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By Root 662 0

Keith and Mick when they were just members of an obscure blues band trying to make a go of it in London, but once they were on the charts, being promoted by Decca, everything had changed. Suddenly, Keith Richards himself became a spectacle within the Symbolic order—“Look, that’s Keith Richards!!!”—that obscures the ‘Real’ source of violence and renders it, under ‘normal’ conditions, ‘unimaginable’ and ‘inexpressible’. I’m guessing that few of us have ever thought, in the middle of a rock concert, that, in the end, it’s really all about transferring the small bits of cash from millions of fans to the accounts of a few people who run a large record corporation and thereby become fabulously wealthy.

So, Back to Altamont …

At Altamont, each of these kinds of violence seems to have been present. The concert itself was free and would not itself generate revenue for The Stones or the owner of Altamont Speedway. But, according to Ian Inglis (in Performance and Popular Music), that does not mean they did not hope to profit from the festival. The Stones, who did not play Woodstock, would get credit and counter-cultural prestige for their generosity by playing a free concert near San Francisco, the acknowledged spiritual home of the counterculture. Dick Carter, the owner of the Altamont Speedway, was eager to make a deal with The Stones’ attorney Melvin Belli (much of these negotiations are filmed in Gimme Shelter) and bring the festival to Altamont. That way he would get worldwide publicity for his speedway, usually in the shadow of the better-known Sears Point Raceway (who backed out of the concert over a dispute about the rights to the Maysles brothers’ film and the revenues it was likely to generate.)

If those collective desires for profits of various kinds made the ill-suited Altamont Speedway the venue for the concert, there are also the desires—the frustrated desires—of the three hundred thousand music fans. They endured the lack of facilities, the cold night air as The Stones waited hours to take the stage (because Bill Wyman had missed the band’s helicopter ride to the speedway), and a hilly geography that encouraged fans to gravitate down toward the stage and into the Hell’s Angels that were guarding it. Judging from Gimme Shelter, one of the most striking acts of violence resulting from this was purely symbolic: a Hell’s Angel’s motorcycle that was parked in the middle of the crowd was toppled (inadvertently, it seems) and that seemed to make the Angels more abusive and agitated as the night wore on (there are few greater insults to a motorcycle owner than to ‘mess with his bike’). To this day, observers dispute the symbolic politics between the Angels and the crowd, the Angels and The Stones (who had Hell’s Angels present for their concert in Hyde Park in the days after Brian Jones’s death), and, of course, the symbolism of race. Meredith Hunter was one of the few black men in the audience and, according to his girlfriend, was growing more agitated and angry about the Angels before the fatal encounter.

Judging from the framework that Lacan and Žižek provide, there is no one simple explanation for the violence at Altamont or the bad-rap that The Stones got in its wake. But that very complexity does help solve the puzzle of having such a peaceful, civilized meal with two very nice guys who supposedly killed “the Sixties” at Altamont. Obviously the Stones neither wished nor intended the violence to occur or to continue—“People!” Mick implored multiple times from the stage “What war are we fighting?” and “Please, just chill out.” But that does not mean as artists trying to make a living they were not “playing with fire” by crafting music that made them high priests of excessive desire that, if the conditions were right, could flame higher than they ever expected.

In fact, that could be what we like most about The Stones. By obsessively and maybe even consciously highlighting some of the more excessive and neurotic elements already present in our Symbolic order, they took rock (and countless of its fans) in directions