Why did the Hell’s Angels run security at the Altamont Free Concert?
At the end of the 1960s, things were getting dark. Joan Didion wrote of this moment, around the time of the Manson Family murders, as a dire situation that surprised no one. After the hedonism of the decade, what went up needed to come crashing down, and at the Altamont Free Concert, the crash was deadly.
Taking place on December 6th, 1969, in California, the festival was initially branded as the ‘Woodstock of the West Coast’. Despite the chaos of the organisation, which is a massive understatement, as will be revealed shortly, they managed to book some of the era’s biggest names like The Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Santana, making it a major event for the California crowd.
Woodstock had essentially run smoothly by complete miracle, given that the team behind that too had failed to preempt the insane crowd size that would be coming in, hadn’t got enough food and ended up being free simply because they hadn’t built the ticket booth in time. So, as Altamont was first launched as an idea, and as the bands got dragged into confused talks about signing on to play, it was clear from the start that this would not run smoothly.
However, what Woodstock did have was a big and capable security team. At first, the plan was to have 346 off-duty New York City police officers running the event. When they had to pull out, personnel from an air force base stepped in, meaning that the security was of army quality.
Altamont didn’t have that. Instead, they had a biker gang.
Why did the Hell’s Angels run concert security?
How the infamous biker gang came to be the security for the event runs on both a theoretical and logistical level.
Theoretically, the organisers wanted to set themselves apart from Woodstock, or even shame Woodstock slightly. At the height of the countercultural era, where anti-establishment thinking was a vital part of the mindset, they thought the decision to engage with the police or the army went against that. But, while Altamont didn’t want the law present, they still needed authority.
The Hell’s Angels could definitely provide that, and logistically, it helped the festival out. The organisers had reportedly heard from the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane that the gang would provide security for concerts for a fee of only $500, given to them exclusively as beer. For a first-time festival trying to do it all on a budget, that was a pretty good deal.
But the facts of it all are hazy. “The only agreement there ever was… the Angels would make sure nobody tampered with the generators, but that was the extent of it. But there was no way ‘They’re going to be the police force’ or anything like that. That’s all bollocks,” the Stones’ tour manager said, claiming that there was never any proper deal.
That checks out with the gang, too, as they remember talking to the crew, stating, “We don’t police things. We’re not a security force. We go to concerts to enjoy ourselves and have fun”, but offering to help show people where to go and generally support with crowd control. In reality, they were the crowd control issue.
What actually happened at Altamont?
With around 300,000 people on site, and most of them high, Altamont was already a mass risk or a disaster waiting to happen. Even as the first performers played, they noted how out of control the crowd seemed. Then, as the Angels got irritated and fighty, the crowd got fighty in return.
Brawls were breaking out left, right and centre when one of the gang members got in a fight with Meredith Hunter. When Hunter then tried to get onto the stage during The Rolling Stones’ set and pulled a gun out, the Angels stabbed and killed him, causing the chaos in the crowd to get even worse.
In the end, four people died that day, Hunter from the stabbing and the other three from tragic drug-fuelled accidents.
