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Speaker 6: Notions you are now listening to True Murder, The most
Speaker 6: shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that
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Speaker 2: Nightstalker, DTK.
Speaker 6: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
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Speaker 6: your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 2: Good evening. In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive,
Speaker 2: never before revealed details, Celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells
Speaker 2: the definitive story of the Rolling Stones infamous Altamont Concert
Speaker 2: in San Francisco, the disastrous historic event that marked the
Speaker 2: end of the idealistic nineteen sixties in the Annals of
Speaker 2: rock history. The Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December sixth,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine has long been seen as a distorted
Speaker 2: twin of Woodstock, the day that shattered the sixties promise
Speaker 2: of peace and love when a concertgoer was killed by
Speaker 2: a member of the Hell's Angels, the notorious biker club
Speaker 2: acting as security. While most people know of the events
Speaker 2: from the film Gimme Shelter, the whole story has remained
Speaker 2: buried in various accounts, rumor, and myth until now. Altamont
Speaker 2: explores Rock's Darkest Day, a fiasco that began well before
Speaker 2: the climatic death of Meredith Hunter and continued beyond their
Speaker 2: infamous December Night. Joel Salvin probes every aspect of the show,
Speaker 2: from the stones hastily plan tour preceding the concert, to
Speaker 2: the bat that swept through the audience, to other deaths
Speaker 2: that also occurred that evening to capture the full scope
Speaker 2: of the tragedy and its aftermath. He also provides an
Speaker 2: in depth look at the Grateful Dead's role in the
Speaker 2: events leading to Altamont, examining the bands behind the scenes
Speaker 2: presence in both arranging the show and hiring the Hell's
Speaker 2: Angels as security. The product of twenty years of exhaustive
Speaker 2: research and dozens of interviews with many key players, including
Speaker 2: medical staff, Hell's Angels members, the stage crew, and the
Speaker 2: musicians who are there. Including sixteen pages of color photos,
Speaker 2: Altamont is the ultimate account of the final event in
Speaker 2: Rock's formative and most turbulent decade. Book there was examining
Speaker 2: this evening is Altamont, The Rolling Stones, The Hell's Angels,
Speaker 2: and the inside story of Rock's Darkest Day, with my guests,
Speaker 2: journalist and author Joel Salvin. Welcome to the program, and
Speaker 2: thank you for agreeing to this interview. Joel Salvin, Thanks Dan,
Speaker 2: good to be here. Thank you very much. A little
Speaker 2: bit different book to look at today, but an incredible
Speaker 2: look back in history and again the darkest day in
Speaker 2: music's history, definitely. So let's ask I asked this question,
Speaker 2: why a book about Altamont? Now, how did you become involved?
Speaker 2: Why did you want to become involved? Tell us a
Speaker 2: little bit about that.
Speaker 5: Well, I worked for most of what we might laughingly
Speaker 5: refer to as my adult life as the pop music
Speaker 5: critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. I started there in
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy and the Duns, the aroma of Altamont was
Speaker 5: still in the air. So it's been a part of
Speaker 5: my lore all along. I came to know the musicians
Speaker 5: who played their stage hands, people who attended the concert,
Speaker 5: and I heard these stories all you know, all those years.
Speaker 5: Why now, well, let's just say that there's a I
Speaker 5: was time for a good story. This is a great story.
Speaker 5: I was not so convinced myself at first that it
Speaker 5: was a great story, because I was so it was
Speaker 5: such common material to me, I was so a nerd
Speaker 5: to the drama of it. But it was suggested that
Speaker 5: I look into this a little bit. Uh, And I
Speaker 5: went down to Monterey to visit with Rock Scully, the
Speaker 5: manager of The Grateful Dead Roca told me the story
Speaker 5: of how Altamont started. It was a beautiful day. I
Speaker 5: hadn't seen Rock in ages. He looked great. We ate
Speaker 5: outside and I drove home. It's about two and a
Speaker 5: half hour drive to San Francisco, and I drove home
Speaker 5: just feeling like I had a gold nugget in my pocket.
Speaker 5: This story, this story was so good, and it's just streamed.
Speaker 5: This is how a book opens. And about two months later,
Speaker 5: Rock died. He'd been sick that day. I didn't know it.
Speaker 5: Like I said, he looked so good. I was taking
Speaker 5: photographs of it. But it felt, really at that point
Speaker 5: like these stories were evaporating and we had to do
Speaker 5: this right now or it was just going to not
Speaker 5: be possible. And it's certainly been the case since the
Speaker 5: book's been published. I think three or four people that
Speaker 5: I interviewed for the book have died since it.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, now, let's as you do in the book,
Speaker 2: take us back to and you include this fantastic the
Speaker 2: historical backdrop, But you have to take us back before
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine to be able to explain the phenomena
Speaker 2: the free concerts, the status musically and culturally of the
Speaker 2: Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead in some of the bands,
Speaker 2: Woodstock itself, and the sixties counter revolution. So tell us
Speaker 2: about jan Winner and the humble beginnings of Rolling Stone,
Speaker 2: and tell us to start to begin to tell us
Speaker 2: who were the major players before we talk about the
Speaker 2: December nineteen sixty nine Altamont concert.
Speaker 5: So you're so right, Dan, this was just a huge
Speaker 5: convergence of social, political, cultural, and musical factors out there,
Speaker 5: and it was really difficult to lay that stuff out.
Speaker 5: The underpinnings of all this. That was the most challenging
Speaker 5: part of the book for me. And you can't separate
Speaker 5: what happened on stage and with the Hell's Angels and
Speaker 5: Meredith Hunter and all that that day, with the culture
Speaker 5: of the time. The historical moment wood Sock had been
Speaker 5: three months before the moon landing, the Manson killings. The
Speaker 5: Chicago police shot Fred Hampton, the Black Panther in his
Speaker 5: apartment that very week. It was just an extraordinary moment
Speaker 5: in our nation's history. You mentioned Jon Lennard. The Rolling
Speaker 5: Stone magazine was successful by that point, was about a
Speaker 5: year and a half old. Jon was the publisher and founder,
Speaker 5: but it was largely a kind of underground music magazine,
Speaker 5: sort of a hit parade or a tiger beat for hippies,
Speaker 5: until the Altamont thing challenged him journalistically and they rose
Speaker 5: to the task. Their twenty thousand word article cover headline
Speaker 5: let It Bleed was really the first authentically accurate journalistic
Speaker 5: account of that day. The mainstream media just kicked that
Speaker 5: bucket down the hill, and I mean the New York
Speaker 5: Times noted it is a joyous advanced although one concert
Speaker 5: go or had been stabbed to death, but otherwise it
Speaker 5: was wonderful. The local newspaper radio has pretty much taken
Speaker 5: the same thing it took Rolling Stone to really pull
Speaker 5: the curtain back on what the violence and negligence of
Speaker 5: that day, and in doing so they really established themselves
Speaker 5: as a legitimate news magazine with that one issue.
Speaker 2: Let's go back and tell it in the sequence so
Speaker 2: that we can understand how important Jan Winner and the
Speaker 2: Rolling Stone Magazine is to this story and is to
Speaker 2: history period and this murder case as well as we
Speaker 2: will see. Let's talk about the bands and San Francisco. Now,
Speaker 2: San Francisco, you can tell it better than anyone. It
Speaker 2: was outside what I guess the rock music thought was
Speaker 2: New York and Los Angeles, and it certainly San Francisco
Speaker 2: was not known nationwide as you write. So tell us
Speaker 2: about what happens with the San Francisco music scene in
Speaker 2: some of those bands, those players, and how do they
Speaker 2: get exposure before we talk about again this planned free
Speaker 2: festival here with the Stones and the Dead and some
Speaker 2: other bands.
Speaker 5: Okay, I can do that. So in nineteen sixty six
Speaker 5: in San Francisco there was a tremendous explosion of music
Speaker 5: based primarily on people who have been experimenting with the
Speaker 5: psychedelic Doug Lst. There are a couple of dance balls
Speaker 5: in town, the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom. They
Speaker 5: were putting on shows every week, and there was a
Speaker 5: whole variety of new sounding rock music, rock music they
Speaker 5: had never sounded like this before, with bands with funny
Speaker 5: names like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big
Speaker 5: Brother in the Holding Company. These bands were entirely unheard
Speaker 5: of outside of certain neighborhoods in San Cisco in nineteen
Speaker 5: sixty six, but by nineteen sixty seven, the national news
Speaker 5: media had begun to find out about this fifty thing
Speaker 5: in San Francisco. In January sixty seven, some hundred thousand
Speaker 5: people showed up at the Polo Fields and Golden Gate
Speaker 5: Park to listen to those dams. They did so without
Speaker 5: any violence, any strife, and the gewords, which blew everybody's
Speaker 5: mind that that many people could come together without any
Speaker 5: you know, horrible incidences. They were compared to professional athletics,
Speaker 5: and the cops just couldn't believe what a different crowd
Speaker 5: it was from say, like a football game. So that's
Speaker 5: like where the beginning of this whole San Francisco mythology began.
Speaker 5: It was no mythology, you know, these dams lived in
Speaker 5: the Haye Ashbury and a Golden Gate Park and they
Speaker 5: were just if the day was sunny and they felt
Speaker 5: like they'd take their gear out in the park and
Speaker 5: just start playing, and they didn't care who came or how,
Speaker 5: or if they got paid for it or not. And
Speaker 5: so this was like a new kind of renaissance of
Speaker 5: arts and culture on a lite electric psychedelic level in California,
Speaker 5: and there was no Internet at those times, so there
Speaker 5: was very little information outside of the immediate experience, right,
Speaker 5: you know, there were magazines, they weren't newspapers weren't covering it.
Speaker 5: The record industry was ignoring it. By the summer of
Speaker 5: sixty seven, which the media called the Summer of Love,
Speaker 5: san Francisco is very much and everybody's focus. One hundred
Speaker 5: thousand kids descended on San Francisco that summer. The Jefferson
Speaker 5: Airplanes second album, Cyrialistic Pillow, was the biggest record of
Speaker 5: the summer. White Rabbits and Somebody Love all over the airwaves,
Speaker 5: and the entire record industry sort of looked at San
Speaker 5: Francisco as like having a new answer. San Francisco in
Speaker 5: London became the sort of axis on which the rock
Speaker 5: scene revolved at that point, and by two years later
Speaker 5: in nineteen sixty nine, San Francisco was the center of
Speaker 5: the rock music universe, and the Airplane was one of
Speaker 5: the big bands in the world. There was a big
Speaker 5: brother in the Hold Income. They had a number one
Speaker 5: album that year. All the great new bands, all the
Speaker 5: exciting new bands, Creeden's Clearwater Revival Santana was lie in
Speaker 5: the Family Stone. Those were all out of San Francisco,
Speaker 5: and it seemed like that, you know, there was just
Speaker 5: something so authentic about the music these hippies made that
Speaker 5: it had resonated all around the world, and especially in London,
Speaker 5: where the music scene had always been very fashion conscious.
Speaker 5: You know, understand. I mean they look like they transmografy
Speaker 5: music into style in England, and that's a very close
Speaker 5: relationship that they didn't quite understand from five thousand miles away.
Speaker 5: With what little faint hints of it they could get lisps,
Speaker 5: you know, LSD was hard to come by in London
Speaker 5: and light shows. They were just guessing at what was
Speaker 5: going on in San Francisco. There was very little back
Speaker 5: and forth until like sixty eight. So the Rolling Stones
Speaker 5: in nineteen sixty nine found themselves in a financial bind.
Speaker 5: They were broke. They had a manager who had bottlenecked
Speaker 5: all their royalties and they were advised the only way
Speaker 5: they could get new money was to form a separate
Speaker 5: company that he wasn't involved in toured the United States.
Speaker 5: They hadn't been on tour in the United States for
Speaker 5: three years. The previous time, you know, they were like
Speaker 5: do a half hour set at the end of an
Speaker 5: entire card of like one or two hit wonders, doing
Speaker 5: three or four songs a piece, and then get the
Speaker 5: hell out of Dodge. Right. But in the ensuing three years,
Speaker 5: the rock scene has just changed so totally. In the
Speaker 5: United States. I mean, like Leed Zeppelin was the big
Speaker 5: act that year that fall in October, touring behind their
Speaker 5: second album, and you know, they had a two and
Speaker 5: a half hour show with like a half hour drum solo.
Speaker 5: So the Rolling Stones seeing the United States as a
Speaker 5: financial opportunity to show up here to do this tour,
Speaker 5: and they and it gets complicated by many issues now
Speaker 5: because they're trying to get into this world of this
Speaker 5: new world of woodstock rock, and there's so many public
Speaker 5: pronouncements that must be made. You know, you have to
Speaker 5: be in favor of free music, and you can't be
Speaker 5: seen as gouging your fans, even if you're asking seven
Speaker 5: dollars and fifty cents about twice what everybody else gets
Speaker 5: for concert tickets. Right. So the Stones are trying to
Speaker 5: brush up against this San Francisco thing, and they start
Speaker 5: talking about this free concert right from the start. It's
Speaker 5: a thing at the time free concerts, and Jager mentions
Speaker 5: it in a press conference in Los Angeles beginning the tour.
Speaker 5: Once the tour starts and they find out how much
Speaker 5: impact they are really having, what size of opportunity this
Speaker 5: American tour really represents, then you know they start over
Speaker 5: time on this idea of well, let's do a concert movie,
Speaker 5: and let's let's have a free concert kind of our
Speaker 5: own Woodstock at the end to frame the movie. Now,
Speaker 5: they don't even really get this in gear until the
Speaker 5: end of the tour in New York when they finally
Speaker 5: meet with Albert and David Masels, the documentary filmmakers who
Speaker 5: would shoot the Madison Square Garden shows. But that's just
Speaker 5: the next to the last show on the tour. There's
Speaker 5: some footage, but they don't have a movie. The only
Speaker 5: way they're gonna have a movie is if the Stones
Speaker 5: go through with this giant Woodstock the in free concert
Speaker 5: in San Francisco. Well, behind the scenes, there's then a
Speaker 5: power struggle between the Stone's front office and the Grateful Dead,
Speaker 5: and the Stone's front office has taken control of the
Speaker 5: permit process with the Parks because It was Rock Scully's
Speaker 5: original idea to get a permit in the name of
Speaker 5: the Jeffson Airplane and Grateful Dead and bring the Stones on.
Speaker 5: It's like a surprise special guest announced like the day
Speaker 5: before the concert, sort of pull one over on the city.
Speaker 5: But the Stones insisted are their guys insisted on you
Speaker 5: taking up the permit process themselves, And that ended any
Speaker 5: prospect of ever playing in San Francisco, because, believe me,
Speaker 5: the mayor of San Francisco is not interested in hifty
Speaker 5: smoothing of the park. So Jagger goes ahead the next
Speaker 5: day and announces at a New York press conference that
Speaker 5: they're going to have this free concert on December sixth,
Speaker 5: somewhere near San Francisco. We don't know where. As late
Speaker 5: as Tuesday, before the Saturday of the scheduled concert, they
Speaker 5: did not have a location. Then they stumble across this
Speaker 5: racetrack about sixty miles north of San Francisco called Serious Point,
Speaker 5: strike a deal with the guys that are running the track,
Speaker 5: and start building the stage and sound system. The next day,
Speaker 5: the corporate owners of the racetrack find out about this
Speaker 5: deal and they call up the Stones lawyer and they
Speaker 5: do not believe that the Stones are doing this movie
Speaker 5: for charity, and they don't happen to be in the
Speaker 5: film business themselves. They want a piece of the film
Speaker 5: and they want a rental. And now the Stones refused
Speaker 5: to budge. This is all about money. They don't get
Speaker 5: to spend any money. They scale me it for twenty
Speaker 5: four hours. The stage is going up. At serious point,
Speaker 5: the sheriff is calling and telling them if they throw there,
Speaker 5: they're all going to be arrested. And that's when this guy,
Speaker 5: Dick Carter shows up, calls him to the Stone's lawyer's office.
Speaker 5: He's got a rundown speedway sixty miles east of San Francisco,
Speaker 5: and I mean nowhere, past the suburbs, past Exurbia, past
Speaker 5: hundreds of acres of cowell passer over a hill and
Speaker 5: in a valley on the edge of nowhere. The biggest
Speaker 5: crowd he's ever had, six thousand for demolition. Jersey's almost
Speaker 5: out of business, but he says the show's can have
Speaker 5: his raceraft Altamont speedway for free. He just wants to publicity.
Speaker 5: It's Thursday afternoon. The show's supposed to start on Saturday
Speaker 5: at noon. Rock Scullia the Grateful Dead, gets in a
Speaker 5: helicopter with Michael Lang, the producer of Woodstock, not really
Speaker 5: sure what he's doing with and they fly out over
Speaker 5: the Livermore Valley where Altamont is to take a look
Speaker 5: at it. As they dip down over this racetrackt Rock
Speaker 5: looks out there and he sees all these broken glass
Speaker 5: and these oil stains and these wrecked cars from the
Speaker 5: demolition derby sitting there thinking what the what the and
Speaker 5: he hears Michael Lang say, oh, this is perfect. We
Speaker 5: can do it right here. Fst Thursday afternoon, they start
Speaker 5: moving the gear over from serious points sixty miles away
Speaker 5: by helicopter. Five trucks that are driven by volunteers raised
Speaker 5: from the radio come helpless homes concert. They put the
Speaker 5: stage together fighting night in the dark, without many flashlights,
Speaker 5: and they're still plugging in equipment and wrapping tables. When
Speaker 5: the band starts the next day at noon, there's three
Speaker 5: hundred thousand people there in the middle of nowhere. No
Speaker 5: running water, no food, concessions, no parking, no nothing. Just oooh,
Speaker 5: all these people shut up. The cops had no idea
Speaker 5: they were coming. There's a very bad setup for what happened,
Speaker 5: and what happened was what you know, you would expect
Speaker 5: from something like that.
Speaker 2: Let's go back a little bit to the relationship that
Speaker 2: the Rolling Stones had with the UK Hell's Angels and
Speaker 2: the difference as you point out, between the UK Hell's
Speaker 2: Angels and American California Hell's Angels with Sunny Barger and crew.
Speaker 2: Tell us about the relationship the Dead had with the
Speaker 2: Great Pardoner, with the Hell's Angels and their own guy
Speaker 2: that were former I guess former angels, So tell us
Speaker 2: a little bit about that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, the Angels were very much a part of
Speaker 5: the San Francisco rock scene. There were presents at all
Speaker 5: the outdoor concerts and in fact at the Human Being
Speaker 5: they guarded the electrical cord and the handle of the
Speaker 5: Lost Children. That was one of the big things that
Speaker 5: you know, everybody was like, oh my god. The Hell's Angels, well,
Speaker 5: you know they partied with Ken Casey, and Ken Causey
Speaker 5: was the acid evangelist who provided the environment where the
Speaker 5: Gatful Dead started, so they all kind of knew each other,
Speaker 5: and especially the San Francisco chapter. So when the concert
Speaker 5: was originally planned, Rock Scully said, we got to invite
Speaker 5: the Angels. They're coming anyway, so we met whom we
Speaker 5: should invite them. So he took Sam Cutler, who was
Speaker 5: the Storms tour director, over to meet with some of
Speaker 5: the officers of the San Francisco Chapter. And the first
Speaker 5: thing Pete Nell said was, we're not cops. We're not
Speaker 5: gonna do security. Oh, you know, we just want you
Speaker 5: to help out in any way you can. And you know,
Speaker 5: we want you to feel welcome, and you know, we
Speaker 5: want to make you feel welcome. And teachers, well, we
Speaker 5: like beer. The Samson says, well, we'll buy you some beer.
Speaker 5: So he buys five hundred dollars with a beer for
Speaker 5: the Hell's Angels and they come over. Keep in mind,
Speaker 5: if that concert had been held in San Francisco, which
Speaker 5: at that time was planned for, then the San Francisco
Speaker 5: Chapter would have had jurisdiction, and that's a different thing altogether.
Speaker 5: Those guys were well known to the dance. They hung
Speaker 5: out backstage, they rode bikes together, they took business together.
Speaker 5: They were all together, more civilized bunch of Hell's Angels.
Speaker 5: And once it moved out of San Francisco and the
Speaker 5: San Francisco Chapter lost jurisdiction. Then it said a different ballgame,
Speaker 5: and in fact most of the problems of Altamont were
Speaker 5: causing the front stage by the San Jose Chapter, which
Speaker 5: is a brand new chapter, had been formed just that
Speaker 5: summer after a violent, vicious turf war with a group
Speaker 5: called the Gypsy Jokers. They've wiped out the Gypsy Jokers
Speaker 5: and took like a few of the Gypsy Jokers and
Speaker 5: some of the South San Francisco Angels and formed this
Speaker 5: new San Jose chapter. And the Santase Chapter showed up,
Speaker 5: and they were strung their bikes across the front of
Speaker 5: the stage because well they were gonna buy tall stage
Speaker 5: from three hundred thousand people a mile away, and they
Speaker 5: knew that nobody would touch a Hell's Angels fight. Well
Speaker 5: that didn't prove to be the case. But the San
Speaker 5: Francisco Angels showed up. They were backstage, they were on stage.
Speaker 5: They went out in front with the pool cues. That
Speaker 5: was the San Lease guys. One of the most important
Speaker 5: jobs in my book was to was to teat the
Speaker 5: Hell's Angels fairly at last, and to give those guys
Speaker 5: their names. Back By the way, Dan, because I look
Speaker 5: over all the reports that are reporting that came before
Speaker 5: and it's just Hell's Angels this and Hell's Angels out.
Speaker 5: Oh look, you know, these were people, and some of
Speaker 5: them were as a gass and a paull that what
Speaker 5: went on that day, as anybody was. Some of them
Speaker 5: were extremely helpful to the doctors. Some of them were
Speaker 5: very helpful to the film crew. There's a lot of
Speaker 5: different experiences in Altamont for the Hell's Angels, And you know,
Speaker 5: I wanted to be fair and honest and real about that,
Speaker 5: you know, like Paul Hibbitts, they called him Animal. That
Speaker 5: was the guy who beat up Marty ballin the Jefferson
Speaker 5: Airplane vocalist and I want to you know, he died
Speaker 5: a few years ago. He spent most of his life
Speaker 5: up in Alaska. But he was really apparently a very fun,
Speaker 5: nice guy who's off intoxicated that day, real high, A
Speaker 5: lot of people were. There was, as you say, a
Speaker 5: lot of bad drugs going around. And he also did
Speaker 5: love the Fist party. So you know, Animal was a
Speaker 5: bad flash point. And yeah, he beat up Marty once
Speaker 5: in front of the film cameras. In the second time backstage,
Speaker 5: and then he beat up Rex Jackson the Grateful Dead's
Speaker 5: Roady who was the big bad enforcer of that band.
Speaker 5: And when Rex got knocked out, everybody on stage knew
Speaker 5: that the Angels own the stage, so some of them misbehaved.
Speaker 5: They were putting in a bad position. But the Stones
Speaker 5: didn't have any idea what they were. The guys that
Speaker 5: intended to be Hell's Angels in London, that they that
Speaker 5: they had backstage at their free concert in Hyde Park.
Speaker 5: Those are some candy ass guys with clean jackets with
Speaker 5: their colors drawn and chalk and they rode mop heads
Speaker 5: for prying out loud. They had no idea what a
Speaker 5: California Hell's Angel was anymore, and they knew what a
Speaker 5: real California hippy was or what a pre concert was
Speaker 5: really like in the park. They just thought these things
Speaker 5: could be just manifested out of the ether and Jaggers
Speaker 5: in particular, so a total disregard for like practical realities.
Speaker 2: Let's go to the day itself, and of course you
Speaker 2: talk about you mentioned three hundred thousand people, and no
Speaker 2: one had even planned on these kinds of numbers, and
Speaker 2: certainly no one was prepared for any kinds of those
Speaker 2: numbers in any conceivable way. Whatsoever. What was the idea
Speaker 2: about the Golden Gate Park? Was there some confidence that
Speaker 2: the concert Kent would be organized? And why was it
Speaker 2: not able to be originally? I mean, you had the
Speaker 2: other speedway site, but why could have not conceivably been
Speaker 2: done at say, Golden Gate Park.
Speaker 5: So this whole thing starts late one night in London
Speaker 5: of about two months before, when Rock Scully of the
Speaker 5: Grateful Dead brings over a bunch of Sensoma exotic marijuana
Speaker 5: grown in California, to Keith Richards. So they stay up
Speaker 5: all night smoking this grass and talking about like things
Speaker 5: that are going to happen, like the Stones ending tour,
Speaker 5: and Rock tells Keith that he can fix it for
Speaker 5: the Stones to play a free concert in Golden Gate Park.
Speaker 5: He'd get a permit in the name of the Jeffson
Speaker 5: Airplane and Grateful Dead and then announced the Stones like
Speaker 5: special surprise guests twenty four hours before then. He was
Speaker 5: sure he could do that. I'm not sure what Keith
Speaker 5: thought Rock Scully was. You know, did Keith think that
Speaker 5: he put on a suit and went to an office
Speaker 5: in the morning. Rock Scully was a hippie. He was
Speaker 5: a fantastic guy. He was very very smart and well
Speaker 5: educated and highly verbal, but he's also like the attention
Speaker 5: deficit disordered poster child. He'd taken so much LSD. There
Speaker 5: his pupils and just full brown blobs floating in buttermilk.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 5: And you know, it's not exactly like the kind of
Speaker 5: person that you know works in the music business in London.
Speaker 5: So I don't know what Key thought of Rock or
Speaker 5: what Rock really thought, because I know he also suggested
Speaker 5: that the Stones should do a concert at stone Hens
Speaker 5: that night, and and also dreamed up taking the Stones
Speaker 5: to the taj Mahal for a concert. So who knows,
Speaker 5: but the idea stuck with Keith. And when the Stone
Speaker 5: stops a Los Angeles and started seeing all the tremendous
Speaker 5: excitement around both the Stones themselves and this free concert idea,
Speaker 5: then they contacted Rock and asked him to make good
Speaker 5: on his his boast, and he showed up with Emmitt
Speaker 5: Grogan and the Diggers. They were sort of like a
Speaker 5: hate Ashbury community group down in Hollywood, and agreed to
Speaker 5: do this with him. Now, the permit thing came unglued,
Speaker 5: and that's another complicated backstage politics deal because there was
Speaker 5: this guy in the Stones tour going by the name
Speaker 5: of John James. That wasn't his real name. The Stones
Speaker 5: didn't know that. He told the Stones he worked for
Speaker 5: Chrysler and could get them free cars. He told Chrysler
Speaker 5: he worked for the Stones and could get them an endorsement.
Speaker 5: And with that he wriggled his way into sort of
Speaker 5: the touring party management. And he was a big shot.
Speaker 5: He was also on the witness protection program and seemed
Speaker 5: to know some cops. He bought some off duty New
Speaker 5: York cops around to guard the Stones, you know. And
Speaker 5: he stepped up at some point and said, oh, I
Speaker 5: can handle this permit thing, and this he took over
Speaker 5: the idea of contacting Now that just wasn't gonna work.
Speaker 5: But Grateful Dead knew the system, and they knew how
Speaker 5: to tickle it, and they knew how to work with subterfuge,
Speaker 5: and they had the Parks Commission all lined up and
Speaker 5: all that. But the minute the word Rolling Stones came out,
Speaker 5: then the deal was done and they were never going
Speaker 5: to get into Golden Gate Park. And this guy James
Speaker 5: just called up the Mayor's office and you tried to
Speaker 5: throw the Rolling Stones name around. That was not how
Speaker 5: it worked in San Francisco, so that was just over
Speaker 5: as soon as he picked it up. There's an interesting
Speaker 5: thing that guy ended up being the signator on the
Speaker 5: contract with Altamon. He was never on the stones as
Speaker 5: pay Well. He had no official affiliation with them at all,
Speaker 5: and yet here he was like guaranteeing all this stuff
Speaker 5: and when the legal thing went down, he was the
Speaker 5: guy holding the bag. No wonder he disappeared.
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Speaker 2: we lass left off, Joel, I want you to our
Speaker 2: audience to set up, as you very vividly doing your book,
Speaker 2: the day itself and again the confluence and convergence of
Speaker 2: events and circumstances that are Altamont that day, including as
Speaker 2: you said, the lack of preparation. But talk about the
Speaker 2: bad LSD and to be fair as well as you
Speaker 2: do in the book the San Jose guys with the
Speaker 2: pool cues, these prospects in this new chapter were out
Speaker 2: of control and there was more than a hint of
Speaker 2: violence right from early on, we'll say, so take us
Speaker 2: back to that day and some of the things that
Speaker 2: even the hippies were seeing, armed with only peace symbols.
Speaker 5: You know, I love the way that chapter opens because
Speaker 5: I chose to start the con section of the book
Speaker 5: at the police station and twenty six year old acting
Speaker 5: watch commander and the guy who caught the phone call
Speaker 5: on the way out of the office at eight in
Speaker 5: the morning, was asked if he knows anything about a
Speaker 5: concert at the Altamont Speedway with the Rolling Stones, and
Speaker 5: it means nothing to him, and he makes a note
Speaker 5: of it and passes the note off to his acting
Speaker 5: watch commander because he's going home and he doesn't know
Speaker 5: who the Rolling Stones are. Yeah, that's where we go
Speaker 5: out there. At the beginning, it was just it just
Speaker 5: flopped on that end of the world. And yes, then
Speaker 5: you're still right. From the very onset, there was a
Speaker 5: flood on the ground and violence. The crowd was in
Speaker 5: a bad mood. The conditions were terrible, and the first
Speaker 5: band of the day, Santana, got things going. But somewhere
Speaker 5: in the middle of their first song, concert goer jumped
Speaker 5: up on this four foot tall stage and ran across
Speaker 5: the stage, chased by three or four Hells Angels and
Speaker 5: caught up with him on stage right and from the
Speaker 5: keyboard player and beat the kid to a pulp. The
Speaker 5: band was horrified. They've never seen anything like it. The
Speaker 5: stage was overcrowded with like two hundred people of a
Speaker 5: very menacing Hell's angels right over your shoulder. The next
Speaker 5: act was Jeffson Airplane. That's when Animal called cocked Marty
Speaker 5: Ballin and nobody had ever seen that happen before. Musician
Speaker 5: beat up on stage during the set. That was just
Speaker 5: incredibly shocking, and nerder to stop the concert Paul Kantner
Speaker 5: of the Jeffson Airplane and get into a shouting match
Speaker 5: with Sweet William Fritz at the San Francisco chapter, who
Speaker 5: was on stage. Those guys knew each other. Canner couldn't
Speaker 5: believe what it was happening. Bill Ladner, the road manager
Speaker 5: from the Jeffson Airplane, used to ride bikes with those guys.
Speaker 5: He knew every one of them months that were on
Speaker 5: stage from the San Francisco chapter. They couldn't believe what
Speaker 5: was happening. The pal cues were out in front and
Speaker 5: all through Santana's set, all through the Airplanes set, any
Speaker 5: perceived and in fraction crimes real and imagine were punished.
Speaker 5: The doctors told me they were surprised how many girls
Speaker 5: they were stitching up from with lacerations and invasions. These
Speaker 5: guys were pumped up on reds. It was a sleeping pill.
Speaker 5: They tend to like frustrate people. So they had noticed
Speaker 5: the anger pill and really bad LSD. LSD that has
Speaker 5: been cut with strychnine or methamphetimine over stimulus is in
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty seventh the Summer Love. People who made LSD
Speaker 5: were missionaries. They were zealous, and those chemists want great
Speaker 5: links to make sure that those compounds were stable. Two
Speaker 5: years later it devolved into a criminal enterprise and the
Speaker 5: chemists were just throwing anything in there that it made
Speaker 5: it work. Methamphetamine added to LSU would overstimulate the users,
Speaker 5: causes all kinds of side effects. I guess you call
Speaker 5: them side effects. And there was a lot of drinking
Speaker 5: going on now in this so the love again drinking
Speaker 5: and psychedelics and didn't mix. Now Here we're at Alphamont,
Speaker 5: people are guzzling red Mountain lime. And the medical symptoms
Speaker 5: of mixing psychedelics and alcohol are erratic behavior and violent outburst.
Speaker 5: And we got a lot of that. So you have
Speaker 5: all this and the psychiatrists, I thought, the psychiatrists working
Speaker 5: in the bumber camp, they were overwhelmed from the minute
Speaker 5: they opened for business. They couldn't believe it for what
Speaker 5: they were seeing. And then these guys were from San Francisco.
Speaker 5: They weren't dabs in the woods. But this was just
Speaker 5: an extraordinary, outrageous thing that was going on right from
Speaker 5: the start beyond the tale, and they worried since they
Speaker 5: knew how remote their kent was, how there were no
Speaker 5: stage announcements about its existence or any signage pointing the
Speaker 5: way that they were only seeing the of what was
Speaker 5: going on out there. So what we're talking about is
Speaker 5: probably tens of thousands of people on drugs.
Speaker 2: What can you explain for our audience the three hundred
Speaker 2: thousand people show up? But what is the phenomena at
Speaker 2: that time? Because it always wasn't like that, and maybe
Speaker 2: isn't like that now that somebody would want to rush
Speaker 2: the stage. Was there actually people rushing the stage or
Speaker 2: was there a couple of things going on in terms
Speaker 2: of people pushing from behind? Were some people trapped against it?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: There was the will in them.
Speaker 5: No room down front. Real Marcus is a Rolling Stone reporter,
Speaker 5: was there that day, and he told me that at
Speaker 5: one point, standing up down front, he got off his leg,
Speaker 5: onder one leg, and he couldn't get his leg back
Speaker 5: down because the crowd was so tightly crushed together that
Speaker 5: he stood there on one leg trying to get his
Speaker 5: leg down. Nobody would help him or cut him a brake.
Speaker 5: So yeah, the crowd, of conditions, the hostile nature of
Speaker 5: the crowd, and the drugs, the weather. It was thirty
Speaker 5: seven the night before, very cold, and warmed up to
Speaker 5: the low seventies, really unseasonably warm. And then at the
Speaker 5: end of the day after coffee stills nastly young, and
Speaker 5: the two hours before the Stones came on after dark,
Speaker 5: forty mile an hour winds went through the place and
Speaker 5: the temperature dropped twenty degrees and then he turned dark
Speaker 5: and the Stones came on and all helped. Bro Cluse.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about Patty Brenda Hoft and her boyfriend Meredith Hunter.
Speaker 2: And he's black and she's white, and what did they notice,
Speaker 2: according to her later, what did they notice about the
Speaker 2: angels and their attitude about a black and white couple.
Speaker 2: We're talking nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 5: Paddy was from Berkeley, where, you know, the most progressive
Speaker 5: community in the country at that point. Patty was always
Speaker 5: aware of the kind of looks she got when she
Speaker 5: was out with Meredith. But I don't have to take
Speaker 5: her word for it. Tony Frunchis was the Stones bodyguard.
Speaker 5: He was on stage all day. He's a six foot eight,
Speaker 5: two hundred and eighty five pound guy with a thirty
Speaker 5: four inch waist, a former Air Force boxing champion and
Speaker 5: one of the couple of the Hell's Angels. Gave him
Speaker 5: some trouble earlier in the morning. He took from both
Speaker 5: backstage and broke his hand on their faces. So nobody
Speaker 5: messed with Tony the rest of the day. And you
Speaker 5: can see pictures of Tony because he's tallering and everybody else.
Speaker 5: He just stands out in the crowd and he said, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: he saw him. Meredith was wearing a bright green suit.
Speaker 5: He was just out in the max and Paddy was
Speaker 5: a gorgeous seventeen year old blonde girl. Yeah, Tony saw
Speaker 5: him from the stage, and he saw the Angels see
Speaker 5: him too.
Speaker 2: Now let's talk about the Stones and the delay. You
Speaker 2: talked about the weather changing and the mood and increasingly
Speaker 2: got worse, and again without any kind of services at all,
Speaker 2: that this was just an increasing and obvious chaos almost
Speaker 2: everybody at first they might not have been able to
Speaker 2: see it. So let's talk about the Stones and their
Speaker 2: delay and why there was a delay, and what their
Speaker 2: attitude was despite what they least they could hear and
Speaker 2: were told about the Angels.
Speaker 5: So the Stones always claimed that it's bass player Bill
Speaker 5: Wyman showing up late that caused them to go on
Speaker 5: when they did. But that's full. They weren't going to
Speaker 5: go on until it was dark. They were making a movie.
Speaker 5: That's what this was all about. They were going to
Speaker 5: film all the other acts in the daytime and they
Speaker 5: were going to be the one act of the night time.
Speaker 5: Why because stars come out at night. So that's what
Speaker 5: that was about. There was them, they were going on
Speaker 5: before dark. They were outrageously making audiences wait on that tour.
Speaker 5: They didn't care when they went on. I saw the
Speaker 5: second show in Los Angeles before them on that tour
Speaker 5: and they didn't come on until four in the morning.
Speaker 5: They didn't want to follow out Contina Turner, who had
Speaker 5: been put on a little too good a show. So
Speaker 5: that's not really why the Stones didn't go on until then.
Speaker 5: They went on at dark because what.
Speaker 2: Was the state of their awareness before they went on
Speaker 2: in terms of potential danger and some of that you
Speaker 2: talk about in the book, the naked fat guy was
Speaker 2: a tease knocked out. So there were some people out
Speaker 2: of control and other people who were also out of
Speaker 2: control exerting some good beating on a man like that.
Speaker 5: So they walked in from the helicopter. Richards had spent
Speaker 5: the night there pretty much the question in his backstage,
Speaker 5: dressing them a little trailer. But the rest of his
Speaker 5: guns walked in through the chaos, and they saw him
Speaker 5: and witness what is going on, even if they didn't
Speaker 5: see any immediate like beatings or anything. But they got
Speaker 5: back there and people fetchers Michelle Philips as the Mamas
Speaker 5: and Papa's been there all day, told them what was
Speaker 5: going on, and then they left. The angels, you know,
Speaker 5: the Sunny Barger of the Oakland chapter and his guys
Speaker 5: showed up about five o'clock just before sunset, filed right
Speaker 5: all the way through the cloud. They got back and
Speaker 5: introduced to the Stones. Sony thought they were a bunch
Speaker 5: of dishies. And they've certainly had plenty of angels around them,
Speaker 5: you know, acting as a guards and escorts and stuff
Speaker 5: like that. And you can see in the movie when
Speaker 5: they pushed through the crowd to get to the stage.
Speaker 5: That is quite an intimidating scene. There's usually two hundred
Speaker 5: people on the stage and many, many, many large and
Speaker 5: violent looking menacing figures, all crowded around the band and
Speaker 5: and as you watch the movie you can tell, I mean,
Speaker 5: the angels just marauded throughout that set. What happened was
Speaker 5: the third song of this set was simply for the
Speaker 5: Devil and Sunny. Barger of the Oakland chapter saw some
Speaker 5: kids from the audience jumping up and down on a
Speaker 5: motorcycle and shorting out the battery and setting a fire,
Speaker 5: and he dashed into the audience to knock the kid
Speaker 5: off the bike and put out the fire. Well, all
Speaker 5: the other Angels saw Barger, and they just followed. They
Speaker 5: didn't know what he was doing. They just they just
Speaker 5: followed him into the crowd and just start laying waste
Speaker 5: in the front row. The jagger stops the dan and
Speaker 5: starts pleading with the audience. Brothers and sisters, what are
Speaker 5: we're fighting for?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 5: But it's just bloodlust now. And they start the second
Speaker 5: They finished Stucimity, then they start the next song. They
Speaker 5: had problems with that. They started the second time, and
Speaker 5: that's when Predith Hunter pushes his way to the front
Speaker 5: of the stage and gets a Hell's angeles shoving him
Speaker 5: back down, and then he goes back up to get
Speaker 5: in that guy's case, four or five angels tackling from behind,
Speaker 5: and they start stomping him and kicking him. He gets
Speaker 5: loose from them and pulls out a gun. That's when
Speaker 5: Alen Casorrow, San Jose Hells angel standing nearby, reaches down
Speaker 5: to his ankle where he's got a knife in his seat,
Speaker 5: and does a pure wet and jumps on Hunter, stabs
Speaker 5: him in the neck, and as they follow the ground together,
Speaker 5: stabs him four more times. The angels swarm over him,
Speaker 5: and Pasorrow is separated from the Hunter, and the angels
Speaker 5: continue to stomp and kick Hunter and stand on him
Speaker 5: and finally leave him alone. A couple of concert goers
Speaker 5: managed to get him up and carry him to the
Speaker 5: lip of the stage and they put him on the stage.
Speaker 5: Everybody saw him, everybody. I talked to people on that
Speaker 5: stage and they all saw this. It didn't happen long
Speaker 5: because the angels just came swarming over this and push
Speaker 5: the body back into the audience. A young doctor intern
Speaker 5: named doctor Robert Hyatt had answered the call for the
Speaker 5: doctor of the stage happened to be standing there and
Speaker 5: he said his arms had hurt for the next week,
Speaker 5: but he carried the hundred backstage to medical camp, and
Speaker 5: doctor Fine, the head of medical there, took a look
Speaker 5: at Hunter realized that nature of his wounds clearly possibly
Speaker 5: mortal have put another doctor on the reviving him, and
Speaker 5: wants to try and get a helicopter to Metavat did
Speaker 5: you ever find anybody in charge or anybody that would give
Speaker 5: him the infermission to use the helicopter? So he called
Speaker 5: the ambulance. The Hunter died waiting for the ambulance. Now
Speaker 5: the stumps. Meanwhile on stage, they don't know what to do.
Speaker 5: They've just seen this body and it's the all concert
Speaker 5: just falls apart, right, And so the young guy, Mick
Speaker 5: Taylor new guitars. He says, let's play the new one,
Speaker 5: and Jagger says, okay. Well that Tuesday they've been in
Speaker 5: Alabama recording, and Saturday that at that point, after Mareth
Speaker 5: Hunter's they publicly debut their new songs Brown Sugar and
Speaker 5: let me tell you, the concert comes back together in
Speaker 5: an instant. I've heard these sixteen track mixes that Bob
Speaker 5: Matthews is the Grateful Dead recorded that day he played
Speaker 5: them for me, and his living them is the only
Speaker 5: place you could hear him. And Ah, the Stones played
Speaker 5: great and the beatings continued, and by another sort of
Speaker 5: weird trick of fate, instead of being blinded by spotlights
Speaker 5: as most performers are on stage, the spotlights never showed up.
Speaker 5: So the only lights they had at Altamont was fifty
Speaker 5: thousand watts of back lights, and they used all of
Speaker 5: it and it made the front rows entirely illuminated the stage.
Speaker 5: So all these beatings they had taken place, the Stones
Speaker 5: are seeing them full living color, which they're not used to.
Speaker 5: And they powered through another hour of the show after
Speaker 5: Hunter's death, and they never stop again. They just keep going.
Speaker 5: And there's problems there was trying to climb on stage,
Speaker 5: and they just play their flats off just I mean,
Speaker 5: Charlie Watson and Bill Wyman they had locked down, and
Speaker 5: Keith Richards and Mick Taylor, their guitars are grinding together
Speaker 5: like bears and jaggers. He's singing this really convincing committed thing,
Speaker 5: you know, like really like he means it, not not
Speaker 5: that grouping characterizations that he sometimes gets into. So you know,
Speaker 5: they were terrified. They were surrounded by all these manazing figures,
Speaker 5: they were witnessing all these beatings. They couldn't figure out
Speaker 5: anything to do but play their show and get the
Speaker 5: hell out of there. And they where to go. They
Speaker 5: hid in the music. They buried themselves in the music.
Speaker 5: They that's what musicians do. It's it's just, you know,
Speaker 5: kind of heroic.
Speaker 2: There was a more than was there was a basically
Speaker 2: essentially a threat from the angels that they weren't going
Speaker 2: to get off that stage. Richard was quite vocal and
Speaker 2: had said some things, and they both maybe Richard's a
Speaker 2: little more wholeheartedly, had said, well, we're gonna quit, We're
Speaker 2: gonna stop. Wasn't there more than an implied threat that
Speaker 2: they better continue?
Speaker 5: I don't think there was ever anybody who was going
Speaker 5: to take that seriously. The idea of stopping and walking
Speaker 5: off in the middle of a set one of three
Speaker 5: hundred thousand people and pitch black out of this cow
Speaker 5: pasture didn't seem like a really safe, secure idea of
Speaker 5: to anybody. So I think, you know, Keith Billy was
Speaker 5: very the anthem rooster. Hey, those cats stopped at and
Speaker 5: we're gonna not gonna play with with these huge guys
Speaker 5: that could break him in half, standing, you know, a
Speaker 5: stepping away from him. I mean that was definitely from
Speaker 5: gutsy stuff. Boy the horns, they say, and Jagger, I
Speaker 5: got a Jagger credit for really trying to you know,
Speaker 5: put oil on troubled waters and really you know, reaching
Speaker 5: into the audience and trying to relate and get these
Speaker 5: people to wise up and be with them. And that
Speaker 5: goes on all through the set. At the end, when
Speaker 5: he says goodbye, he says, well, we have some troubles,
Speaker 5: but there's been a good time. That isn't in the
Speaker 5: movie though, you know, the movie is not a very
Speaker 5: active partrail of the event. Oddly enough, you.
Speaker 2: Talk about really a couple essential characters who introduce Paul
Speaker 2: David Cox and Baird Bryant. So explain who these two
Speaker 2: people are and their role at Ulti Mont.
Speaker 5: Paul David Cox was one of the concert goers who
Speaker 5: carried Hunder to the stage, but more importantly, he was
Speaker 5: an anonymous caller to Rolling Stone magazine who gave an
Speaker 5: incredible first person account of Hunter's beating and killing. It
Speaker 5: became the lead section of the Rolling Stone cover article.
Speaker 5: And it's just the sort of thing news magazine's dream for.
Speaker 5: You just get dropped right in the middle of the action.
Speaker 5: So subsequently, of course, he was a important witness in
Speaker 5: the trial, and that's when he disappeared. He was reluctant
Speaker 5: to reveal his name to Rolling Stone, and I believe
Speaker 5: he's only identified by a single name, And in fact,
Speaker 5: this journey had a hard time finding out who he was,
Speaker 5: and then when they did find him and he ran away,
Speaker 5: they only found him just a few days before he's
Speaker 5: before he's supposed to testify. Far Bryant was the cinematographer
Speaker 5: who actually captured the Hunter assault on film. He didn't
Speaker 5: know it at the time. He was lying in the
Speaker 5: prone position on the top of a dam behind the
Speaker 5: stage shooting of the hol on stage action. Eric Sarnon
Speaker 5: was also on stage with a camera and saw the scuffle.
Speaker 5: Both Bryan and Sarno hit their zoom button, but Eric
Speaker 5: Sarnon hit the wrong way, so he zoomed back. Bryant
Speaker 5: hit the right one and zoomed in. He never knew
Speaker 5: what he got on film, or even if he's seen anything.
Speaker 5: He just sort of followed his instincts until the film
Speaker 5: was developed and they saw the dailies and realized that yes,
Speaker 5: indeed they had the killings on gat Bryant was interesting
Speaker 5: by the way that cinematographer that shot the cemetery cemetery scene,
Speaker 5: an easy writer, has a long background in Bohelian life
Speaker 5: in Paris.
Speaker 2: Now you talk about the exit. You alluded to the helicopter.
Speaker 2: When we're looking for a helicopter be able to fly
Speaker 2: Meredith Hunter to hospital. It was reserved and nobody could.
Speaker 2: He said, well, I got to get authorization and nobody
Speaker 2: could find anybody to authorize the helicopter. So that's why
Speaker 2: the ambulance was called and he died as a results.
Speaker 2: So other people jumping the copters, other bands they leave,
Speaker 2: they jump into crowded copters and they get out of there.
Speaker 2: What is the you do? You talk about person drowning,
Speaker 2: but more importantly you introduced a guy named McDonald, so
Speaker 2: quickly talk about the other crazy deaths that occurred at
Speaker 2: ALTAM McDonald.
Speaker 5: Yeah, five investigators got to do that town Jim. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he's a surfer, stoner fireman down in Santa Cruz. I
Speaker 5: remembered every ride that he got hit. Tacking to the show,
Speaker 5: a met some friends, he got high on asset. He
Speaker 5: had a great time, split up with his friends, and
Speaker 5: he's leaving. He's walking out through this dark field. He
Speaker 5: sees his car started moving slowly and he said, hey,
Speaker 5: you know, give me a ride and go where you're going.
Speaker 5: He does, I'm going to Santa Crash. We're going to
Speaker 5: San Francisco. He says, I'll that be good. So they
Speaker 5: opened the back door and slays room for one more.
Speaker 5: He gets in and he's tacking this couple guys in
Speaker 5: the back seat. There's a young gallon a baby in
Speaker 5: the front, and another couple of guys driving them and
Speaker 5: sitting up the front, and they don't all know each other.
Speaker 5: They're all sort of like you know, ride grouping up
Speaker 5: and they're going through the cloud very slowly. They get
Speaker 5: up to the highway traffic still clouded, so they decide
Speaker 5: to pull over and make the fire. And Jim has
Speaker 5: a blanket because he remembered. It gets cold up there
Speaker 5: and hits like with two there and he gets this
Speaker 5: flanket out of his napstack and he pulls around his
Speaker 5: shoulders and his fists and sort of tugs it tightly together,
Speaker 5: and the next thing he knows, some guy is shaking
Speaker 5: his shoulder and here's the guy say, hey, this one's
Speaker 5: still alive. Some acid craze concert guards stroll in the
Speaker 5: car under their assumption or beliefs that he's being chased
Speaker 5: by Hell's angels, drove it through the exiting cloud at
Speaker 5: speeds up to sixty miles an hour of The Highway
Speaker 5: patrol figures guests to the top of the hill, launches,
Speaker 5: crashes down on this campfire, kills two people that Donald's sitting.
Speaker 5: The next dude seriously injures the young mother and McDonald man.
Speaker 5: He's pulled out there by a highway patrol metavac. He
Speaker 5: dies in the helicopter and has to be brought back
Speaker 5: to life in the emergency room, where he's blatlined. Mother
Speaker 5: comes up to hand or his possessions, and he's got
Speaker 5: this blanket right, and on one side of the blanket
Speaker 5: his body, his outlines, his squirts of blood, and the
Speaker 5: other side is a tire attack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, now we missed one little profound point, so
Speaker 2: I'll just go backwards just a little bit. When Meredith
Speaker 2: Hunter is stomped and Meredith Hunter has been stabbed with
Speaker 2: a big, large knife. And there are people go to
Speaker 2: help him, Paul Cox, another concert goer. And what did
Speaker 2: the angels say to those people and to Patty about
Speaker 2: Meredith Hunter laying on the ground, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Leaving alone. He's going to die. Don't cry over him.
Speaker 5: He's not worth it. Yeah, those are bad guys. On
Speaker 5: the other hand, you know, Uh, you pull a gun
Speaker 5: in the crowd. Uh, that's a very difficult uh decision
Speaker 5: to make. Uh. And uh my detectives got to do that.
Speaker 5: Who was a former Alameda County Sheriff's homicide and that's
Speaker 5: getting worked on this case. Uh. He said that Allan
Speaker 5: Tosorrow wasn't held angel a public considered as he ro
Speaker 5: so and and keep in mind, to Sorrow was acquitted.
Speaker 5: The sound not guilty, Uh because of Hunter pulling a gun.
Speaker 5: Who knows whether he saw it or not. Who knows
Speaker 5: who intended to shoot? Uh? Certainly from all accounts and
Speaker 5: from the film, you know, it looks like he pulled
Speaker 5: it in self defense. But you know at that point
Speaker 5: you've updates in the game, and you know that what
Speaker 5: happened happened that you noticed that I refused to call
Speaker 5: the murder wasn't a murder, right, was a killing.
Speaker 2: Now there's the story that you tell, and there's a
Speaker 2: story that Yan Winner and Rolling Stone, you know, break
Speaker 2: out of their relative obscurity and into national headlines and importance.
Speaker 2: But tell us it was amazing and surprising. Tell us
Speaker 2: what the reaction is. First in the New York Times
Speaker 2: and other the Examiner and other papers, how do they
Speaker 2: report on what everyone else saw? What was the quite
Speaker 2: different story in the news the next day. In the
Speaker 2: following day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's crazy, Yeah, three hundred thousands say it with music,
Speaker 5: was the Sunday newspaper headline in San Francisco. The guy
Speaker 5: went on to go on great length about how well
Speaker 5: the groovy time was having. Young people are getting together.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, some guy was gab to death, but really
Speaker 5: it was a wonderful day in the sun and the
Speaker 5: New York Times a parly I said the same thing,
Speaker 5: much shorter, because of course, you know, it was happening
Speaker 5: out on the West coast. But they noted the death
Speaker 5: of concert go what was otherwise a flying you know,
Speaker 5: Woodstock like festival. That was the accepted myth at that point.
Speaker 5: But Woodstock myth was so large that the media was
Speaker 5: the mainstream media who were you know, not hit or
Speaker 5: or with it or at all. But they just read it
Speaker 5: as like, oh, yeah, somebody died, but it was another woodstock,
Speaker 5: you know. Yeah, good Rolling Stone to the vaults. They're
Speaker 5: real in Canada and that that, you know. I mean,
Speaker 5: they were so far I heard the homicide investigators had
Speaker 5: to come over and get an advanced copy of the
Speaker 5: magazine to figure out what their case was almost about.
Speaker 2: We just alluded to it, but tell us where Rolling
Speaker 2: Stone really succeeded and had a coup in terms of
Speaker 2: witnesses that really opened up the story for him and
Speaker 2: revealed the truth about what actually happened.
Speaker 5: Well you know, uh, the truth that actually happened. The
Speaker 5: Rolling Stones themselves have never really opened up to it.
Speaker 5: Their whole attitude is the grateful Dead and Hell's Angels
Speaker 5: responsible for this. I mean I ran into Ronnie Snyder
Speaker 5: in Los Angeles couple of weeks ago, he's the producer
Speaker 5: of the tour. He pretty much said the same thing.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, you know, they went through with it because
Speaker 5: the Dead insisted on it. Uh So I don't think
Speaker 5: that's that just doesn't make any sense and it doesn't
Speaker 5: fit with the facts. What fits with the facts is
Speaker 5: you know, a really dangerous, volatile cocktail of of of
Speaker 5: greed and innocence. Uh and and the Stones uh uh
Speaker 5: I think we're builvi had lots of both of those.
Speaker 5: And that's what happened.
Speaker 2: Pardon me, I'm What I meant was what was the
Speaker 2: key for Rolling Stone Magazine in terms of how they
Speaker 2: broke this and what was their coup in terms of
Speaker 2: how they discovered the truth about what happened as opposed
Speaker 2: to what was being reported as some you know, further
Speaker 2: loving that had occurred at three hundred thousand people lollings down.
Speaker 5: To put a team of eleven reporters on it. These
Speaker 5: were hit guys. They were from the rock scene. Went
Speaker 5: square all the time newspaper reporters. They saturated the story.
Speaker 5: It's twenty thousand words, couverished pretty much everything that's in
Speaker 5: my book almost and did it the week afterwards. It's
Speaker 5: the extraordinary piece of journalism. And they were, you know,
Speaker 5: you know, supervised by imagineer John Burks, who was a
Speaker 5: veteran of Newsweek, so he knew what news magazine stuff was.
Speaker 5: It wasn't just an undeydound newspaper guy that had never
Speaker 5: had a tough breaking story before. But they did great job.
Speaker 2: Now with this as well. Like you say, the police
Speaker 2: are playing catch ups, so with this they have now
Speaker 2: an idea of who they may question because based on this,
Speaker 2: and everybody's also awaiting film from a cinematographer that, as
Speaker 2: you write in the book, she was accidentally dosed on
Speaker 2: acid and spent about eight hours underneath the bleachers and
Speaker 2: then rallied and got some amazing footage. So tell us
Speaker 2: about this this fight to who was going to be
Speaker 2: able to see the footage first? Tell us it's a
Speaker 2: profound story, the stones, the angels, and the police, who
Speaker 2: gets to see the film and how everybody reacts differently.
Speaker 5: The filmmakers were very protective of their daily as they
Speaker 5: hit him. They got out of town with film before
Speaker 5: anybody noticed they were gone, and they took them straight
Speaker 5: from the lab to place out of Malibu where a
Speaker 5: director and I associated with the project lived. They were
Speaker 5: really careful to find out what they had before they
Speaker 5: found out before they showed anybody, and they brought him
Speaker 5: up to San Francisco about a week and a half later,
Speaker 5: and they screening at Francis Coppler's American Zold trop studio
Speaker 5: for the two district attorneys who then took the footage
Speaker 5: and had blow up skills made from him. They didn't
Speaker 5: know what they saw. They couldn't identify the guy. They
Speaker 5: didn't know what to do with what they had. The
Speaker 5: guys who were investigating it couldn't figure out where to
Speaker 5: go with this. They first ran down to La and
Speaker 5: chased some rabbit hole down there. Rolling Stone magazine was
Speaker 5: more health than anything. I mean, they didn't seem to
Speaker 5: be any big hurry to get out to the traft.
Speaker 5: They could go out that night because of the traffic,
Speaker 5: they didn't really go out till Monday, two days later.
Speaker 5: There's weird investigation. It took them three merchs to fine
Speaker 5: to sorrow. He's been in custody since Tuesday after the
Speaker 5: conscience on another charge, obviously.
Speaker 2: And they didn't even talk to Patty for a week,
Speaker 2: didn't they?
Speaker 5: Are they talking to Patty on Monday? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now eventually, again it's not easy because the angels aren't
Speaker 2: aren't going to identify. They put a couple of angels
Speaker 2: that they suspected through polygraphs, which led them to believe
Speaker 2: that they knew something, but nobody was going to give
Speaker 2: up this name. But eventually, as you mentioned, Pasario Alan Pasario,
Speaker 2: Pasero gets charged. He's already in jail on a pretty
Speaker 2: heavy two to ten already. And it's crucial because the
Speaker 2: film and the people who did the film and are
Speaker 2: there are crucial witnesses, reluctant witnesses that are set for
Speaker 2: this trial here that maybe nobody was, you know, anxious
Speaker 2: to put these people in front at a court, but
Speaker 2: really they do so.
Speaker 5: People are very worried about. Angels are very known for
Speaker 5: intimidating witnesses, and it was widely presumed that the Faro
Speaker 5: was going to go down for this since this obviously
Speaker 5: he did it. George Walker was the brant defense at
Speaker 5: Trinity the Angels hired is San Francisco's first prominent African
Speaker 5: American attorney and also integrated the basketball team at UC
Speaker 5: Berkeley as All American after the war and graded the
Speaker 5: Air Force sixty one bomber missions. Quite by an amazing guy,
Speaker 5: and he played with Johnny Cochran saying finding for Johnny
Speaker 5: Cochran made sure that the Sorrow got an entirely all
Speaker 5: white jury, which is not easily due in Oakland, California,
Speaker 5: immediately underlined almost every witness the prosecution brought, and then
Speaker 5: especially the damning piece of film place the prostitution thought
Speaker 5: would show that to Sorrow killed Hunter, and actually what
Speaker 5: turned out so the jury was that Hunter pulled a gun.
Speaker 5: So George Walker was still a lot ninety two is
Speaker 5: a brilliant, wonderful man, and he saw this all the way.
Speaker 5: He said, he never thought he would lose it.
Speaker 2: Now you chronicle in this book as well, that disaster
Speaker 2: seems to happen. I mean, obviously, the the the love
Speaker 2: Piece generation failed, or it seemed. And this was a
Speaker 2: concert that many have spoken about, was that catalyst or
Speaker 2: that end of that that dream. But bad luck, and
Speaker 2: extremely bad luck follows a lot of these people, bands
Speaker 2: and managers and all kinds of people. So tell us
Speaker 2: a little bit about the litany of disaster that followed
Speaker 2: the people that were involved in Altamont.
Speaker 5: Oh. Yeah, it's such a I mean, I don't want
Speaker 5: to drill to you down, but you know, the airplane
Speaker 5: was splintered within a few months. The stones were never
Speaker 5: the same, the dead were never the same, angels were
Speaker 5: never the same. Perry of transmitted suicide. The dead's manager
Speaker 5: responded with all their money that the Stones went into
Speaker 5: a dark period of lawsuits and and drugs. I mean,
Speaker 5: oh no, it was. It was a terrible tale spin.
Speaker 5: How are we doing on time?
Speaker 2: We're just almost gonna wrap up. I just wanted to
Speaker 2: ask you what this at the end of this, What
Speaker 2: if anything that you didn't set out to unlock or determine.
Speaker 2: Is there anything at the end of this that was
Speaker 2: surprising to you that you did were able to conclude
Speaker 2: from all this research and this investigation in Teltamont.
Speaker 5: So there was there was no like big new discovery
Speaker 5: like I knew about the vehicular manslaughter even if Scott
Speaker 5: do that didn't I literally read upon it. So there
Speaker 5: was no big like aha things. But the extraordinary detail,
Speaker 5: almost granula, of how heedless and irresponsible and violent and
Speaker 5: darkness was that game as a surprise to me. Uh.
Speaker 5: And and the power and the propulsive uh nature of
Speaker 5: this narrative that that that surprised me to uh. And
Speaker 5: it's more not any one detail, but the whole accumulation.
Speaker 2: Well, I want to thank you very much Joel for
Speaker 2: coming on, and I want to tell people too, with
Speaker 2: this Altamont, the Rolling Stones, the Hell's Angels, and the
Speaker 2: inside story of Rocks Darkest Day. There's some fascinating photos
Speaker 2: in this incredible photos and the incredible history backdrop that
Speaker 2: you present here as your roll as of Rocks are Analyst,
Speaker 2: is just a fascinating step backwards in history. I don't
Speaker 2: want to thank you very much for coming on and
Speaker 2: talking about Altamont. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much,
Speaker 2: Joel Selvyn.
Speaker 5: Thanks an, take care you two.
Speaker 2: Good night.