Old Gods Almost Dead (43 page)

                

Two shows
at Boston Garden, where “Live with Me” shook the house. Before “Street Fighting Man,” with the house lights up, Mick said (with a wicked smile parting famous lips, revealing overbite): “We'd like to say a special hello tonight to all the minority groups here with us, all the
fags,
all the
junkies—
good evening,
junkies
! [sneaks a look at Keith, who's using]—and all the
straight people,
the
cops,
all you
minorities
out there.” The Stones returned briefly to New York, waited in a broken plane for nine hours, flew to Florida on November 30 to play the Miami Pop Festival, held in a swampy drag strip inland from Palm Beach. This was the last show of the '69 tour, and the Stones were brain-fried but still able to take nourishment. They were topping a bill that included the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother, and Johnny Winter, and they thought it would be a good prep for the big outdoor show in San Francisco the following weekend.

The Stones had been starting their shows two hours late, building up fan anticipation by keeping 'em waiting. Now they were eight hours late: 55,000 kids had been waiting outdoors in a grove-killing Florida rainstorm in battlefield conditions. There was political trouble as well, with right-wing groups agitating against the festival and the corrupting power of the Stones specifically. The Stones were flown in by chopper. Freezing, wrapped in a blanket, Keith hit the chords of “Jumpin' Jack Flash” at three in the morning, and thousands of cold kids started dancing. They played until dawn broke over the Everglades, and the “festival” was counted a ragged victory for the band, performing in the open air with frozen fingers. Exhausted, the Stones jammed a little for their film crew in their Palm Beach hotel, then disappeared off the map for a supposed rest. Instead, they flew to northern Alabama and checked into the Holiday Inn near Sheffield for a few days of recording, arranged by Ahmet Ertegun and kept secret from Allen Klein. Klein controlled the Stones' song copyrights, tape masters, and royalty payments. He had the Rolling Stones by their throats, and they couldn't afford to rile the volatile accountant.

At Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, a squat bunker in a factory zone where Aretha Franklin and other Atlantic soul stars did some of their most down-home recording, the Stones worked with Memphis musician Jim Dickinson and engineer Jimmy Johnson. A big old porcelain toilet bowl in the middle of the funky studio held a microphone for special plumbing resonance, “a shitty sound,” according to the locals.

At Muscle Shoals, the Stones began working on their next album and the rest of their career. The first night, they recorded “You Gotta Move,” a retitled version of Mississippi bluesman Fred McDowell's “Got to Move.” Keith took the high part sung by McDowell's wife, Annie Mae, as he had when they did the song as part of the tour's acoustic set. The second night, playing guitar, Mick taught Keith his Australian outback song, originally titled “Black Pussy” but renamed “Brown Sugar,” partly in honor of sepia beauty Claudia Linnear. “Brown sugar” was also the street name of unrefined heroin from Southeast Asia. (“Drugs and girls,” Mick later said of the lyric. “All the nasty subjects in one go.”) Charlie got into a classic rock groove (“Do it like 'Tallahassee Lassie,' Mick told him”), and Ian Stewart played good boogie piano. Mick wrote the three verses on the spot, and the band got it right after half a dozen takes. In “Brown Sugar,” the Stones had what they came for: a furious and alive record of a coked-up band rocking out in the Deep South.

The next night, after drinking half a fifth of Jack Daniel's and playing country songs on the piano, Keith high-strung a guitar in a Nashville tuning. Prompted by Mick for a song (“C'mon, you must have
hundreds
”), Keith disappeared into an office and worked out the melody line to “Wild Horses” and the words of its chorus, thinking of Anita and baby Marlon back in London. Plugging into Keith's riff, with the “dull aching pain” of his own love life in mind, Mick wrote out the song's verses of regret and his unwillingness to let his graceless lady slide through his hands. Stu hated any song with minor chords, so Jim Dickinson played piano, and by dawn the Stones had their newest love song, a conflated portrait of their feelings for the wild, untamed blondes in their lives.

At the dawn end of these sessions, mindful of bootlegging, Mick Jagger carefully erased all the extra tapes of their work before he left the studio. On December 4, the Rolling Stones flew to San Francisco and their shared destiny in the cold, empty hills south of the city.

The Battle of Altamont Speedway

December 1969.
While the Rolling Stones were in Alabama, their halcyon free concert in the Bay Area was on its way to hell. San Francisco's main rock promoter, Bill Graham, still angry with the Stones, queered them playing Golden Gate Park by bad-mouthing the show to the cops and mayor's office. Another site was found at Sears Point Raceway. The Stones, the Airplane, the Dead, CS&N, the Burritos, and Santana were all set to play. The national press ran with the story, and thousands of Stones fans were heading west for the final mammoth rock festival of the sixties, a groovy tribal gathering that would make Woodstock look sick. Then, three days before the show, with the stage already built, the raceway site fell through when its film studio owners demanded movie rights to the concert. At the last minute, another site was offered by the owner of a demolition derby track in the barren hills of Alameda County, thirty miles south of Oakland, in a place called Altamont. The name seemed to indicate a pinnacle of some sort, perhaps an auspicious new height.

Working overnight, the crew organized by the Grateful Dead's office dismantled the stage, trucked it down to Dick Carter's Altamont Speedway, and rebuilt it at the bottom of a wash in treeless hills covered in sand-colored winter scrub. This high desert landscape was immense, empty, and unforgiving, looking like the arid
bled
in northern Morocco, traversed by gigantic power lines and drainage ditches. A perimeter was set up backstage amid heaps of wrecked cars that recalled Godard's junkyard sets in
One Plus One.
The Oakland, San Jose, and Frisco chapters of the Hell's Angels were invited by the Grateful Dead's organization to protect the stage, much as they had done, peacefully, at previous San Francisco festivals. This was no big deal. Payment was said to have been a busload of beer, but this was later indignantly denied by the seething Angels after they'd been blamed for what happened at the Battle of Altamont Speedway.

                

The wan,
crescent-shaped moon—and much was later made of this—was in Scorpio.

The Rolling Stones flew into San Francisco on Friday, December 5, and checked into the Huntington Hotel. That evening, Mick and Keith drove out to Altamont with the film crew to check out the scene. They found an immense hippie encampment surrounding floodlit scaffolding and the stage being built. Chip Monck was on the job, as were hundreds of volunteers who labored through the night. Volunteer medical teams were setting up field clinics. It seemed like San Francisco was working overtime to show the world what could be done for free. Beyond the perimeters, friendly campfires burned in the darkness as hundreds huddled together for warmth. Jugs of California wine were proffered, joints, good vibes: so good that Keith decided to stay the night and crash in one of the trailers behind the stage.

By noon the next day, December 6, an estimated 300,000 carpeted the hill in front of the stage. Roads were blocked ten miles around Altamont, so the only way in and out was by foot, motorcycle, or the helicopters landing on the nearby racetrack. There was weak sunshine, and all the bands were supposed to play in daylight. Santana went on first, jammed a set of their conga-driven Chicano rock, played “beautifully,” according to Charlie. Young Carlos Santana watched in alarm as knife fights and stabbings broke out at the side of the stage while he was playing. A naked fat man was badly beaten when he tried to approach the stage, which was only four feet high. Then the Flying Burrito Brothers started their pure country rocker, “Six Days on the Road,” with Gram Parsons up front as the hero of the rodeo.

Excited by the young Burritos, the girls in the crowd surged to the edge of the low stage—some guys too—and the Hell's Angels in their black leather jackets and greasy denims lost control. Fights broke out in front of the band and the music stopped. Gram tried to soothe it—“Let's not hurt each other”—but some people were bleeding badly.

The Stones arrived early in the afternoon by helicopter—without Bill Wyman, who missed the flight. Mick got off the ship, accepted some flowers, and was punched in the face by an acid-crazed kid. He found Keith in his trailer, getting briefed by Gram Parsons on the vicious fighting the Burritos had seen during their show. Wary of the whole thing, Charlie Watts chatted up a couple of the Angels minding the trailers and found them quite pleasant. Waiting for Wyman, insulated from the growing chaos outside, the Stones and Gram Parsons spent the afternoon smoking weed and yodeling country tunes.

Out front it was a bummer. The acid, the mescaline, the DMT, the alcohol had a death grip on the afternoon. A thin greasy line of stoned bikers under the watchful eye of the formidable Oakland Angels chieftain Sonny Barger faced an increasingly hostile mob of freaks and suburban high school kids. Crazed Stones fans fought to get up close. Tripping kids who'd gotten rid of their annoying clothes and were only trying to hurl their shivering naked bodies onstage were beaten with pool cues the Angels had thoughtfully packed for crowd control.

In his most soothing tones, Sam Cutler, the Voice of Hyde Park, announced that a baby had just been born and appealed for blankets. Nothing. More fights in front of the stage as the Jefferson Airplane started up. Grace Slick vainly appealed for calm. Singer Marty Balin saw a Hell's Angel savagely punch a black man and leaped off the low stage into the crowd to stop the fight. The Angel stepped back and knocked Balin out with one punch. They got him back on the stage, where he sat dazed while his band played “Volunteers.” When Balin came to, he cursed at the Angel who'd hit him, and the enraged biker smashed Balin in the head and knocked him out again.

When the Grateful Dead's helicopter landed, Jerry Garcia and the others ran into Michael Shrieve, Santana's drummer, who told them what was going down. The Dead got right back on their chopper and didn't play that day.

Crosby, Stills and Nash went on late in the afternoon with their fey songs about Judy Blue Eyes and the Marrakesh Express. They watched, horrified, as the bikers continued to defend the stage, and the line of Harleys now parked in front of it, with their pool cues. When some poor victim went down, brained by a cue, the Angels stomped him bloody, and crew people watching from the stage assumed that people were being beaten to death. There was no official police presence anywhere at Altamont.

After CS&N, there was a long wait as the sun sank behind the hills, the evening turned cold, and the crescent moon shone with a baleful light. Sam Cutler kept announcing the Stones wouldn't appear until the stage was clear of everyone, including the Angels who occupied it like a drunken crew of pirates. One of these, a saucer-eyed devil wearing a wolf's-head hat, even whipped out a flute and played into the microphone for a few moments of horrifically apposite
Boujeloudiya.

Bill Wyman finally turned up after dark; he had been shopping with his girlfriend. The Stones tuned up in a tent behind the stage. It was late and very cold when the Rolling Stones finally came out and played one of the musically better shows of the 1969 American tour.

                

Seven p.m.
Suddenly the hot lights flashed on, a harsh splash of current in the cold black night. Sam Cutler: “I'd like to introduce to you, everybody—from Britain—the Rolling Stones!” Dull roar. Bright white floodlight outlined the packed stage against the gloom. Mick appeared in an orange and black satin suit, a little drunk, with silver satin pants tucked into knee-high velvet boots with three-inch heels. The “Omega” on his chest was the last letter of the Greek alphabet, signifying The End. Keith was in a tight red leather jacket and ruffled lace shirt, Jack Daniel's at hand on the drum riser. Mick whooped it up, Charlie hit the drums and into “Jack Flash.” Then “Carol” and “Sympathy,” where the Stones' invocation to Lucifer broke down as a motorcycle exploded in front of the stage and a mini-riot flared up. Mick stopped the band. “Hey, people, sisters and brothers . . . Come on now, will you
cool out,
everybody.” After a while, Charlie and Keith started up again and Mick said into the mike, “Okay, we can groove—something very funny always happens when we start that number.” The Stones kept playing “Sympathy” while the Angels pushed a guy off the stage, then cut him down with their cues, then gang-stomped him. It looked like they'd killed him and Keith stopped playing, really upset. Mick: “I mean, like
people,
who's fighting and what for? Why are we fighting?
Why are we fighting?
Every other scene has been cool . . . We've gotta stop them right now, you know, we can't, there's no point . . .”

Tumult. Leather in swirling motion. Sound of heads cracking. Sam Cutler took the mike, trying to talk to the Angels as the pool cues were raised and smashed down horribly.

Keith, livid, pointing: “Either those cats
cool it,
or we don't play. I mean, there's not that many of them.” Sonny Barger looked at Keith. The Stones' security men, impassive New York cops in windbreakers, moved in closer to the band. Another fight in front of Keith: “That guy
there
! If he doesn't stop it—”