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By Root 669 0

at the front of the stage, fights in the crowd, bad drugs circulating, and projectiles flying overhead and occasionally onto the stage. To make matters worse, the Hell’s Angels, over the protest of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, had been ‘paid’ $500 worth of beer to provide security for the area around the stage. Things subsequently became so violent that the Dead refused to play their set, scheduled just before that of the Stones, and left the scene. By the end of the concert, four young concert-goers had died and uncounted others had been injured. (Much of this, by the way, was documented in the Albert Maysles film Gimme Shelter.)

It’s probably not fair to blame The Stones for this. They were only a group of musicians playing a gig and most of the bad decisions were made by their management team. But they were the main force behind it, its major attraction, and their reputation suffered most of the consequences. By most accounts, the final crescendo of violence commenced about the time the Stones launched into “Sympathy for the Devil” (their third number), which they had to interrupt more than once, admonish the crowd to “cool it” and stop shoving, and then restart. Then, soon after they started “Under My Thumb,” the eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter pulled a gun and was quickly beaten and stabbed to death by a contingent of Hell’s Angels. The Stones themselves were unaware of the Hunter’s death and continued their set. You can see them first viewing the footage of all this in Gimme Shelter. By the looks on Mick’s and Charlie Watts’s faces, it’s clear that they never wanted anything like this to have happened. But the popular imagination (fed by songs like Don McLean’s “American Pie” and Rolling Stone magazine’s coverage2) came to see Altamont as an orgy of drug-driven violence presided over and egged on by a band that ‘sympathized’ with ‘his satanic majesty’ and glorified aggression, domination, and violence.

Before and After Altamont

Before Altamont, rock’n’roll had enjoyed a certain innocence when it came to matters of overt physical violence. While rock had its detractors from the beginning, the only violence usually attributed to it was a sort of cultural affront to the dominant ‘happy days’ sensibilities of the American 1950s. Not only were its predominant themes teenage love, longing, and loss, together with the beach, school, and soda fountain, but viewers could tune in every Saturday to view well-dressed teens (even representing various races) mingling, dancing, and enjoying themselves on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Changes in society at large, especially the ever-escalating war in Southeast Asia, the Civil Rights Movement, and the assassination of several public figures, confronted rock with a ‘culture of violence’ that initially helped to solidify its own role and self-image as a principal agent of the ‘Counterculture’. Woodstock, with its message of Peace and Love, represented the zenith of rock’s own self-image as intrinsically innocent and non-violent. As Joni Mitchell’s anthem proclaimed, “We are stardust / we are golden / and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”

Altamont shattered this undoubtedly naive self-image once and for all. No longer could such former countercultural heroes as the Hell’s Angels be viewed as our ‘barbarian brothers’; no longer could rock bands be regarded as “jus’ singin’ and playin’ our guitars”; no longer could rock concerts be seen as safe, innocent occasions for young people to blow off some libidinal steam. Rather, it became clear to most that the idea of a peaceful and non-violent Counterculture was “just a dream some of us had,” that the Counterculture, and rock music itself, harbored in its own midst the same potentials for violence that it had previously attributed to the ‘violent other’, the culture that it had earlier rejected. After Altamont, the door opened for rock not only to realize its own implication in violence-infested institutions and practices but to adopt its own increasingly violent themes and ways of expressing them. Punk, death