Jerry Garcia discusses his hellish performance at Altamont: “It was like Dante’s ‘Inferno'”
For a brief second in the 1960s, it felt like rock and roll could change the world. As the Vietnam War raged half a world away, the people still in the US were coming together to create a sense of peace and harmony through music. Songs by Bob Dylan and The Beatles started to become anthems for the Summer of Love. Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, and Jerry Garcia thought those dark days began at the infamous Altamont Festival.
The show may be remembered more now as a disaster than a proper concert, but one can almost see this working. I mean, the massive lovefest going on at Woodstock in New York had already done wonders for the psychedelic scene, so why not move it to the second most important city in the US for rock and roll: Los Angeles?
Considering the outfits they had to work with, it seemed like it would be a good time. Out of all the legendary acts from this time, Garcia’s band of merry men in the Grateful Dead are the last people that you would think of as starting any trouble with their fans, but it wasn’t just the groups that were having a hard time. It was the security.
Since no one bothered to hire actual security guards, the entire show was marred by having the Hell’s Angels biker gang oversee everything. They were tough. They could take out anyone who got out of line, and after they agreed to get paid in beer, it looked like there were going to be no problems.
Until the bands actually started playing. Once Garcia started to make his way through the crowd, he remembered not feeling safe once the group took to the stage, remembering, “Phil [Lesh] and I, we got off the helicopter, and we came down through the crowd, and it was like Dante’s Inferno. It was spreading out in concentric waves. It wasn’t just the Angels. There were weird kinds of psychic violence happening around the edges that didn’t have anything to do with blows. Shit, I don’t know – spiritual panic or something.”
The kind of energy that Garcia described was a ticking time bomb, and sooner or later, that bomb went off right when The Rolling Stones were about to take to the stage. Outside of the rowdy crowd, the biker gang ended up getting a little too hostile during the performance of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, leaving one spectator dead after being stabbed by one of the Angels.
While the Grateful Dead carried on for a few years following Altamont, the dream of them creating a kind of musical utopia started to feel like a thing of the past. Whereas the movement started as a way to promote love and peace, this is where it ended up: with a violent crowd and a show that left one of their audience dead.
For all of the great music that came out of the late 1960s, this was the kind of dark conclusion that The Doors had warned them of, with the entire counterculture jumping the shark and putting an end to any chance of social change. They tried as hard as they could to capture Heaven in just a few minutes, but what Garcia saw that fateful night was the equivalent of Hell on Earth.
