Jerry Garcia on why there wasn’t “any blame” for the Altamont Free Concert disaster
The Altamont Free Concert wound up being one of the most consequential live concerts in the history of rock music. Headlined by The Rolling Stones as a way to deflect criticisms of their high ticket prices, the concert was supposed to reflect the peaceful Be-Ins that were staged around San Francisco at the height of the flower power movement. But by 1969, things had changed.
When it was all said and done, at least four people were dead, including a young man by the name of Meredith Hunter. Hunter had been stabbed to death by Hells Angel recruit Alan Passaro, which was caught on film and eventually included in the documentary Gimme Shelter. The scene was so rough that the Grateful Dead, one of the main organisers of the event, didn’t even perform live.
“Phil and I got off the helicopter, and we came down through the crowd, and it was like Dante’s Inferno,” Jerry Garcia observed in 1970. “It was spreading out in concentric waves. It was weird… fuck, it was weird. It wasn’t just the Angels. There were weird kinds of psychic violence happening around the edges that didn’t have to do with blows.”
In his memoir You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Rolling Stones (and later Grateful Dead) tour managed Sam Cutler went so far as to blame the series of bad LSD trips on a government-level conspiracy to discredit the hippie movement. Whoever was directly involved, Altamont wound up becoming a low note that closed out the 1960s.
For his part, Garcia was remarkably philosophical about the catastrophic concert. “What’s to forgive, there isn’t any blame,” Garcia claimed in an interview following the event. “Because who are you going to blame? You’d have to blame everybody. We’re all human beings, we’re all in this planet together, all of the problems are all of ours. Not ‘Some are mine, and some are theirs.'”
“You know, if there’s a war going on, I’m as responsible as anybody is,” Garcia added. “If somebody’s murdered, I’m responsible for that too. At a certain point, someone has to say, ‘There can be no Hells Angels.’ And who’s gonna say that?”
“I think the Angels behaved properly,” Garcia opinioned in 1970. “I mean, they did just what they would do, so they were not out of character. Also, I don’t think it was strictly a trip on the Angels. ‘Cause the Angels in California are surrounded by prospects – people who want to be Angels, and their way of showing they could be Angels is to come on bad. And they’re the ones who are mostly responsible. Most of the Angels I know are into partying.”
“Our relationship with the Angels is that we both exist in essentially the same area, we both know each other exist, and they out-number us about 90 to one,” Garcia explained. “We get along okay with them. Those guys are guys that we all know. We’ve known them for years, and we don’t have any fight with them, but we do know that they’re Hells Angels and that they’re capable of doing a lot of pretty amazing things. We just stay out of their way.”
Despite not even being on the premises, the Grateful Dead did cull quite a bit of inspiration from Altamont. Lyricist Robert Hunter, who declined to even make the trip to the festival site, later commented on the blame game that erupted in the aftermath of the concert in the song ‘New Speedway Boogie’. Another song, ‘Mason’s Children’, was also written in reference to Altamont, but only ‘New Speedway Boogie’ wound up on Workingman’s Dead.
