December 6, 1969: The Altamont Disaster

Mick Jagger in cape. Note the Hell's Angel behind him.

December 6, 1969: The Altamont Free Concert is held at the Altamont Speedway in Tracy, California. After seeing the 500,000 or so people who had come to the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in New York's Catskill Mountains in August, with several West Coast acts performing, including Jefferson Airplane, that band's drummer, Spencer Dryden, suggested a "Woodstock West."

As with Woodstock, the hard part turned out to be securing a location. Finally, Altamont was suggested. The concert's poster says it's in Livermore, but current sources say it's in Tracy. Regardless, it's at the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area's East Bay region. Opened in 1966, the facility last known as Altamont Raceway Park hosted auto racing until it was closed in 2008. The 7,500-seat main structure still stands, 56 miles east of San Francisco, 45 miles east of Oakland, 49 miles northeast of San Jose, and 78 miles south of Sacramento.

The initial plan was to have the Airplane, their San Francisco and Woodstock compatriots The Grateful Dead, and the band that, with The Beatles having retreated from live performing, were now the biggest live rock and roll band in the world, The Rolling Stones. Anybody else they could get would have been considered gravy.

Well, 5 bands performed, but The Dead wouldn't be one of them. In order of their taking the stage: Santana, also San Franciscans who had been at Woodstock; The Jefferson Airplane; The Flying Burrito Brothers, based in Los Angeles, including former members of The Byrds Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman; David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash & Neil Young, who had also been at Woodstock, and Crosby had also been a Byrd; and The Rolling Stones.

The day before, The Stones had released a new album, titled Let It Bleed. Lead singer Mick Jagger would later call it his favorite Stones album. But on December 6, he got the title's wish -- which contradicted a line from the album's closing song: "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need." What everybody got at Altamont, nobody wanted or needed.

Airplane lead singer Grace Slick was interviewed for Rolling Stone magazine 20 years later. (While the band was named for "Rollin' Stone," a blues song by Muddy Waters, the magazine was named for Bob Dylan's song "Like a Rolling Stone.") She was one of several performers who said that Woodstock was the worst performance of her career, and added that the music was better at Altamont.

But everything else was wrong. She said, "The vibes were bad. Something was very peculiar, not particularly bad, just real peculiar. It was that kind of hazy, abrasive and unsure day. I had expected the loving vibes of Woodstock, but that wasn't coming at me. This was a whole different thing."

On July 5, the Stones had given a concert at Hyde Park in London, in memory of bandmate Brian Jones, who had died of a drug-related drowning 2 days earlier. (After being kicked out of the band for his drug use, something no other member of that famously druggy band was.) Like Woodstock, it was said to have attracted 500,000 fans.

The security at that concert was run by the London chapter of the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. There were no security issues there. So Stones lead singer Mick Jagger suggested the Hell's Angels as security for Altamont. Unfortunately, no one counted on the fact that the Hell's Angels weren't just a motorcycle club: They were a gang, involved in organized crime, a Mafia on two wheels. And they would be operating out of the East Bay, their home territory.

At Woodstock, out of 500,000 people, there were 3 deaths, all accidental: A drug overdose, a burst appendix, and a kid who made the mistake of trying to sleep under a tractor on a hill. At Altamont, out of 300,000 people, there were 4 deaths. Three were accidental: Two in a hit-and-run car accident, and one kid high on LSD who fell into an irrigation canal and drowned.

One death at Altamont was no accident. As can be seen in Gimme Shelter, the documentary film made by Albert and David Maysles, during the performance of "Sympathy for the Devil," the Stones had to stop, because there were fights near the stage. While playing "Under My Thumb," they had to stop for a medical emergency.

Just as The Who, 10 years later to the week, didn't know until they had finished a concert in Cincinnati that 11 fans had been killed in an accident before the show, the Stones didn't know what the emergency was. If they did, they might have stopped the show entirely. Certainly, they would've closed with a song other than "Street Fighting Man," their song inspired by the Paris demonstrations of the year before.

The Hell's Angels guarding the stage were mean, and they were drunk. Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old black man from Alameda, climbed onto a speaker. He had been told that, the further east you got from Oakland and Berkeley, the worse the racism got. This was a reasonable claim: Inland, California can be just as hicky as The South, just as New York State is the further you get from the City, and Pennsylvania is the further you get from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Hunter had heard this, so he packed a gun. He wasn't using it when he stood on the speaker. But the Angels grabbed him, started punching him, and, discovering the gun, stabbed him. The Angel who did the stabbing would be charged with murder, but was acquitted on self-defense grounds.

Afterward, the Maysles Brothers showed Jagger their footage of what happened, and filmed him watching it. Mick, who has so often embraced his devilish image -- before taking the title role in "Sympathy for the Devil," he titled a Stones album Their Satanic Majesties Request -- is not a man known for attacks of conscience. On the film, he appears genuinely shocked and scared.

Not enough to change his ways, though. He was still 26 years old, and the leader of what was already being called "The World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band." He thought he could do anything, and get away with it. And he has gotten away with a lot. The shock is not that Jagger's excesses of the 1960s led to the disaster at Altamont, 25 days before the decade's end. It's that he, or the Stones as a whole, haven't had another incident like Altamont -- or worse.

Rolling Stone soon called Altamont "Rock and roll's all-time worst day, December 6th, a day when everything went perfectly wrong." Shades of Franklin Roosevelt calling December 7th, 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, "a date which will live in infamy." And in 1990, writer A.E. Hotchner would publish a book about the Stones, Jones' death, and Altamont, titled Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties.

Of course, worse was to come: The rest of December 1969 -- I was born 12 days after Altamont -- and the 1st half of 1970 would see the breakup of The Beatles, Diana Ross leaving the Supremes, President Richard Nixon extending the Vietnam War into Cambodia, the Kent State Massacre, and the Hard Hat Demonstration that essentially supported the 2 previous occurrences.

As the poet William Butler Yeats wrote half a century earlier, "Things fall apart. The center cannot hold."

*

December 6, 1969 was a Saturday. "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye," by the "studio group" Steam, hit Number 1. I have a separate entry for this event.

It was the off-season for baseball. There was 1 game played in the NFL that day, and it was also in the Bay Area: The San Francisco 49ers beat the Chicago Bears, 42-21 at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. And there was 1 game played in the AFL: The New York Jets beat the Houston Oilers, 34-26 at the Astrodome in Houston.

The big story in America that day was not expected to be Altamont. It was expected to be a college football game that was moved to the Saturday after the intended last week of the regular season, because it looked like the teams involved would be ranked the top two in the nation. In this "Game of the Century," Number 1 Texas beat Number 2 Arkansas, 15-14 at Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I have a separate entry for this event.

There was 1 other college football game played that day: The Pasadena Bowl, held at the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena. San Diego State beat Boston University, 28-7.

Also that day, there were 5 games played in the NBA: 

* The New York Knicks beat the Milwaukee Bucks, 124-99 at what was still being called "The New Madison Square Garden Center." Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley each scored 29 points for the Knickerbockers, who advanced to 26-2 on the season that would end with their 1st NBA title. In a losing cause, Lew Alcindor (he changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1972) scored 26, and Len Chappell scored 24.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Cincinnati Royals, 120-102 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.

* The Seattle SuperSonics beat the Baltimore Bullets, 132-129 in overtime at the Baltimore Civic Center (now the CFG Bank Arena).

* The Chicago Bulls beat the Boston Celtics, 116-114 in overtime at the Chicago Stadium.

* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the San Diego Rockets, 128-115 at the San Diego Sports Arena. Wilt Chamberlain did not play for L.A., but Jerry West scored 30, and Elgin Baylor 25. Elvin Hayes scored 40 in a losing effort. The Rockets moved to Houston in 1971, and the arena is now named the Pechanga Arena.

Two games were played in the American Basketball Association:

* The Denver Rockets beat the Washington Caps, 108-97 at the Washington Coliseum. The Rockets would become the Denver Nuggets in 1974, renaming themselves for the city's 1st NBA team, which were founded in 1935, joined the NBA in 1948, and folded in 1950. After the 1969-70 season, the Caps moved to Norfolk, and became the Virginia Squires. The Nuggets, the New York Nets, the Indiana Pacers and the San Antonio Spurs were merged from the crumbling ABA into the NBA in 1976. The Squires were not.

* And the New Orleans Buccaneers beat the Miami Floridians, 112-104 at the Miami Beach Convention Hall.

* Five games were played in the NHL. The New York Rangers, the only NHL team in the Tri-State Area at the time, were not involved in any of them:

* The Minnesota North Stars beat the Montreal Canadiens, 4-3 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Boston Bruins beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 6-1 at the Boston Garden.

* The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 5-0 at Maple Leaf Gardens.

* The Detroit Red Wings beat the St. Louis Blues, 5-1 at the St. Louis Arena.

* And the Los Angeles Kings beat the Oakland Seals, 5-3 at The Forum in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, California.

Also, Arsenal drew with Southampton, 2-2 at Highbury in North London.