Sunday December 6th will mark the 40th anniversary of an event that has commonly been dubbed as “Rock & Roll’s Worst Day”. The Altamont Speedway Free Festival in California took place just four months after the huge success of Woodstock although Altamont resulted in the complete opposite of “peace and love.” Also hailed as being “Woodstock West,” what started out as a great idea has been best remembered as an event marred by violence and death.
The free festival, which was hastily organised and headlined by the Rolling Stones, had roughly 300,000 people in attendance, and featured bands such as Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby Stills and Nash and Young and Santana. The Grateful Dead were also billed to perform but they bailed out because of the bad organisation of the event. The Hell’s Angels, who were hired as security for a rumoured $500 worth of beer, infamously got into some heavy clashes with the packed crowd, resulting in the stabbing of gun wielding 18-year-old black man Meredith Hunter. Shockingly captured in the Rolling Stones US tour documentary ‘Gimme Shelter’.
Leading up to the stabbing of Meredith Hunter the Stones were playing through their set as a number of scrambles broke out amongst the first 20-30 rows of the uncontrollable crowd. Drug overdose was rampant with many of the fans ignoring others in distress so as not to miss the music. Earlier during the day Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin was knocked unconscious by a punch from one of the Hell’s Angels during another brawl within the crowd at the front of the stage. The stabbing came from a Hell’s Angel, allegedly in self-defence, whilst the Stones played ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
In the days following the festival, the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards said. “The Violence just in front of the stage was incredible.” Lets face it, it’s not every day that a rock and roll band’s performance, let alone the Stones, is accompanied by a knifing within a scream of the stage.
Richards continued. “Looking back I don’t think it was a good idea to have Hell’s Angels there. We had them at the suggestion of the Grateful Dead. The trouble is it's a problem for us either way. If you don't have them to work for you as stewards, they come anyway and cause trouble. But to be fair, out of the whole 300 Angels working as stewards, the vast majority did what they were supposed to do, which was to regulate the crowds as much as possible without causing any trouble. But there were about ten or twenty who were completely out of their minds, trying to drive their motorcycles through the middle of the crowds.”
Filmed with no less than three cameras the 1970 documentary ‘Gimme Shelter’, made by filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, includes some remarkable footage from the Stones 1969 US tour. Featuring clips from gigs in New York, Boston, Florida, and the recording studio sessions in Muscle Shoals the picture climaxes with the violence at Altamont, featuring the entire brutal sequence from the time Hunter was knifed, then downed and surrounded by Angels.
The events at Altamont are often contrasted with the Woodstock festival that took place less than four months earlier. In addition to the knifing two people died in a hit-and-run with a car and another drowned in an irrigation canal. It was reported that 850 were injured and four births were reported at the Altamont event as well.
Whereas Woodstock represented a coming together of peace and love the Altamont events were viewed as an abrupt end to the hippie era and the death of the Woodstock America.
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Leading up to the stabbing of Meredith Hunter the Stones were playing through their set as a number of scrambles broke out amongst the first 20-30 rows of the uncontrollable crowd. Drug overdose was rampant with many of the fans ignoring others in distress so as not to miss the music. Earlier during the day Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin was knocked unconscious by a punch from one of the Hell’s Angels during another brawl within the crowd at the front of the stage. The stabbing came from a Hell’s Angel, allegedly in self-defence, whilst the Stones played ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
