I don’t remember exactly where I was when the Hells Angels stomped the delicate, fragile flower that was 1960s idealism.
I am pretty sure I was somewhere in the vicinity of either An Khe, Pleiku or Bong Son. I remember Christmas. Christmas was nice. We got turkey out of a big can. But I particularly do not remember December 6. I remember a baby faced Captain named Colgan bought it on the first. I liked him. He was pretty cool. But I just know the date he died because I found it out later. The sixth of December, 1969 is a blur to me or a smear or a lost man in a thick fog.
I didn’t even find out that a black youth named Meredith Hunter had been stabbed to death by an Angels prospect when he started waving a gun around in front of the stage. But I am pretty sure that if you had told me that news then I would have deadpanned something callous and inappropriate like “Oh fucking well” and then tried to bum a cigarette off you.
Nevertheless, today, December 6, is a very big deal for those who are veterans of small liberal arts colleges, day care cooperatives, communes, free clinics, Wall Street and the peace movement. This day, according to a dude named James Thornton Harris writing for the History News Network, an online publication of George Washington University, commemorates the the “Day the Sixties Died.”
Big Deal
I know what you’re thinking. When your number’s up your number’s up. Well, okay. Look. Maybe that’s just one of the voices in my head. But many Americans, the best Americans, still grieve for bell bottoms, girls who say yes to boys who say no, The Lovin’ Spoonful songs, 27 cents a gallon gasoline and dashikis. So just for them, this week all the most important news outlets, from Yahoo News to The Telegraph are running special news features about the free concert at Altamont.
My favorite is Yahoo Entertainment’s “Did a tarot card reading predict the Rololing Stones’ Altamont disaster 50 years ago?” I like it because it says to much more about contemporary journalism than anybody could ever find to say about a rock n’ roll show. But honorable mention has to go to the SF Gate’s “If Jesus had been there, he would have been crucified’.”
The reserved Telegraph has “In search of Altamont, 50 years after the hippie dream died.”
Thomas S. Hibbs, the president of the University of Dallas, has a notable think piece about this seminal event in American History in the Morning News today titled “From Altamont to the mountaintop: Did we take the wrong message from the ’60s?”
Hibb’s lede is:
“‘Rock and roll’s all-time worst day, December 6th.’ So wrote John Burks in February 1970 in Rolling Stone, referring to what might be the genre’s most infamous concert – the Rolling Stones’ 1969 Altamont Speedway appearance that was intended as a kind of West Coast complement to Woodstock. Instead, it erupted in violence and is best remembered for the murder of a young black man, stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels, who – at the suggestion of the Grateful Dead – were inexplicably hired as security. The violence reached a crescendo early in the Stones’ set, as the band played ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’”
Wanna read more? Me neither.
The San Francisco Chronicle thinks “Altamont wasn’t the end of the ’60s, it was the start of rock ‘n’ roll disasters.” Forbes thinks, “Altamont At 50: The Disastrous Concert That Brought The ‘60s To A Crashing Halt.” There are more. Collect them all if you want – like pogs or Pokemon cards.
The best piece, which goes on forever and includes numerous rare phonographs is in The Washington Post. You can read that one here, if you have nothing better to do.