Rolling Stones At Altamont thoughts

I'll post a link to this very interesting blog pist I found. This says, again as old school has pointed out, the Angel's didn't "do security". The $500 of beer was for guarding the generator for the power supply.

http://davrosky.blogspot.com/2012/06/altamont-what-really-happened.html?m=1

It's a very long account, very detailed. I'm still working my way through it....but moments of humor (believe it or not). The guy who knocked out Balin is named Animal. Says, "call me Mule" and everyone agrees that there won't be any more music if all the musicians get knocked out!

 

I know. This is important stuff we're discussing.

Thanks for your leadership.

 

I agree. I think that the Stones faced with an impossible situation did the best they could. I'm also sure Mick was thinking that he didn't want the crap beat out of him like Marty Balin and, given they had lost control, it would seem natural that playing the set might give them back some sort of control but that clearly didn't happen.

 

Very sad short film, thanks for sharing. Interesting how his story was never really told.

 

A human being with a gun, pointing it at the stage.

 

Great article! Thanks Zeki

 

Never realized he was buried about 15 minutes from where I live and five from where I went to high school. I will have to ask my brothers if they went to Altamont. Never thought to ask them.

 

Further down in the above linked blog post account.

"But what about his account of the security arrangement? Hadn’t Cutler ‘hired’ the Angels for no other reason than to secure the power supply?

Cutler’s book paints a scene of rapidly disintegrating control, against a shrinking security contingent. The Stones’ own security, made up of off-duty New York cops, numbered about five. Monck says “there couldn’t possibly have been more than six; there were probably three”. Cutler says that early in the afternoon they made it plain to him that they weren’t about to risk their lives trying to deal with ‘those crazy biker dudes’. Their job was to protect the Stones, nothing else. "

 

Again, from that blog post account. You can see how this "security" arrangement keeps evolving:

"At some point during the day, Cutler seems to have asked the Angels to become stage security. As tour manager, he had sized up the way the festival was likely to go, particularly in light of the inadequacy of the tiny stage as a barrier to the crowd and to the prospects, and made a decision to use them. It’s an uncomfortable point for Cutler. In his book, written expressly to “set the record straight” on Altamont, the direction he gave the Angels is nowhere to be found.

Did he tell them to guard the stage?

Cutler pauses before answering. “I was talking with them, because I was interested in the security of my band - everyone’s security, for that matter,” he says slowly.

“In the midst of chaos … In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. They were the only people who were strong and together. [They had to guard the stage] because it was descending into absolute chaos. Who was going to stop it?”

 

That account explains why the stage was only 39 inches high. It was originally intended to be at the top of a natural hill at the other location that fell through.

 

Which might've been even more offensive to the Angels! To quote a passage from Fargo Rock City, from memory: "The six most dangerous words in America are, 'you think you're better than me?' If you hear those words in a blue-collar bar on a Friday night, someone is losing teeth."

 

So much misinformation in this thread.

 

Funny that you participate in a forum full of fans of such evil music & music artists. Which drug using, sex-outside-of-marriage, non-church-going artist is your musical hero? If none, then what is your ranking of artists on a righteousness / divinity scale that we can all look up to?

 

I quite agree it's a shame, and a waste of a human life, I just have a semantic problem with all the posts asserting that he was murdered.

 

I understand Cat Stevens is very religious.

 

In law homicide is just that: homicide...the killing of a human by another human. Thats divided between justifiable & non-justifiable (i.e. criminal) homicide. Murder is a term usually associated with criminal homicide. Whether Hunter was murdered or not is a grey area and depends on ones viewpoint. The state clearly felt Hunter was murdered. But the jury found the killer fit into that narrow exception defining it as justifiable. The slightest shift in fact, jury bias, etc. could have resulted in the conclusion it was not justified. As we all know the distinction of what can be proved at law is not always in sync with what occurred.

 

After reading the quite detailed blow-by-blow account, my initial knee-jerk thought has changed. I shy away from using the term "murder". The way the Stone's guy puts it, he thought one of The Stones or someone on stage was going to be killed by Hunter. So then it gets into "what if" scenarios. Killing with the knife...is probably the hardest part to grapple with, for me. I'll have to think about this!

 

Supposedly after Hunter had been stabbed and fallen to the ground, a group of Angels kicked him around a bunch as well. So the initial attack in self-defense (or defense of the Stones) was fine, but after that they seemed to have carried it on a bit more than may have been necessary. *shrug* I dunno. I wasn't there.

 

Description of the killing, from linked account:

"After the song ends, Meredith Hunter briefly appears in the film for the first time, standing about a metre from the stage. Jagger is again imploring the audience to “keep it together”. Hunter is striking in a black hat and an iridescent green jacket. High on methamphetamines, his tongue darts in and out a couple of times during the few seconds the camera is on him.

It happens as the last chord ofUnder My Thumb fades out. A girl screams and the crowd parts as Hunter lurches forward, off balance, a long-barreled pistol in his left hand. As Hunter regains his balance, an Angel expertly parries the gun away with his left arm just before bringing a knife down into Hunter’s back. The Angel pushes Hunter from behind, towards the side of the stage, stabbing him once more before they both disappear into the darkness.

Exactly what happened between Hunter and the Angels before the stabbing is not entirely clear. Early reports framed Hunter as a victim of the Angels, but the Angel who stabbed him, Alan Passaro, was subsequently acquitted of murder on the grounds of self defence. The other Angels who are alleged to have helped kill Hunter by kicking him were never identified.

Scully, who saw the incident clearly from his truck by the stage, recalls being alarmed by Hunter. “There was no doubt in my mind that he intended to do terrible harm to Mick or somebody in the Rolling Stones, or somebody on that stage. He had a gun, and it was loaded, and fortunately he got stopped,” he says.

“I saw what he was looking at, that he was crazy, he was on drugs – methamphetamines – and he had murderous intent. He had a powerful pistol in his hand.”

Cutler didn’t see the stabbing, but has a similar view. “In the final analysis, there’s a black guy, armed with a gun, who came there and got off two shots. What was he doing with a gun? You pays your money and you takes your choice,” he says.

Due to the way its edited, for dramatic power, Gimme Sheltergives the impression that the Stones’ set finished at that point, but in fact Hunter’s killing actually occurred only about half way through. The band, unaware than anyone had been killed, played another eight songs, including the first ever performance of Brown Sugar, before running for the helicopter that flew them back to San Francisco. The film captures the band, along with Cutler and Booth, piling onto the helicopter, desperate to get out of there. "

 

It occurred to me today that if Hunter had managed to squeeze off a shot and killed one of the Stones, he'd be remembered on roughly the same level as Mark David Chapman.

 

In Ethan Russell's Let It Bleed book, it says Hunter actually went back to his car at one point to go get the gun.

 

All I can say is, there is plenty of reasonable doubt attached to Hunter's death, it's no clear-cut case of murder. If I was on that jury, knowing as much as I do now, I would vote to acquit, and I'm no fan of the Hell's Angels.

 

I just realized that Cutler claims Hunter got off 2 shots. ??? I don't see that mentioned anywhere else.

 

A damn shame for the festival and all that but as I said earlier, what sort of person takes a gun to a festival? I can't feel sorry for someone like that.

 

I just said that in #262 that Hunter brought on his own demise. The State of California thought Hunters mother had a valid claim.