| March 16th, 2005 10:02 PM |
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| stonedinaustralia |
i just lifted the following off the uncut magazine website
As part of a new series of 'Your Say' features, Uncut will be looking at personal accounts from regular people who have attended great events in Rock History. Read Marcia Heinegg's account of the Altamont disaster, then tell us your own story.
Marcia Heinegg, then 22, was living that fall of 1969 with her friend Susan Deixler in Point Reyes Station, an hour north of San Francisco. She doesn't remember how she heard about the free concert the Stones were going to play at Altamont - probably from friends, she thinks now. Anyway, she and Susan Deixler and Marcia's future husband Chris and his friend Nicholas Rosenberg, who'd just arrived from New Zealand, drove out to the festival in her 1952 Studebaker.
"I remember masses of people as far as the eye could see," she recalls now. "I think we got there in the early or mid-afternoon. We dropped psilocibin. I remember that I got seperated from Nick and Chris briefly and found myself on the other side of a VW Bug. I saw Nick on the other side. There were so many people squashed together that I couldn't get around the Bug. Nick motioned to me to climb over the car. And so I did, and other people helped me and thought this was completely normal. I remember digging the music. I remember my smiling till my cheeks hurt and not being able to unsmile. I remember seeing Mick Jagger on stage, although I don't think we were that close-up."
Unlike others who were there who were struck from the start by the menacing atmosphere, the brooding ugliness and unsettling presence of the Hell's Angels, Marcia recalls nothing about being at Altamont that seemed threatening or ominous, although down near the stage people were being beaten close to death by Sonny Barger's goon squads.
"I really did not experience anything weird that day, like evil vibes or danger," she tells Uncut quite breezily. "I'm sure I was just too absorbed with myself and my own drug trip. I may have known that the Hell's Angels were policing the event, but being a Californian living in the Bay Area, I was used to them being around. I don't remember being aware of any commotion down on the stage. I only read about it later in the paper. Of course, I was horrified then, but didn't equate it with the end of an era, although within a few years things got more tense and not so love-love-love. When Nixon got elected, Chris and I left the country for New Zealand."
A couple of days after she first speaks to Uncut, I get an e-mail from Marcia in Santa Cruz. Since she talked to us, she's been talking to an old friend of hers, Frank Wise. Frank was also at Altamont.
"Frank is about 65," she writes. "He was a professor at a college in New York years ago. He hung out with Timothy Leary types in New York and took a lot of LSD. Then he dropped out and has been a true hippie all his life - lives on some land in Oregon with wife and family, grows a lot of their own food, welcomes all passersby, creating a commune feeling, smokes dope and likes to talk about peace, love and the world today.
"At Altamont, he remembers goblets or chalices of LSD being passed around. He remembers thinking then that what was going on in front of him was a government plot to demonise hippies. He still firmly believes that and has gathered evidence to support his thinking. The Hell's Angels were hired to be security guards. But there weren't enough of them to adequately control the crowd. He believes the FBI or the CIA fed downers to the Hell's Angels and lots of alcohol, which made them wild and crazy and violent.
"He got there early and observed that that there were movie cameras high up, pointing at the stage, so he was quite sure they were making a movie of the event. He remembers the Stones playing, but they were not great musically that night. He said he remembers this great balloon came down with a Moog synthesiser playing and it felt to him like the world was breathing. It was cold.
"After the concert, he got seperated from his friends and decided to spend the night. He said there were lots of fires inside tyres. He had lost his coat and tried to find a warm place to curl up to sleep. He couldn't find a bathroom and later had a bladder infection because of this. The next day, he hitchiked into Golden Gate Park and discussed the situation with various other concert-goers. He said that in '67 LSD was legal and that the government wanted to make it illegal. So they had to find some horrifying incidents to make it illegal. These two incidents were Altamont and the Manson Murders, which he thinks were also instigated by the CIA. They tried to make Altamont as near to HELL as they could, in order to demonise hippie-ism and to make it just the opposite of Woodstock.
"He said that in the Fifties, there was an experiment done by the military, where they gave LSD to soldiers and then instructed them to engage in a mock war game. Nine out of 10 of the soldiers wouldn't participate because they couldn't see the point. Somehow," Marcia goes on, grappling with what Frank recalls of Altamont, "this is all tied up with the '68 Tet offensive in Vietnam. After LSD became illegal, and after Altamont, the atmosphere in America changed - hitchhiking was seen as dangerous and rape and violence increased considerably. Down in front of the stage, towards the end of the concert, Frank observed the Hell's Angels on their motorcycles going back and forth and knocking people down. He was horrified, but at the same time he thought they were making a movie and the people who were hurt were actors.
"What a contrast to my memories!" Marcia writes, with considerable understatement, signing off.
Robert Leslie Dean
CaliforniaMy Altamont ExperienceI experienced Altamont. May I elaborate? I was nineteen years old, and took a Greyhound bus from the Hollywood depot, just south of Sunset and Vine, to Fresno, just southeast of Tracy/Altamont. I'd never taken a Greyhound bus anywhere before. The bus left Hollywood about 8pm and arrived in Fresno around 3am. A connecting bus then delivered me/us to Tracy. From there I hitched a ride a few miles further to the Altamont Raceway. By now it was dawn and quite chilly. On arriving at Altamont at sunrise, I realized this was gonna' be a really huge gathering. Making my way up the rolling hills above the massive stage, I settled in for the day with a nice group of folks, and we passed around joints, and refreshments as morning broke. I believe that I was about 100,000 fans back from the front of the stage (there were no giant video monitors back then) so the performers were pretty far from view. It was a dreary gray/brown day, as I recall, but a couple of very colourful hot-air balloons nearby brought a bit of cheer to the masses. I do remember seeing that very fat naked fellow pass by on his way down to the front of the stage(one can see him in the Stones' film). Those around me thought he was a funny-yet-gross sight. But, hey, peace, love, and understanding, right?
I don't remember the first band that played, or the order that the bands played in, but, I do remember that every single band that performed(Santana, Burritos, Airplane, etc.) had to stop playing mid-set because of on-going commotions occuring at the front of the stage. My strongest memory was of Jefferson Airplane's performance. It seemed to me that Marty Balin's voice was slightly off-key during the Airplane's set. That is, until he got into the altercation with the Hell's Angels (also seen in the Stones' film). After he jumped into the crowd and was punched by an Angel, when the band resumed playing, it sounded to me like he was now singing in key! Coincidence? I also remember that Santana were extremely hot and tight (their debut album had just been released), though, they too had to stop during their set because of troubles taking place down front. After an interminable delay, and with the weather getting chillier by degrees, the sun had set and it was now dark. The pot smoking continued and I was with a friendly group. Finally, the Stones appeared. Wow! There they were. Mick prancing in his cape and Taylor/Richards' slashing away on guitars. But, again, every song was interrupted by some unseen commotion taking place far from my view. I thought it was a drag, and I considered packing it in early, but I decided to stick it out to the end. When the concert finally ended, I really don't remember how, but I was able to bum/thumb a ride south to Hollywood. I arrived back in my hometown/Hollywood early the following morning. It was only then that I heard on the radio about the violence and death that became the "Legend of Altamont".
James Kenney
VA?'s 'bout '67I was born in 1979 and only know about Altamont through what I've read. I do know, however, that the year 1967 was as important a year for rock as was 1979 and 1993. It was the year of Sergeant Pepper's, Woodstock, Altamont, the heyday of Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the twilight of Kerouac's Beats, and early signs of a time when new phrases like "sellout" and "corporate rock still sucks" entered the rock and roll lexicon. Is there some sort of meaning to all of this, or was it just a big coincidence?
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