Mick Jagger (55 page)

Before returning to Britain in unquestionable triumph, they were to appear at a second festival—for free, like Hyde Park—at which conditions promised to be far superior to West Palm Beach Raceway’s. While arrangements for this were finalized, the band had a recording date at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, following in the footsteps of great soul artists like Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers. There, galvanized by his recent second spoonful, Mick finished off “Brown Sugar” at top speed, writing one verse per page of a yellow legal pad. He also handed “Wild Horses” to Keith, who was feeling some of the same pain of separation from his new baby son, Marlon.

There were some communication difficulties with the Muscle Shoals studio crew, whose Alabama accents the Stones sometimes found impossible to understand despite long conditioning to Jagger Dixie-speak. The Alabamans in turn were frequently baffled by the whiskeyand dope-slurred tones in which Keith now addressed the world. To avoid misunderstandings, Mick would repeat everything his Glimmer Twin said, like instantaneous translation at the UN.

The two nailed “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” on the last night in just two takes per track, sharing a microphone and swigging from the same bottle of bourbon. Afterward—as he had at every previous session—Mick destroyed all the outtakes so there could be no bootleg versions.

IT IS THE darkest of all rock legends: how at a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, California, in December 1969, an inoffensive audience member was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels while, a few feet away, Mick Jagger sang “Sympathy for the Devil,” as usual not giving a fuck. And how the magic decade which the Beatles had defined with melody, charm, and laughter was seen off by him and his band amid violence, chaos, and callousness. Almost everything in the legend is untrue, especially the part about Mick’s attitude. In fact, the horrible Altamont episode only came to pass because he did give a fuck.

While the tour had delighted its audiences without exception, it had created a backwash of resentment among promoters like Bill Graham, who’d been forced to dance to the Stones’ tune, and media commentators to whom Mick seemed altogether too pleased with himself. To both camps, he was probably at his most insufferable at a press conference in New York’s Rainbow Room on November 25, when a matronly woman journalist quoted his so-wicked 1965 hit to ask if he was more “satisfied” by America now. “D’ you mean foinancial-ay?” he replied in his best mixture of Cockney barrow boy and college debater. “Sexual-ay? Philosophic-lay?”

Among these disgruntled promoters and disapproving journalists, one complaint recurred time and again: that ticket prices for Stones shows throughout the tour had been set at an extortionately high level. The San Franciso Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason—who happened also to be a founding editor of Rolling Stone—made it into a positive crusade, repeatedly asking just how much money the band needed to squirrel away to “Merrie England” and suggesting that, despite this supposed avalanche of dollars, their black supporting acts were being shamefully underpaid.

In reality, despite the Stones’ urgent need of capital, top seat prices at prime venues like the Los Angeles Forum were $8.50, just a dollar more than to see Mick’s archrival Jim Morrison with the Doors. In planning the tour, Mick had insisted on proscenium shows, where the whole audience got a frontal view, even though in-the-round venues could sell as many as 25 percent more tickets. While raking in $260,000 from the Forum, he’d accepted just $35,000 for the gig at Alabama’s Auburn University. And Ike and Tina Turner and B. B. King, far from being exploited, were receiving their biggest career boost in years.

Clear as Mick’s conscience was, Gleason’s constant harping had started to get to him. “We aren’t doing this for money,” he told another media levee at the L.A. Beverly Wilshire, with what can only be called breathtaking disingenuousness. “We just wanted to play in America and have a lot of fun. We’re not really into that sort of economic scene. I mean, you’re either gonna sing and all that crap or you’re gonna be an economist. We’re sorry people can’t afford to come. We don’t know that this tour is more expensive. You’ll have to tell us.”

In the tour’s closing stages, however, a chance came along to answer Ralph J. Gleason and all those other accusations of greed and exploitativeness. Six days after the Stones’ last official gig, California was to have its own Woodstock-style free festival, aimed at equaling, or surpassing, the original four months previously, but this time, in truer hippie style, organized by the musicians themselves. The idea had come from the Grateful Dead, supported by Woodstock co-headliners Jefferson Airplane, Carlos Santana, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The one-day event would take place on December 6 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, an easily accessible public space with all the facilities for large crowds that Woodstock had so sorely lacked.

Mick had always regretted not being at Woodstock and, even before his alfresco Hyde Park triumph, had talked about such a Californian festival, as had Keith, with the Grateful Dead’s manager, Rock Scully. Performing for free at this “Woodstock West” would not only be one in the eye for Gleason but a thank-you to all the American fans who had taken him to their bosoms, or whatever, once again. It would also provide a climax to the film which Albert and David Maysles had been shooting throughout the tour. Such was Mick’s enthusiasm that, while the Stones recorded at Muscle Shoals, key members of their tour team were sent to help put together the event from the Dead’s communal house in Marin County. Not only the Dead but all the West Coast bands involved hugely revered the Stones and regarded them as the event’s pièce de résistance. Even so, it was never seen as a Rolling Stones concert, but as a multi-act show in which the Stones would give the climactic closing performance. With sunny Hyde Park memories still lingering, Mick expressed the hope that it would continue to “set a standard of how one can behave in large gatherings.”

The Grateful Dead’s initial planning was quickly revealed to be wholly inadequate. Golden Gate Park had been announced as the festival venue without anyone first ascertaining whether it was available. When belated approaches were made to San Francisco’s parks department, the necessary permit was granted but then revoked because a football game was due to be played there on the same day. An alternative site then materialized in a car-racing track, Sears Point Raceway, in the Sonoma Mountains, whose setting formed a perfect natural amphitheater. The Stones’ production chief, Chip Monck, was immediately dispatched to build a stage which, since it would nestle against a mountainside and command a steep downward slope, needed to be only about three feet high.

Sears Point had been officially announced as the festival venue when another problem arose. The raceway was owned by a Los Angeles film company, which suddenly added a rider to its original easygoing terms, claiming distribution rights to any film made of the festival. Failing that, a $1 million fee would have to be paid with a further $1 million lodged in escrow against site damage. By ill luck, the company also included the promoters of the Stones’ L.A. Forum shows, who were still smarting from the 75 percent of gate receipts they’d had to hand over, so there was no possibility of negotiation. As a result, forty-eight hours before the festival’s scheduled start, with thousands of spectators already en route, Sears Point Raceway had to be scratched.

Losing faith in the Grateful Dead’s organizational powers, Mick hired a flamboyant L.A. lawyer, Mel Belli—known as “the King of Torts” and most recently seen in the Manson trial—to conduct the seemingly hopeless search for yet another site. And, miraculously, the world of Californian automotive sport again provided one. This was Altamont Raceway, a stock-car track near Livermore, eighty miles from San Francisco and sixty from Sears Point. The owner, Dick Carter, offered it gratis, provided the festival truly was free; $5,000 was paid for clearing up afterward and a $1 million insurance policy taken out against site damage. Chip Monck and his crew dismantled the stage they’d built at Sears Point and worked through the night to reassemble it at Altamont, while radio stations and the stop press column in that week’s Rolling Stone announced the venue change to the festival goers in transit. The idea of what RS termed an “instant Woodstock” gained further momentum when the promoter of the original New York marvel, Michael Lang, was brought in to advise on the logistical complications involved. The only Cassandra voice came from Lang’s fellow entrepreneur Bill Graham, seemingly puckered with sour grapes: “They’ll never do it … it could explode in their faces.”

Graham knew, if no one else did, that all that Sears Point and Altamont had in common was being called a raceway. While the former was a well-run, well-patronized place of family entertainment, the latter was a run-down resort of mainly rowdy young males which for years had been hovering near bankruptcy, hence its owner’s eagerness to attract high-grade rock performers there. Whereas Sears Point’s steep slope would have made a perfect auditorium, provided good sight lines for hundreds of yards around, and given Chip Monck’s concert stage an unassailable height, Altamont was almost totally flat. But there was no time for Monck to raise the level of the three-foot-high structure he was reassembling.

Least promising of all was the neighborhood. The hippies trekking out from San Francisco to Livermore would find themselves in the mainly working-class, redneck East Bay area, where long hair was still greeted by howls of “faggot” and fusillades of fist-crushed empty beer cans. It also was the territory of the Oakland Hell’s Angels, the most feared and lawless of their kind in California.

By the afternoon of Friday, December 5, a crowd of Woodstock proportions, or very nearly, was collecting at Altamont Raceway. One hundred thousand people had already claimed the area nearest the stage, and thousands more were arriving every hour in endless parallel columns, bearing tents, bedrolls, cooking utensils, and musical instruments, like some medieval peasant army. Parking arrangements were shambolic: the nearest place cars could be left was a stretch of unfinished freeway eight miles off. Everyone but artists and VIPs (who used helicopters) had to foot-slog it down neglected access roads or, dangerously, along a railway line.

The muddy meadows of Woodstock would have seemed Elysian by contrast with these bleak, treeless flats, barely warmed by Northern California’s pallid winter sun. Altamont was, indeed, the only festival site ever to need cleaning up before the event, being littered with the hulks of cars wrecked in its regular demolition derbies and carpeted with a foot-crunching layer of metal fragments and broken glass. The catering, toilet, and first-aid facilities that had been shipped in over the past frantic twenty-four hours clearly were nowhere near sufficient. But festival-going hippies by now had some of the same spirit as Londoners during the Second World War Blitz, and the vibe initially seemed excellent.

In the early hours of Saturday, the Stones arrived by chopper from San Francisco, accompanied by key members of their entourage (and, as usual, a Maysles brothers film crew) for a first inspection of the stage. Unfortunately, the darkness prevented Mick, or anyone else, from realizing the implications of its minimal height. Later, wearing a pink satin cape and matching Bonnie and Clyde cap, he talked to some of the audience as they shivered in their bedrolls, passing from campfire to campfire rather like King Harry before the Battle of Agincourt in Shakespeare’s Henry V: “a little touch of Jagger in the night.” Someone offered him a joint and—having asked for the camera to be switched off—he accepted it and took a hit.

The vibe changed drastically the next morning with the arrival of the Hell’s Angels. Though this was Oakland Angels country, they made up a virtual convention from chapters throughout California: the ’Frisco, the San Bernadino, the San Jose—some fifty riders in all, mounted on 850-cc Harley-Davidsons, each in a black leather jacket with a pale horseshoe-shaped insignia across the back; some with an equally tough-looking girlfriend clinging on behind; all bearing as much resemblance to Hyde Park’s pimply faux Nazis as white lightning does to orange Fanta. With the convoy of gleaming, jouncing high-handlebar “hogs” came a yellow school bus, loaded to the gunwales with their private store of beer and rotgut wine.

The Angels’ recruitment as stewards is always held up as Altamont’s crowning folly—and the ultimate manifestation of Mick’s rock-star vanity and arrogance. Actually, it had been planned by the Grateful Dead, abetted by chic radicals like Emmett Grogan, well before the Stones’ involvement, and did possess a glimmer of sense. Since security staff and even police could not handle the Angels, it was safest to include them in the organization, give them a privileged stage-front view, and cast them flatteringly as a Praetorian guard to the Stones. Previous festivals had found them a deterrent to violence if they were allowed to park near the stage-side generators, so protecting the electricity supply along with the performers. There had never been any serious trouble with them before.

At noon, with the crowd now close to three hundred thousand, emcee Sam Cutler announced “Santana, the first band in the biggest party of 1969!” With the first elegaic notes of Carlos Santana’s guitar, violence began erupting all around the stage-front area between two immediately recognizable factions in that overwhelmingly white assembly. One consisted of hippies, male and female, breaking into the jerky lone gyrations music always awoke in them; the others were redneck youths, attacking any long-haired, wavy-sleeved dancer in reach, male or female, with pool cues that seemed to have been issued from some invisible quartermaster’s store. Both factions were already out of their heads, the rednecks on booze and amphetamines, their victims on various types of bad acid that made many strip naked and almost offer themselves to the flailing cues. According to Cutler, the assailants were not fully fledged Angels but would-be recruits, hoping to make their bones by breaking a few hippie ones. The attacks went on in full view of the performers, uninhibited by snapping press cameras or the Maysles brothers’ several film crews. There was not a security man, let alone a police officer, in sight.