The concert was a success, an entirely peaceful event financed and filmed by Granada Television. Security had been provided by a ragtag group of people wearing leather, who the Stones mistakenly believed were part of the Hells Angels. Emboldened, the Stones hired the man who organized the Hyde Park concert, Sam Cutler, to work on an American tour in the fall of If the Woodstock festival in August represented peace and hippie idealism, then the Altamont Free Concert , held almost four months later, symbolically shattered that innocence.
But the event was marred by violent confrontations between the Hells Angels who were hired to do security and the crowd, in addition to lack of organization and bad drugs. Altamont at How went from peace and love to murder and mayhem. Those lyrics would prove to be prophetic when, on the following afternoon, the Stones arrived at the disastrous Altamont Speedway Free Festival in Livermore, California.
The Rolling Stones ended their U. It was supposed to be a celebration, but it turned into chaos. There was no site, there was no sound system.
There was no staging, although some of that was being sent to the Bay Area. There was no crew. There was no nothing. We'll do the show on Saturday. They just figured that they could do it. It just didn't matter what obstacles were thrown in their way. On the day of the show, they Angels were physically violent towards the crowd with pool cues; they even assaulted Jefferson Airplane co-singer Marty Balin during his band's set when he tried to intervene in a scuffle.
Adding to the sense of drama were the bad drugs going around; health professionals at the medical tent were dealing with numerous people experiencing freak-outs. There were no longer sacraments of a movement. They were cut with all kinds of things. Such factors as the Angels, drugs, and the lack of police intervention and proper facilities all contributed to a tense and dark environment throughout the day.
Sensing the chaos, the Grateful Dead decided at the last minute to pull out. Meanwhile, Meredith Hunter, a young black man who went to the show with his girlfriend, was beaten up by members of the Hells Angels.
Trying to get away from them, Hunter pulled out his gun near the stage and was fatally stabbed by Hells Angels member Alan Passaro he was later acquitted in court. A still from the documentary film 'Gimme Shelter', showing audience members looking on as Hells The concert was headlined and organized by The Rolling Stones. The film cuts back to footage of Altamont, where we see Hunter lying on a stretcher, dead. He was foaming at the mouth too; he was as nuts as the rest. Altamont is where Hunter lost his life.
Ward has never seen the film. Like the Grateful Dead, Owens decided that he should leave. Of course, things might have also got worse if the headliner had bailed. But the show went on, Hunter was killed, and, in the decade that followed, both the Dead and the Stones became bigger and more successful.
A great deal has been written about Altamont in the years since, but so much of the language around it has the exonerating blush of the passive: the sixties were ending; the Angels were the Angels; it could only happen to the Stones. There may have been larger forces at work, but the attempt to see Altamont as the end of the sixties obscures the extent to which what happened that night had happened, in different ways, many times before, and has happened many times since.
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