, which we never got from them again. But it was an amazing experience. It was a really hot day, the weather was brilliant, the crowd was on their side and they rose to it. All you could think about was Brian Jones, but in a good way. The film of the gig captures its essence very well, particularly the “Sympathy for the Devil” sequence with the African drummers.’
‘After Hyde Park,’ recalls Paul, ‘we went over the back to the Royal Albert Hall to see the Who supported by Chuck Berry in the Pop Proms. Equally astonishing. All the Stones were in the box right behind us. At one point, Jagger got up and went outside. My friend and I jumped up and ran out after him. He walked the circumference of the Albert Hall, kissing girls, then came back inside the venue to Marianne.’
Stuart White was also at the Hyde Park concert. ‘I was in the press pen with the Hells Angels, who had been brought in as stewards,’ said the former News of the World West Coast editor. ‘What sticks in my mind is Mick Jagger waiting to do his poetry reading for Brian Jones and goading the crowd. “Are ya gonna be quiet?” he was yelling at them. And I remember thinking, you sod. They’ve been sitting here since eight o’clock this morning, some of them. You’re late coming on, and you’re telling them what to do. It was my first glimpse of rock star arrogance, and it really annoyed me. They played atrociously that day, too.
‘I saw them again in August 1976 during their European tour, at Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire. “The Glyndebourne of Rock”, they called it,’ said Stuart. ‘There were upwards of two hundred thousand people there. Topless girls all over the place, drugs freely for sale, and a host of celebrities backstage: Paul and Linda McCartney, Jack Nicholson, Ian McLagan from the Faces, Van Morrison, Jim Capaldi, Dave Gilmour and more, all off their bonces on free champagne. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Todd Rundgren and 10cc performed too. The event of the decade, you might have thought. But there must have been “technical hitches”. The Stones went on really late, about half past eleven, and played thirty or so songs into the early hours. Badly. Were they blind drunk? I thought so, and I wasn’t the only one. They were literally staggering about up there. Keith was missing notes and Mick was slurring his lyrics. I saw again the arrogance of Jagger. I was cast right back to that day in Hyde Park, and to that utterly unfathomable poetry reading.’
Written in 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s celebrated pastoral elegy Adonais, dedicated to the Greek god of fertility though actually about the death of John Keats, cut closer to the bone than Mick may have known. ‘I am aware indeed,’ said Shelley of Keats, having invited his ailing fellow poet to stay with him in Pisa, ‘that I am nourishing a rival who will surpass me, and this is an additional motive and will be an added pleasure.’
So Mick cast himself unwittingly as Shelley and Brian as Keats, did he? Read the whole poem, not just the bits that Mick recited. Mourners are urged to weep no longer, because Keats lives. He is at last free of his attackers. He is not dead: it is the living who are deceased! Brian, likewise, has ‘outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again.’2
Even if the wider implications went over his head, the reading of some of that poem was a curious volte-face on Mick’s part, given his reaction when he heard that Brian had died. He and the rest of the band were down at Olympic Studios in Barnes at the time, pushing on with their next album Let It Bleed when Ian Stewart imparted the shocking news. Their publicist Keith Altham was with them.
‘And it was as if Brian had gone and died on purpose, just to spite them and put a spanner in the works,’ said Keith. ‘Where the others were genuinely shocked, I mean really upset and actually weeping – especially Marianne, who was totally overcome, poor kid – Mick was fuming. I couldn’t tell you his words exactly, but he was spitting blood. It was as if poor Brian had committed this act of sabotage to deliberately steal the thunder from Mick’s big moment, a poxy gig in Hyde Park. I thought at the time and I still think now: how can anyone be so deluded, so immune to reality and priority? Mick’s insistence all these years that he and Keith treating Brian so shamefully was only what he deserved, because he was selfish, jealous and lazy – which I never saw, and which wasn’t my perception of him – has got guilt written all over it.’
And yet. Brian got to escape his torturous existence, leaving Mick, Keith and the boys to a lifetime’s unrest. Will they ever be free of him? Are they not condemned in perpetuity for his demise, ‘their hearts grown cold, their heads grown grey in vain’? Have they ever found, or will they ever find, the courage to look themselves in the eye over it?
Meanwhile, bivouacs of asphyxiated cabbage white butterflies, 3,500 of them (who counted?) were freed to flutter over the vast Hyde Park audience, an evocation of Brian’s spirit rising to the blue. Instead, the doomed creatures sucked their last, and their corpses were crunched underfoot. It was, muttered the drummer, ‘like the Battle of the Somme’.3
There was more self-delusion and death to come. As if one free concert were not enough, the Stones had to go bigger and better. Hubris gone mad. Thus did Lucifer lollop on down to Altamont in December ’69. West Coast winter’s answer to East Coast summer’s Woodstock was to prove not only the killer culmination of a controversial US tour. It would slaughter the fantasy. According to the mythology, it pulled down the curtain on the sixties and called time on the hippie dream. There is always more to it.
History’s first mythic rock’n’roll tour in the winter of 1969 had ‘firsts’ written all over it. Held back by drugs busts and other controversies, this was their first advance across America since the summer of 1966; their first tour without Brian; their first with Mick Taylor playing in his place. Hurled in at the deep end with little idea of what to expect, Taylor’s first outing with them since the Hyde Park free festival raised their game, fetching a mournful, melodic and searing edge that the Stones had never benefited from before.
‘I just couldn’t believe how bad they sounded,’ Taylor would later remark. ‘Their timing was awful. They sounded like a typical bunch of guys in a garage – playing out of tune, and too loudly. I thought, how is it possible that this band can make hit records?’
This would also be their first tour comprising America’s largest basketball arena and early stadium concerts. A massive step up. Kicking off with a 7 November warm-up at Colorado State University, the Stones opened at the Los Angeles Forum with Ike and Tina Turner, B.B. King/Chuck Berry and Terry Reid in support, and rolled their way east through the arenas to climax at New York’s Madison Square Garden and the Boston Garden at the end of the month. The pace was full-on, with the first five dates consecutive, a single day off followed by another seven shows in a row, then a six-day break before landing in New York City to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. They then circled west to Detroit, east to Philadelphia, down to Baltimore, back up to New York, on to Boston and about-turn down to Florida for the West Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival. Twenty-four live shows and a televised performance in under a month. They proceeded to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, to record ‘Brown Sugar’ and other tracks, sending their representatives ahead to San Francisco to set everything up for that trip’s final performance. Six days after the last show on 30 November came the horror of Altamont.
The Free Festival at the remote Altamont Speedway motor racing track in Tracy, northern California, on 6 December 1969 is rock’s nadir. Bad publicity over extortionate ticket prices on the tour having seen them denounced as mercenaries, the Stones were in need of damage limitation. A free concert to acknowledge the support of the fans was a good idea. Demonstrating an embarrassing lack of awareness, Mick announced his hope that this congregation would ‘create a microcosmic society that would set an example for how the rest of America can behave at large gatherings’. In other words, he tried to hijack the counterculture, and to hitch the Stones’ wagon to the hippie ideal. Rarely has a rock band been less altruistic. Jagger’s primary motivation for agreeing to the free concert was the opportunity to film it for the documentary they were making. The result would be seen in the now notorious Gimme Shelter.
There was a scramble to secure a suitable location. The festival could have taken place at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, but the city put its foot down. Sonoma Raceway at Sears Point was a possible, but the site owners demanded $100,000 when they heard that the event was to be filmed. Next. Altamont was by no means ideal, but was the last resort. An agreement was hastily struck with its owner, and Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the rest were lined up to perform there. It was risky from the outset. The facility had negligible facilities. Nowhere near enough toilets or medical tents were provided to service the hundred thousand fans expected to turn up, never mind the three times that number who did. In place of security barriers to separate artists from audience and keep both sections safe, somebody ran a ball of string from pillar to post at breast height. That was it. And nobody had any idea who was in charge. None of which bothered Mick. He had astutely avoided adding ink to any release form or contract that might render the band legally liable for either the concert or anything that might occur during or after it. Whatever the outcome, the Stones would not be responsible. It was almost as if they’d had a premonition.
A posse of beefy, unbriefed, simmering-for-action Hells Angels who had been hired in place of professional security guards were positioned at strategic points, and were paid in beer. Whose outrageous idea was that? Worst of all, the hastily constructed stage that the Angels were there to defend was too low, only about four feet off the ground. The musicians effectively found themselves performing among the crowd, most of whom were out of it on booze and drugs. Not just your basic hippie hash, either. LSD laced with speed was the dangerous cocktail doing the rounds in huge quantities, leaving the hillside heaving with tripping fans. Too few paramedics were on hand to administer Thorazine, the antidote. Who cared, they soon ran out of it. Paranoia set in and violence broke out, which quickly escalated. Many of the casualties limping into the med tents had fractured skulls. A pregnant singer was bottled, and a girl was torn across the stage by her scalp. As darkness descended, the cloying air, which seemed to have solidified according to some of those present, was carved by the blades of the chopper carrying the Stones.
The Grateful Dead had signed up to play bridesmaid to the headliners. But hell was unleashed during Jefferson Airplane’s set by the accidental knocking over of one of the Angels’ motorbikes. The leathered henchmen went berserk, and started attacking people with pool cues and bike chains. Fans retaliated with whatever they could find, empty glass bottles, mostly. Singer Marty Balin jumped off the stage to try and intervene, and was knocked clean out by an Angel. The Dead saw all, and were sore afraid. They packed up their gear and got the hell out. ‘The vibes were bad,’ said the Airplane’s co-vocalist Grace Slick. ‘Something was very peculiar. Not particularly bad, just real peculiar. It was that kind of hazy, abrasive day.’
Nobody mourned the Dead. Meredith Hunter didn’t, anyway. The Stones were the act this clean-cut teenager had come to see. He must have picked up on the bad vibes and realised that he and his date were risking their lives just by being there, because he barged back through the crowd to his borrowed car to pick up the handgun he had brought with him as a protection measure. This act alone suggests how precarious the scene had got by then, and how frightened this harmless-looking couple must have felt. They must also have known that their very presence was inflammatory: a good-looking, lime-suited, Afro’d black guy and his pretty, white, long-blonde girlfriend in her pew-worthy crocheted tunic. What was he, that guy, her pimp? Believe it or not, this was written. We’re talking 1969, an era when racism was still rife in the backward Californian provinces. Basic folks back then didn’t care for that kind of behaviour, and made their displeasure felt. But who cared what folks thought? Hunter probably didn’t, or couldn’t, given that he was higher than a kite on methamphetamine: the stimulant otherwise known as ‘yaba’, ‘crank’ or crystal meth, with an effect similar to, but much longer-lasting than, crack cocaine. He was fearless and excited, this was the Rolling Stones!
Leaving little Patti on the ground, he clambered on top of a speaker cabinet beside the stage, most likely to get a better view. An Angel reached up, wrenched him from his perch and flung him to the ground. The boy floundered and kneejerked, pulling at his pistol as he went down. Then came the flash of the knife brandished by big bikerman Alan Passaro, who stabbed him, apparently five times. All of this was captured on tape, preserved and used, horrifyingly, in the 1970 Stones doc Gimme Shelter. The frame of the pack of Angels closing in for the kill is blood-chilling. Hunter was pronounced dead at twenty past six that evening. Terrified, bewildered, heartbroken Patti is seen sobbing in the footage as his lifeless body was whirlybirded into the sky.
Hunter’s schizophrenic mother never recovered from her loss. His sister Dixie avoided the trial, unable to bring herself to witness the inevitable: another white man walking free from the killing of Just Another Black Man. Which is what happened. Passaro, the knife-wielding Angel, was charged with murder. The jury viewed the footage and concluded that he had acted in self-defence. He was acquitted, but he wouldn’t live long. Sixteen years later he was found drowned in a California reservoir, wearing $10,000 in cash. Revenge, the dish best eaten cold? Or an accident?
As far as the Hells Angels were concerned, the Stones, the track owner and the promoters were to blame for the tragedy of and fallout from Altamont. They resented that the media had tried to pin it on them, and made their feelings known. Forewarned is forearmed: Keith would be carrying a gun on the road from then on. Though Jagger had no idea at the time, the Angels resolved to seek revenge by assassinating him. Tracking him down to his home on Long Island, their hit squad hired a boat and attempted to sail across to do the deed. But on the appointed day they were scuppered by a violent storm. Forced to turn back, they survived. They must have gone cold on the idea after that. News of the plan was leaked to the FBI in 1985, and was only made public in 2008. All those years, Mick had been oblivious of how close he came to being the Angels’ second Altamont victim.
It was in 1995, twenty-six years after the event, that Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine questioned Mick as to how he felt about the Altamont tragedy.
‘Well, awful,’ Jagger said. ‘I mean, just awful. You feel a responsibility. How could it all have been so silly and wrong? But I didn’t think of these things that you guys thought of, you in the press: this great loss of innocence, this cathartic end of the era … I didn’t think any of that. That particular burden didn’t weigh on my mind. It was more how awful it was to have had this experience, and how awful it was for someone to get killed.’ His words seemed cold enough to freeze eyeballs.
Some still blame the Rolling Stones for Meredith Hunter’s death. What did they expect, others reason, of a rock gig, especially a vast open-air festival, which after all is all about crowds and surging masses? Collective loss of control often leads to tragedy. Were the Who to blame for the deaths of eleven fans and the serious injury of twenty-six others in Cincinnati, Ohio, December 1979, when 18,000 fans stormed the venue and only twenty-five policemen fought in vain to control them? Were Queen responsible for the fatal stabbing of twenty-one-year-old Scottish fan Thomas McGuigan at Knebworth in August 1986, the last gig with his band that Freddie Mercury ever played? What about the terrorist attacks at the Manchester Arena Ariana Grande gig, and at the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest musicfest, both in 2017? Or the nine killed at Roskilde in Denmark – Pearl Jam’s concert in June 2000, when the crowd rushed the stage? And did the buck stop at the feet of rapper Travis Scott after nine lost their lives at his Astroworld Festival in Houston, Texas, in November 2021?
There is no question that the Stones should have called a halt at Altamont, and have quit the stage the moment the scuffle broke out. According to them, they had no idea until afterwards that anyone had been killed. But we know they smelled danger, that they sensed a satanic panic. What else would have spooked them back into the chopper that had conveyed them there, cramming in more bodies than it was designed to lift so that they were lucky it didn’t go down?
And still the myth persists. Still they bang on about Altamont closing the door on the sixties and extinguishing the hippie dream. The assumption that this was its outcome obnubilates shudderingly sinister reality. The Stones never cared about the flowery-powery counterculture. Their passing interest in what the masses were into extended only so far as what was in it for them. Posing as believers in peace and love and a better world would make the punters more inclined to buy their records. The latest of which had just been released. Only yesterday, folks, come and get it! Let It Bleed, their eighth studio album in the UK (their tenth in the US) bore the hallmarks of a band which had come of age and grown into their reputation. No. 1 in the UK and a No. 3 in America, it was thin on singles chart hits but was a crucible of live-performance classics. ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Midnight Rambler’, ‘You Got the Silver’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, specifically. Which may have been intentional. They were finally free from comparison to the disintegrating Beatles, as well as of a defeated key component who had been dragging them down. Cynical? You are right, reader, I wasn’t there. But friends who were, who ran for cover once they had seen that particular emperor in the altogether, are under no illusions. They saw right through Jagger that day, and they’ve been seeing ever since. There was, it was said, evil in the hillside that night.
‘They did Altamont for the money,’ remarks a retired industry executive who declines to be named.
But they didn’t get paid …
‘They got paid. Ya think they’d do it for nothing? Hell, they earned it, too. Played like their lives depended on it. We knew at the time it was probably the greatest set we’d ever see. All that tension vibing in off the audience that stretched farther than the eye could see, it went all the way to hell, and it sent them. Like putting rocket fuel in a pair of skis. Watch the film. It doesn’t capture their brilliance that night, and this is the thing about their genius: it can’t be captured. You gotta experience it live. The records don’t even come close, and it’s what the Rolling Stones are about. The secret? Don’t ask me. You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, there are not words to describe, you just gotta get in their faces, open up your pores and hope that the Devil himself doesn’t jump in there before they do.’
Then what?
‘Then they got the hell out of America. Mick was paranoid that someone was coming for him. Had a feeling, he said. Keith and the guys went to London, but Mick flew directly from San Francisco to Geneva to drop a coupla rocks in a Swiss bank.4 He’s the one doing this. Which tells you a lot. A lot. The next year they’re raking in box office from Gimme Shelter, which, get this, is a snuff movie.’5
He would refer to it as that?
‘How can we not refer to it as that? It features the black kid Meredith Hunter’s murder. Not an actor. Nobody’s pretending. This guy gets killed in cold blood and they leave it in. You see it twice. They replay it, it’s horrific. The stabbing is captured, you see both the murder weapon and the gun belonging to the deceased, and the Stones keep the footage to redeploy as entertainment. As entertainment. Without ever approaching Hunter’s family for permission or offering them a share of the profits or even some basic financial support, nothing. Because to do so, I guess, would have been taken as an admission of guilt. And the Stones want us to believe that they were the victims at Altamont. Why is that film still out there? Why has Black America never torn its hair out and taken them to task over this, with everything else that’s going on? It is beyond me. All the Black Lives Matter protesters, where are those guys? Like I said, there was evil in the hillside that night. Pure evil. If he hadn’t gotten to them before, Satan sure got to the Stones that day. He’s been riding the bastards bareback ever since.’
Never again would they leave logistics to chance, perform in an inadequate setting or hire Hells Angels to belch about, pretending to be security. That was then. And just as they had clicked into a superior gear on stage at Altamont that night, a chemical reaction was stirring. In time, it would change not only their perception of themselves and what they were capable of; it would also change the world, in terms of its reaction to them. Shrugging off the conventions of the music business and their status as a band, they would break moulds and take things stratospheric. Leviathans from the soup would soon roam the earth, and would dominate.
The next time that David Stark and Paul Levett saw the Stones together was in London on 21 December 1969, at the Lyceum Ballroom on the Strand. This show followed the band’s two performances a week earlier at the Saville Theatre.
‘They’d just got back from Altamont,’ remembers David, ‘and they were absolutely brilliant. I’d go so far as to say exuberant. They were promoting the Let It Bleed album, and they opened with “Under My Thumb”. We were blown away. Jagger wore a white puffed-sleeve shirt, and looked like a Greek god. Nobody mentioned what had just happened. There was no indication at all of what had gone on. They must have been very relieved, I reckon, to get out of America and back to London in one piece.’
Did David feel they were somehow responsible for the death of Meredith Hunter? ‘I did not. I don’t believe anybody else did either. It was shocking of course, but not surprising, when you look back. It does feel in some ways as though tragedy has always followed them around.’
The Stones were at the top of their game at that point, the lifelong friends agree. ‘The songs from Let It Bleed were outstanding,’ says Paul. ‘I still pinch myself when I think about it. It was one of those nights you think, God, I’m glad I was there. It was so great to see them back then, when we were so young and naïve and so thrilled by it all. David and I have seen them on every single tour, during the seventies, eighties, nineties and the two thousands. The best? The Steel Wheels tour, 1989–90, promoting their brilliant comeback album. “Love is Strong” was the first single, and they really pulled it off. They were stronger than ever. And the 1994 Voodoo Lounge tour too, of course, which was exceptional.
‘They still put on a great show. But it’s different now. Perhaps it’s because we are older, because we no longer get comps from the PR, and because we find their ticket prices ridiculous! It’s all so vast, so corporate, so distant, so geared to the masses now. It feels as though it’s not so much about the music but more about the spectacle – the miracle, almost, that these old crocs are still standing, still doing it. A lot of people must feel compelled to part with a fortune to experience them live because it might be their last chance. It’s not a band, now. It’s an institution, banging out predictable numbers we’ve all heard a thousand times. Which is a shame, because they’ve got such a huge back catalogue of great songs that they never do. ‘I don’t want to hear them play “Satisfaction” ever again. I want to hear “Who’s Driving Your Plane” and “Cocksucker Blues”.’