John Henry Days (13 page)

“The tour started from there and went all across the country, selling out everywhere. They made something like a million dollars over the course of it, and that’s what got them into trouble. It was the time of free concerts and festivals and that’s what the kids wanted. They demanded it. It was their right. Of course they wanted it all for free—they were Americans. Woodstock and Hyde Park and the Isle of Wight—that’s what was going on. So the rock press got into the act. Ralph Gleason over at the
Chronicle
wrote a piece slamming the Stones for ripping off the kids and not giving anything back. Ralph thought they should give something back, basically accusing them of being sellouts. I always liked Ralph—he was one of the last moralists. So then
Rolling Stone
joined in the act and that pissed off the Stones to no end. Here was their comeback tour—they’d survived the drug busts and Brian’s death, and now they were being reviled by their fans. Or the press, rather. At every press conference, it was like, ‘so when are you going to do a free concert, when are you going to do something for the kids?’ So what I’m saying is that already the concert had a bad vibe on it. It was born more out of p.r. than love for what the kids were trying to do.”

“You’ve gone from ‘we’ to ‘the kids.’ ”

“Have I? It was a long time ago. Maybe I’m just in journalist mode right now. I’m trying to be objective.”

“And you sound like even more of a hippie than usual.”

“I always talk like this.”

“He’s right—he always talks like this.”

“But you went in for all that peace and love stuff, right? You always talk about it.”

“I’m just trying to get some objectivity in my account, if that’s okay with you, Tiny.”

“I saw the Rolling Stones a few years ago on one of their farewell tours. One of their many farewell tours. I have a hard time reconciling. I’m trying, but I don’t get it.”

“You had to be there, Frenchie. It was a whole period that they were a part of. That’s what I’m trying to get across.”

“Don’t get mad, I’m just saying. I’m more of a Hootie and the Blowfish man myself.”

“All right, all right. So at the end of the tour, the Stones announce that they want to do their free concert thing and they want to hold it in San Francisco. Only the city fathers want this outrageous insurance bond for Golden Gate Park, the natural place to play, so they had to find someplace else. They retain Melvin Belli, this old school gangster lawyer-type to handle the arrangements. At this point Belli is handling the Manson defense down in L.A. Nice, right? He flies up to San Francisco and does some wrangling and massaging and secures the Altamont Speedway, this old stock car racing track out in the desert about forty miles outside of San Francisco. And it’s on, December of 1969.

“We drove out there in Andy Farber’s old Mustang early in the morning. I don’t think you would’ve ever met Andy—he wrote the first really great mushroom piece—but he stopped writing in the early seventies and moved to Alabama to start a chicken farm. Andy and I were drinking this big jug of California red and smoking joints as we drove out there and it was a great morning. Sunny. We’d been up all night at the pad of this friend of his and we just kept going. And we headed out and every so often we pass a van or a car full of hippies and they honk and wave, and we wave back, it’s all good fun. There’s this great energy that we’re all just going to hang out and listen to music and smoke some grass and maybe get laid and it’s going to be a good time.”

“Were you writing about it?”

“I hadn’t intended to, but how couldn’t I after what I saw? I found out
Rolling Stone
was putting together a package about it and I got to work. Unfortunately, I started getting sick the day after the concert, and that turned into pneumonia because I wouldn’t stay in bed, and I couldn’t get it done, which was a bummer. But I later included it in my book
Rock and Roll Memories.
I gave you a copy of it, remember?”

“I’m not sure I got that far.”

“I see. Well, it’s in there. It’s the centerpiece of my chapter on the Death of the Sixties, which holds up as the final word on the subject, if you ask me. So we’re passing people on the road, and the road out there was getting packed with kids and pretty soon we realized that all the cars pulled over to
the side of the road weren’t people stopping to get high—they’re parking. We thought we were getting there early, but people had been camping out all night for this thing. There was no more parking up at the site and now you had to fucking park like miles away and trek up there. So Andy nosed into this little space and we started walking. It was a caravan. Thousands of pilgrims hoofing it up there. Little gangs of kids who had driven from all over the country, carrying baskets and coolers, passing wrinkled-up joints. Walking barefoot to the mount. You’d walk up one brown hill only to see two other slopes beyond it and all of them were crawling with people. Look back and you’d see even more people, the ones who got their shit together even later than you, and they were coming up behind. People banging tambourines and goofing. It was the convocation of the freak nation. No one knew.

“And of course it was a bigger mess once we actually got to the site. It was a quarter of a million people. All you could really see was heads in the distance for miles it looked like. Of course those people couldn’t hear the amps, they just wanted to groove on the event. People sat down on the brown grass on their Indian mats and blankets, bunching up their sleeping bags as pillows. They’d dance a little hippie dance on one foot and then stop, everybody so fucked up. Girls were strutting around with their shirts off, tits flopping around with their crazy moves. Tits flopping all around—they didn’t care. Long hair flowing. This was the ground zero of the counterculture at that moment in the world. They had caravaned from New York, hey let’s go, man, and slept on the floor of vans or maybe they hitched all the way. They were yearning to be part of the free festival thing they’d heard about, this new happening. It was moving and horribly pathetic at the same time. You started to notice the bad freakouts little by little. One guy would be standing with his shirt off with his arms outstretched, staring off into the sun. And his mouth would start moving and he’d look confused and shocked, like he was realizing the worst thing in the world. Their friends would take them off to one of the Red Cross tents, which were totally overwhelmed. I later found out that Owlsey was there giving away free acid, and I don’t know if that’s what was causing it, but there was a lot of bad street acid making the rounds and that was doing serious damage. There were all these skinny malnourished dogs around, I remember that. They prowled around. The kids had found the dogs on the street and taken them in. Strays taking in strays. They couldn’t take care of themselves and they’d take a dog in. It was a stimulating atmosphere with all the stuff going on; everyone wants to play with a dog, and the dogs were able to deal with the kids but you felt they were only one day away from
total wildness. They sniffed around the trash and mud like they were sniffing what was coming and already adapted to it. Ready to go wild and ugly, like nature intended for them all along. It was messy enough. And then I started to see the Angels.

“The Angels had been providing security for the Dead for the last year or so. Jerry and the boys dug hanging out with them—they were these tough customers, dose-of-reality characters who put the up-against-the-wall in up-against-the-walls, motherfuckers. When the Stones finalized the San Francisco show, Rock Skully, the Dead’s manager, set them up with the Hell’s Angels. To keep things cool. Now, I’ve never bought into the Angels’ mystique. I knew what they were before Altamont and I still know it. It was a stupid decision. The Stones bought the Oakland and San Francisco chapters of the Angels for five hundred dollars’ worth of beer—Budweiser, their choice, I’m sure. I saw the first one after we sat down. Andy and I staked out some space next to a bunch of fifteen-year-olds and Andy immediately sacked out and I was lying back and taking in the scene. We were pretty far from the stage, and you could hear Santana faintly-playing, but I was in no rush to move up closer. Then I heard that hog sound, that backfiring farting sound of their motorcycles, and looked up and saw people trying to move out of the way. I saw the Angel coming toward me, with his long dark greasy hair and dingy club leather, astride this massive chopper. The motherfucker was driving his motorcycle through the crowd, just nosing it forward and revving it every few feet to scare the kids. He had this little square of black hair under his lip that was almost, but not quite, a Hitler mustache, but he had obviously cut it that way so that Hitler was the first thing you thought when you saw it. I couldn’t see the Angel’s eyes because of his mirrored sunglasses, but I could see that we were in his way and he wasn’t making any motions to swerve away. I started trying to wake Andy, but he wasn’t having it. We’d been up all night and he was totally out. His mouth open like a dead fish. So I started slapping him, trying to get him awake, but he still wasn’t having it. I kept turning back to look at the Angel, who was still descending on us, slowly, like a shark, and then the Angel kind of did this slight nod thing and turned to the right. He smiled as he passed us and showed me his rickety brown teeth, what was left of them. From anyone else—on that day, in that scene, or anywhere else, for that matter—what he did would have been a simple kindness, but I looked into his teeth and knew he was trying to tell us that he could have run us over or not and it would have been the same thing.

“I left Andy there and started to walk around and the stories of the Angels
started to trickle in. The Angels were getting violent. They attacked singly and in groups. Someone would accidentally brush against them and the Angels would whup them with a pool stick—they carried baseball bats and pool sticks that they filled with lead. These things connected with skulls. Or a kid might accidentally kick up some dust on one of their hogs and get beaten up. If an Angel started something, all of a sudden two or three other Angels would come swooping down and join in and help beat up whatever unfortunate soul had crossed their stupid white trash rules of propriety. They all had the same greasy look and feral eyes. They loved it—the dirt they wore on themselves was the natural progression from safe, middle-class hippie anarchy to total anarchy, anarchy in its natural state. When they laughed at one of the kids and picked on a flower child or couple and threw their Budweiser at the head of some kid in the middle of a freakout, they knew what they were doing. They were telling the kids that the Angels were the real deal. The kids were kids playing at something, and the Angels were that something all grown up.”

“Now you’ve gone from ‘we’ to ‘they’ to ‘the kids.’ Weren’t you the same age?”

“I was twenty-six at the time. I was a little too old to take it as seriously as, say, my younger brother did. I was just past the mark.”

“So you didn’t believe it all.”

“I did or I wanted to—it’s the same difference, isn’t it?”

“All those people have straight jobs now, right? Run the country and what not?”

“That would be true.”

“This is the elegy for the lost boomer.”

“Like I said, I left Andy to his stupor and started walking the desert. The Altamont Speedway had agreed to hold the concert because the owners were basically bankrupt. It was in the middle of nowhere, just a mess of dead grass for miles in every direction, but now it had been taken over by the freaks. The towering amp scaffolds went up sixty feet in the air and the kids climbed up on them like black bugs. I saw one person climb halfway up and then lose his grip in a druggy haze, hang there for a minute, and then he fell down in the crowd where I lost him among the heads. I’d pass these abandoned stock cars here and there, rusted through and totally crashed up. Teenagers’d set up shop, spread out their Indian blanket on the backseat and ball. Some people didn’t feel as modest and rolled around in sleeping bags, or out in the open,
even. Well-heeled white chicks from Marin made the rounds asking for contributions to the Panther Defense Fund and giving speeches about the struggle. Like they were war widows. I was missing most of the action on stage, but I didn’t care. I’d get there eventually. I was pretty fucked up, so I don’t know why I’m casting so many aspersions on the kids, but I’d never seen so many people in such obvious trouble in one place before. The street acid was taking its toll. I got accosted by this head in a fringe leather jacket who peered at me through Peter Tork sunglasses. He grabbed on to me, dried grass in his hair, and kept jabbering at me until I finally had to knock him to the ground. He just looked up at me and smiled and said, ‘You got it, man, you got it.’ Everyone panting in communal, barefoot freakout. The sky had gone gray. The sun wasn’t out anymore and the air was getting chilly. The p.a. warned people about bad acid, where to take lost children, and gave directions to the Red Cross tents. I saw a young woman with blood on her tie-dyed shirt and asked her if she needed any help. She said, ‘It’s beautiful, man. I just helped deliver a baby’ It’s beautiful. She stumbled off and I just thought, what kind of woman who’s about to give birth would come out into the desert for this? That’s beautiful? People were getting seriously hurt. In the days after the concert, people kept mentioning that four people died and four babies were born, as if that was some kind of equation that balanced all the negativity out. But it didn’t. Four babies born, two people run over by cars while they slept in sleeping bags, one guy passed out in an irrigation ditch and drowned in a puddle, and of course what happened during the Stones’ set. It doesn’t balance out.

“The Angels continued to crack heads open through each act. As the Jefferson Airplane started ‘Revolution,’ Marty Balin jumped off stage to break up a fight—the Angels had started picking on this black guy near the front of the stage and Marty jumped in to break it up. And the Angels turned their fangs on him and beat him unconscious. They beat the lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane unconscious. I was still far from the stage but I heard Paul Kantner—the guitarist—take the mike and start berating the Angels. So one of them grabbed a mike and told him to shut up. They were in control. I didn’t like Marty personally—he had snubbed me at a party a few months before and though I retaliated by saying a few unkind things in print later on, I still held a grudge—but obviously the scene was now out of control. They’d beaten up a rock star, for Christ’s sake. But the show went on. The Angels controlled the night.