Days of Rage: the Rolling Stones' Road to Altamont (2020) - full transcript

In February 1964

The Beatles brought optimism to America.

Only four months later

The Rolling Stones arrived.

They made themselves an antithesis, really,

of what the Beatles were in terms of image.

The Beatles may want to hold your hand,

but The Stones want to

come and burn your town.

Rebellious, dangerous, druggy,

sexy, that is The Stones.

But as peace and

love spread from California,

The Stones tougher

vision seemed out of place.

The Stones are hardened.

They never fully bit on

all the idealism of the '60s.

"We can transform things by smoking pot."

It was just not realistic.

In a sense, The Stones' vision was truer.

And then, within months of

The Summer of Love,

the whole world changed.

By '68 the darkness that was

associated with The Stones

definitely chimed with what was happening

on the streets of Chicago,

and Paris, and London.

Blood was running in the streets.

The temperatures were

rising, rising really fast.

It was as if this is their time.

This film traces

The Stones through this

turbulent era, all the way to

the Altamont Festival in 1969,

the concert that brought

the decade to a shocking end.

Much as there was an element of The Stones

that loved chaos, and loved

disorder, they had no idea

what they'd gotten into at Altamont.

This didn't turn out like that.

You'd see real ugliness,

savagery right in front of your eyes.

The Hell's Angels were horrible.

It's like a car crash.

You can't do anything

about it, you're just in it.

Things just went from bad to worse,

and there's no controlling it.

It was probably, one of the

worst days of my life, ever.

October 17, 1969.

After a prolonged break

from live performance,

The Rolling Stones touched

down in Los Angeles to begin

preparations for the biggest

concert tour of their career.

Due to play at 16

arenas across the country,

for the booming youth

culture, The Stones' return

to the American stage

was hugely anticipated.

It was looked forward to as a huge event,

a big event, and a lot was expected of it.

People wanted to hear

what The Stones had to say.

The Rolling Stones hadn't played

in America for three years or so.

Things had changed

radically in that three years.

When The Rolling Stones

before were playing,

girls would literally wet

themselves and scream

the house down, and the

show might last 20 minutes

before all 10,000 people rushed the stage.

So The Rolling Stones were

confronted with something which,

at first, completely

kind of freaked them out.

Which was audiences that

sat there and wanted to listen.

Announced as

the greatest rock and roll band

in the world, despite a

changed environment,

The Stones' seminal performances

became the stuff of legend.

Everybody was on fire, you'd

get the energy from a group,

and you'd get an energy from the fans.

I'd love the fact that I

could go and watch them

every night, and it would

be a little different each time.

But it was great, the

shows were spectacular.

The boys knew how to perform.

In 1969 The Stones were

incredible, they were brilliant.

I mean those shows were raucous.

The Stones were the biggest

rock and roll band on the road.

The Beatles had pulled

back, Dylan had pulled back.

But The Stones were out there in 1969.

And coming to America in 1969 was no joke.

The Stones were in

the thick of whatever was

racketing around in America at that time.

America in '69 is in a

state of some turmoil.

We'd moved on from

The Summer of Love in '67.

Obviously things have got a lot darker,

partly because of the Vietnam War protests.

We've had the assassination

of Martin Luther King,

and Kennedy, so there's a

much darker mood abroad.

There's still that air of

hippy optimism. '69 is,

in some ways, the high water mark of that,

rather than The Summer of Love in '67,

because this is the summer of Woodstock.

Held in August 1969,

with nearly half a million in attendance,

the Woodstock Festival

was a momentous four day

free concert that stood as a testament

to the growing strength

of the youth culture.

In November, late in their

tour, The Stones announced

their own free concert on the West Coast.

Originally to be held at San

Francisco's Golden Gate Park,

this event would eventually take place

at a remote racetrack called Altamont.

Altamont was intended to

be an expression of optimism,

of the strengths of the counterculture,

an event at which all the tribes

could could come together.

So, on the surface,

when it's first announced,

this is huge news and

and it's celebratory news.

The mythology of free concerts were

at the absolute height in 1969.

The whole phrase free

concert was just redolent

with all these ethics,

and images, and ideas

that were floating around

the counterculture at the time.

It could have been

fantastic, everybody assumed

that they were looking at a mini Woodstock

in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

That's not what it turned out to be.

The event itself

would prove disastrous,

a tipping point where

the countercultures dream

of peaceful solidarity

tragically fell apart.

And the violence and chaos that The Stones

came face to face with during this concert

was a far cry from the

seemingly calm America

they had first encountered

less than 10 years beforehand.

And the band's own

development across this decade

interweaved with the changing currents

of America's youth culture

during the same period.

America, 1962, a nation

energized by a period

of political growth of prosperity.

Consumer culture was thriving.

Advances in technology

were transforming everyday life.

And many felt that this was

the dawn of a new golden age.

The American dream

alive and kicking once more.

Yet an ever present threat of war

cast a shadow over this spirit of optimism.

And beneath the confident surface,

tensions were developing.

America in the early '60s is a

strange place in many ways.

In terms of popular culture,

it's rather bland and anodyne.

At the same time, politically you've got

Camelot and the court of JFK.

And there's a certain optimism there that

we've broken with the

immediate post-war generation,

and this is the start of a more youthful,

more energetic, more

forward looking political life,

soured to an extent by the Cold War,

soured by the Bay of Pigs,

and the situation in Cuba.

Almost half of the population in

the United States is under 25 years old.

And there was this sense of an inherited

world that had a lot of problems.

For the younger generation,

growing up with the Cold War

and the threat of nuclear annihilation,

all the material prosperity in the world

didn't really go to their concerns.

Things like community,

or things like social justice,

or spirituality, none of those things could

be addressed by a roaring economy itself.

And in November 1963,

the equilibrium of the

nation was shattered.

President John F.

Kennedy, for many a symbol

of optimism and rejuvenation,

was assassinated in Dallas.

The event stunned America,

its youth in particular traumatized

by the violence and chaos

it seemed to represent.

But early the following year,

a voice of hope emerged.

And it was emanating from distant shores.

The Beatles arrived

within a couple of months

of Kennedy's assassination, so they walked

into a nation that was grieving,

grieving really badly, and

was in a state of shock.

And they appeared on that Ed Sullivan.

And immediately they put

smiles on people's faces.

It sounds glib and bland,

but that's really what they did.

It was medicine, what the Beatles did.

You can't stress enough

just how important their arrival was.

And the sudden stateside success

of this revolutionary four piece

opened the door for dozens

of other British bands to

have a go at breaking America.

Following in the

footsteps of Liverpudlians,

Gerry and the Pacemakers,

The Searchers and Billy Kramer,

in June 1964 a London group arrived

with a very different image and sound.

Unlike their fellow countrymen,

The Rolling Stones weren't about optimism.

There wasn't a sense of

"the latest band from England."

That was the thing, it

was the British Invasion.

And every week it was The Searchers,

and The Dave Clark Five,

and Herman's Hermits,

and all this business.

The Stones were

something totally different.

It just felt entirely different.

No one else was really trying to do what

The Stones were doing,

they were into the blues.

They were into black

music, and they imitated it.

But they imitated it very well,

and they got something of the essence.

They weren't just playing on the surface.

But The

Stones', singer Mick Jagger,

guitarists Keith Richards and Brian Jones,

bassist Bill Wyman, and

drummer Charlie Watts,

found that their appeal was limited.

And their first US tour

proved a disappointment.

When The Rolling Stones first came to

the United States in 1964, they were not

greeted with tremendous acclaim, initially.

Their records hadn't hit the radio yet,

and they came to Los

Angeles where they appeared

on a television show called

The Hollywood Palace.

And the host was Dean

Martin and he said, these guys

are gonna get in a hair

pulling contest with The Beatles.

They were costarring with two elephants,

which kind of tells you what America

thought of The Stones to start with.

And Dean Martin, he laid into The Stones.

Well I'm gonna let you in on something.

You know these signing

groups today are under

the impression they

have long hair.

Not true at all, it's an optical illusion.

They just have low

foreheads and high eyebrows.

They had the advanced

publicity, they had the gigs,

but America just did not see in

The Rolling Stones what they wanted to see.

They really wanted a second Beatles.

And that's not what they got.

In contrast, their rise

to the top in the UK had been meteoric.

Having only formed in the

summer of 1962, they quickly

made a name for themselves

in the London blues circuit,

and arrived fresh faced in the British

charts less than a year later.

And where America was

looking for another Beatles,

The Stones earlier in their

homeland had been built upon

marketing them as the polar

opposite of the Liverpudlians.

Their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham,

carefully crafted this image.

They wouldn't smile in photos,

they would respond

indifferently to interviews.

From the very start, The

Stones were presented as rebels.

They didn't so much have

a defiance as an insolence.

It put The Rolling Stones on

one side, with the youngsters.

And it put the establishment

on the other side.

They were really probably the

first anti-establishment band.

There was a punk attitude,

except we didn't call it

punk at the time, we

just called it loutishness,

or yobbishness, that

applied to the Beatles as well,

and John Lennon in particular perhaps.

And whereas Brian

Epstein's instinct was then

to tone that down, put them in suits,

and make them as

respectable as he possibly could

without completely losing their edge,

Oldham's instinct was the exact opposite.

He definitely had a

vision of creating a band,

a gang, that was the

opposite of the Beatles gang.

I think they understood Andrew's vision.

And I think when Andrew

said don't smile, be a bit surly,

you don't have to be, if Charlie doesn't

want to answer he doesn't answer.

If he does answer, he just says yes or no.

And he's sort of monosyllabic and cool.

What would you say?

Not in this first relationship,

It's too late to be made better.

What came out of it was a

high degree of individuality,

coupled with the nous that

Jagger had from the very outset.

The coolness that Keith

had, and the extraordinary

charismatic Brian who was

unlike, at that moment in time,

unlike anybody I think you'd ever seen.

And The Stones'' image

perfectly complemented their music.

After a couple of minor

singles, their 1964 hit

"Not Fade Away" captured the band's

unique blend of blues and rock and roll.

The sound that had made them

a sensation on the club circuit

now saw them ascend to

the top of the British charts.

The Stones really were the first

of the R and B bands to emerge.

I mean R and B originally

came out of the jazz

movement in London, the jazz clubs.

And it was frowned upon a bit,

it was scene as a bit populist.

Whereas the Mersey Beat

bands, obviously the Beatles,

but then you had Billy J Kramer,

you had Freddie and the Dreamers,

were very much melody driven.

But The Stones had this dark American vibe.

They didn't look to Mersey

side, they looked across

to the States to Chicago

and the inner cities.

So, it was really a new

sound, there was nothing really

like what The Stones were doing at all.

The Stones' music was very much a vine.

The hooks were all about

rhythm, whereas I think

the hooks for the Beatles were

yeah yeah yeah and harmonies.

The Stones didn't really go in for that.

"Not Fade Away" really crystallized that.

The Stones had that R and B bluesy edge.

And, of course, in Jagger they had this

charismatic frontman, so it was earthier.

Rock and roll had sort of eradicated it's

black origins, and tried to make itself

as white as it could possibly sound.

And, if you like, the early Stones put

the black back into rock and

roll, even though they were

white, middle class, suburban English boys.

After that you had the chain

of events that The Stones

were suddenly good copy

in the national newspapers,

this is the dark version of the Beatles,

they don't wash, all that kind of stuff.

"Not Fade Away" was the song that did that.

They were taking us

on this rhythmic journey,

and no one knew where that was gonna end.

In October 1964,

The Stones headed to the US once again.

Now with hit singles behind them,

and a growing reputation

within the youth market,

this time they were invited on to

Ed Sullivan's television

show, which had helped launch

the Beatles nationwide

at the start of the year.

And the generational divide

that the band had opened up

in their homeland, was immediately

replicated when they arrived on screen.

The Stones' appearance on Ed Sullivan,

in the newspapers everybody

was complaining about

because Mick Jagger walked

on stage in a sweat shirt.

No one did that on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Jagger just walked out on that

stage like he was in a club.

The second you saw

him you knew that this was

crossing the line in an outrageous way.

Jagger was singing in a

kind of black American accent.

It was very sexual.

And by that point the

Beatles had become sort of

a novelty as far as parents were concerned.

You got patted on the

head for liking the Beatles.

You didn't get patted on the head

for liking The Rolling Stones.

The older Americans

reacted with complete dismay,

without understanding why, although

instinctively they are completely correct

because the British were here to replace

old fashioned American show business,

and that's exactly what they

did, so long Toady Fields.

It presaged what came to

be called the generation gap,

where the American adult population became

really threatened and

intimidated by their children.

And these

children were impressed

by what they saw on Ed Sullivan.

This time, with the performance mainlining

the band directly into

homes across the country,

The Stones were instantly elevated

to the very top of the music world.

And as their audience

grew, so too did the unruly,

frenzied atmosphere of their live shows.

More than any of their contemporaries,

The Rolling Stones inspired chaos.

There were a lot of riots,

but the riots were more-so

I think the fans trying

to get close to you.

Mick had it controlled usually,

and the minute you knew

they were coming over

the stage, we'd run back to

the dressing rooms and lock it down.

There was not as much

security but the doors kept it clear,

no kids were pushing through at that time.

But it was scary.

The Stones appealed much more towards

the boys than the Beatles had done.

The Beatles encouraged the screamers.

The Stones invited the boys to participate.

There was something a bit more butch about

The Rolling Stones than there was

about the Beatles, at that time.

Whether it was the beat, the rebel look,

young men turned up at Stones' concerts.

On the continent, for

example Paris and Holland,

there was serious rioting,

male, masculine, macho rioting.

It was just like rock and roll again,

smashing up the stalls,

fighting with the police.

It wasn't just the fact that

it was the boys looking for a punch up,

it was the media, to a

large extent, that built up

the expectations of the gig quite often.

The security people just

didn't know what to expect.

When somebody tells

you that The Rolling Stones

are coming to town,

there's gonna be a riot.

You prepare for that

eventuality just in case.

Security and the audience

was a massive problem,

which I mean ultimately

saw it's nadir in Altamont.

But these outbreaks of disorder

did not dampen the mood

of optimism back in Britain.

By late in 1964, a cultural

and artistic revolution

was underway, with a

change in political leadership

bringing a new sense

of purpose and vitality.

Youth was in the driving

seat, and the nation's capital,

London, was becoming a

hotbed of creativity and innovation.

After the Beatles, it

was all eyes on Britain,

but particularly all eyes on London.

Suddenly, filmmakers, the fashion world

particularly, were gravitating to London,

and seeing London as a city of culture.

It was very very different,

the old idea of Britain as

an old fashioned, almost militaristic,

historical establishment

symbolized by the royal family.

We're having aristocrats now,

and they were from the lower orders.

You had Julie Christie, Jagger,

Ringo Starr, Michael Caine, Terence Stamp.

This was London in

1964, '65, it was the place

where everyone wanted to gravitate.

And it was the place that was pulsing

more than any other city on Earth.

In America however,

things were very different.

Although the coming of the British bands

had energized the nation's youth,

and revolutionized the

entertainment industry,

the shadow of violent

conflict loomed large.

At the time of John F. Kennedy's death

there had been a number of

military advisors in Vietnam

aiding the government

in the south of the country

against a communist

insurgency from the North.

Where Kennedy had been

keen to contain this involvement

his successor, President

Lyndon Johnson, escalated

the conflict and committed

US forces to a ground war.

By 1965 thousands of young

American men were being

called up to military

duty and sent to Vietnam.

And the president immediately emerged as

an enemy of the growing youth culture.

History did not favor a

single system or belief,

unless force is used to make it so.

That's why it's been

necessary for us to defend

this basic principle of our

policy, to defend it in Berlin,

and in Korea, and in Cuba,

and tonight in Vietnam.

Vietnam certainly did

more than anything else

to politicize the generation gap.

And the reason he escalated it

when he did was that he made

the terrible mistake of

thinking that Southeast Asia

was a replay of Europe in

1938, and we were reminded

over and over again that we

must never make the mistake

of Munich made by Neville Chamberlain.

The two things actually had

nothing to do with each other.

But unfortunately they became an excuse

to send 500,000 American

soldiers to Vietnam

in a completely hopeless cause.

The draft that supported that war

was incredibly unpopular, again,

90 million Americans under age 25,

many of them know people

that are are getting drafted,

and serving, and dying in some cases.

So the war was extremely controversial.

And there's also an important point

that young people were more alert to.

And that was that the

explanations about the war,

its origins, and its

development we're not truthful.

This is much more than a political issue.

It's an issue of trust.

And as the

war quickly escalated,

protests broke out across the nation.

Young Americans joined with peace activists

to organize large scale

demonstrations, and marches.

While at academic

institutions, students became

a powerful voice in

the fight against the war.

With the young now actively

involved in a conflict with

an older generation they perceived

as violent war mongers,

the music that had reenergized their lives

became bound up in this struggle.

As people began to protest the war,

and civil rights protests

were taking place,

rebellion in the cultural arena

began to take on that tinge.

So, what seemed just

like The Rolling Stones

kind of surliness, suddenly

had a political element.

The generation gap, and

the don't trust anyone over 30,

and all of those kind of

ideas became politicized,

so that it wasn't just the

kind of Marlon Brando

what are you rebelling

against, what do you got?

Well, we got plenty, there's

plenty to rebel against.

And in the summer of 1965,

just as President Johnson

announced he would double

the number young Americans

called up for active duty,

and as race riots erupted in the Watts

neighborhood in Los

Angeles, The Rolling Stones

released "I Can't Get no Satisfaction."

The song perfectly captured

the spirit of their generation.

"Satisfaction" really was

the record that they kind of,

they didn't realize it I think, but it was

the one that they were working up towards.

It was the one that

embodied their attitude.

It embodied the drive.

And you have to listen

to the rhythm of that.

It was like a marching, almost

a marching pounding beat.

And it was the march of youth,

the march of the younger generation.

And then you add the

lyrical content on top of that.

I can't get no satisfaction, The Stones,

and that record particularly was the one

in summer of '65 that

embodied everything that

the young people were kind of striving for.

"I Can't Get no Satisfaction" became

a kind of generational anthem.

And it's an amazing performance,

I mean it's a definitive guitar line.

But also Jagger's performance,

by the time he gets to that last verse,

I'm riding around the world.

Jagger is very underrated as a singer.

But when you isolate

his vocals, and you hear

the kind of commitment

that he brings to his delivery.

There's a reason why the second you hear

that song you never forget it.

The sense of young

people feeling that kind of

disgruntlement with mainstream

culture, that was very much

in the air right then,

and they gave it voice.

Over the next year,

The Stones' sound would expand.

And the singles following

"Satisfaction" took aim

at the dark underbelly of British culture.

And at the same time in America,

a new door was beginning,

one that would have an

enormous impact on The Stones,

and all of their contemporaries.

In distant San Francisco

an artistic, spiritual,

and cultural scene had

been growing since the 1950s.

And its introduction of new

music, mind expanding drugs,

and alternative lifestyles

was about to change the world.

San Francisco has been a home for

the tragically disaffected

since the Catholic

missionaries showed up here in the 1700s.

Hospitable to radicals,

rebels, mavericks, it attracted

these original sort of

disaffected free thinkers

of the '50s, of the post war era.

And it was common knowledge to them

that their parents didn't understand them.

And one of them was a writer

by the name of Jack Kerouac

who constructed an

epic book, "On the Road",

of two just such

characters making a journey

across the country, and their

destination is San Francisco.

On the Road settled San Francisco as

the capital of this kind of thinking.

The main thing that touched

off this kind of activity,

I think, is the arrival of the beats,

the arrival of Jack

Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

And then in short order you've

got figures like Ken Kesey.

A decade

younger than the beat writers,

celebrated novelist,

Kesey introduced the bohemian community

in San Francisco to a new drug, LSD.

And this would play a pivotal role in

the cultural scene that soon developed.

Ken Kesey had made his money as the author

of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

He'd been introduced

to hallucinogenic drugs

by a government backed

experimental testing program.

And then he becomes the link really between

The Beat Generation of Allen Ginsberg

and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the emerging

hippie movement of the mid

1960s, so he's a pivotal figure.

He puts together what came

to be called the acid tests,

which were multicultural

events, experiences,

at which LSD was liberally

and freely circulated,

and at which the Grateful

Dead became the house band.

The Grateful Dead play

there, they become part of

that scene, the house band,

they weren't really concerts.

But the Grateful Dead were there.

Sometimes they didn't even

play, they were too high to play.

And no one would came

there to listen to them anyway.

So it gave them a fantastic opportunity

to develop their music in

the way that they saw fit.

In early 1966,

this musical offshoot

of the LSD parties began

gathering momentum.

Alongside The Grateful Dead, bands such as

The Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother

and the Holding Company

developed on the local

club circuit, creating psychedelic sounds

that complimented the acid experience.

At the premier clubs the Fillmore West,

and the Avalon Ballroom,

from these experiments

a new musical culture was

born, far from the controlling

hands of the commercial

entertainment industry.

At the Fillmore in Avalon

there were no spotlights.

There was a big light show

that covered the back wall

and the side wall, and

was not an exact science.

It covered parts of the floor

too, and people sitting on it.

It was just this huge pulsing set of colors

coming out of light

projectors, and film loops.

And there was no spotlight,

there was no band on display,

and the stages were very low, like 12,

18 inches off the floor,

and these crowds danced.

They danced to the music, they didn't

sit there and watch like a concert.

And the culture

that started in the clubs,

soon began to spread

out into the neighborhoods

and public spaces of the city.

With its epicenter in the

Haight Ashbury District,

free concerts were soon organized,

with The Grateful Dead

and other bands playing to large crowds,

both on the streets and in local parks.

By the end of 1966, the hippy

movement was in full flight.

What's happening in

San Francisco is driven by

a very democratic impulse,

but it is not commercial.

So you have the free concerts.

I mean the drugs are

also very very important.

LSD is still legal in in '66, don't forget.

And it is a tool of liberation,

and suddenly drugs

are not just about

getting out of your head,

they're about expanding your

head, expanding your mind.

And so that goes along I think

with the democratic impulse,

and the love, and peace, and

those sort of pseudo political

philosophical notions that

underpin the hippie movement.

And while the key

concepts of love and peace

were central to this new

San Francisco counterculture,

at the free concerts another

group of non conformists

were often seen rubbing

shoulders with the hippies.

The Hell's Angels, a

Californian biker club,

were similarly looking

to live by their own code.

An outlaw presence across the state,

viewed by the authorities

as a violent criminal gang,

they had come into contact with Ken Kesey

and the burgeoning counterculture

at an early stage.

Kesey tamed The Hell's Angels.

He had them come over to

La Honda, filled them with LSD,

and hung out with the pranksters.

And they were tamed by him, they loved him,

they loved LSD, they got that whole thing.

Pretty soon The Hell's Angels are fixtures

at the Grateful Dead shows, and people

start getting used to seeing them.

And in fact they can be quite helpful,

sometimes reconnecting

lost children with their parents.

So, it wasn't unusual to see

them at some of these events.

The counterculture and

The Hell's Angels were sort of

decent bedfellows because

sex, drugs, rock and roll.

Living the fast life, living

life on the margins of society.

There's an affiliation between rebellion

and men on motorbikes that goes right back

to Marlon Brando in "The Wild One."

On their bikes they expressed freedom,

and up and down the

freeway, this is on the road,

except they're on their

iron horses, so to speak.

But I think there must

have been a wariness,

because the angels

lived kind of a different life.

They didn't subscribe to love and peace.

For more than a

year this new counterculture,

coexisting with The Angels,

had been able to grow

organically with little media attention.

But in January 1967 a far

larger free concert was organized.

Known as the Human

Be-In, it featured speeches

from prominent figures Timothy

Leary, and Allen Ginsberg,

alongside musical performances by

the major new voices on the scene.

The Human Be-In was a huge event,

because it was the first one of its kind.

You hadn't seen this kind of a huge crowd

of countercultural people

until the Human Be-In.

So, it's example was extremely important.

It was made for television,

sort of as a signal

to the national media

that something interesting

is going on in San

Francisco's youth culture.

The people who are onstage and speaking,

are also made for television.

You got Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg

in these kind of flowing robes,

Leary spreading his message

about the benefits of psychedelics.

Six words:

Turn on,

tune in,

drop out.

I don't think word leaked out

much about what was going on

in San Francisco through

the course of 1966.

But with the Human Be-In in January of '67,

it just exploded the

beginning of that year.

And the mythology was instantaneous.

Harry Reasoner showed

up, the American TV journalist

and cluck, cluck,

clucked about the hippies.

They they think there's some kind of saint.

And in doing that, it

delivered a coded message

to young people everywhere

that it wasn't as repressive,

it wasn't as gray, that there was hope.

And that you could go to San Francisco,

grow your hair, and

things would be different.

While across

America, young people flocked

to the Haight Ashbury

District in search of this Utopia.

In Britain too the influence of

San Francisco was soon felt.

Countercultural ideas and

fashions crossed the Atlantic,

while touring musicians,

including The Stones

and The Beatles were introduced

to hallucinogenics by

their American counterparts.

Talk of the new drug, LSD

in particular, led to fears

that popular culture

was getting out of control.

Where only two years beforehand,

the administration of

Prime Minister Harold Wilson

was celebrating the Beatles and the booming

youth movement, now a backlash began.

Where once leniency had prevailed,

now a number of drug busts were organized.

And in February 1967,

the police arrived in force

at the home of Rolling

Stones' guitarist, Keith Richards.

Pop stars had soft power,

they had cultural power,

and what they were saying

was increasingly disobedient.

But of course the

establishment didn't like that.

And they increasingly took notice

of pop stars, and what they were saying.

And The Stones really were ideal

candidates then for drug busts.

When they started to clamp down hard,

which was February 1967,

The Stones were marked men.

The police were given a tip

off by the news of the world

that a drug party was taking

place at Keith Richards'

home in West Wittering, in Sussex.

And they raided it on a

Sunday night in February.

This was the famous bust

where Marianne Faithfull

was dressed in nothing but a fur rug.

All they found was some

ash from marijuana cigarettes

in an ashtray, a few amphetamines

that were actually, I

believe a prescription.

And the outcome was that Jagger was

sentenced to three

months in prison for the pills.

And the Keith Richards

got 12 months for allowing

his home to be used for

this nefarious drug taking.

Personally I was upset

for them, and very shocked.

We were all instructed to be very

very low key, not to talk to any media.

There was a sort of blanket instruction

from The Stones' office, to

not do anything to exacerbate,

that this was a serious situation.

And so we were all, I

mean definitely, upset,

and distressed, and

worried, and worried for them.

While these

arrests further enhanced

The Stones' rebellious

reputation, they also sidelined

the band for much of the

counterculture's watershed year.

While awaiting trial, they

performed a European tour,

their last series of shows

for more than two years.

And in May, Brian Jones

was also the target of a police

raid and he too would stand

trial for drug possession.

On America's West Coast, however,

the counterculture's

influence spread unobstructed.

And in June 1967, the first

major pop festival took place in

Monterey, a coastal city 100

miles south of San Francisco.

It would prove a vital showcase for

the bands of the Haight Ashbury.

The San Francisco scene

was very excited by this.

We could feel this was the next wave.

And so we wanted for them,

if you hadn't heard of them,

now's your chance to see them, now go down

and spend three days and see them all.

Monterey, incredible important transition,

catalyst for huge change, and

people came in that weekend

on the top, Mamas and Papas

runs six straight top 10 hits,

The Association, Simon and Garfunkel.

By the end of the weekend everybody was

talking about Jimi

Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane,

Otis Redding, Big Brother

and The Holding Company.

And the whole world

had revolved in three days.

Monterey was the first

of the pop music festivals.

And it had a great feeling around it.

There was a lot of optimism in the air,

along with the smell of marijuana.

And for me, watching that festival,

the highlight was Janis Joplin.

Because I'd scene Hendrix,

and I'd seen The Who.

I knew how good they were,

I'd flown out with Hendrix.

But when Janis Joplin came up on stage

and opened her mouth, I

just took two steps back.

I just had never heard a

woman sing like that in my life.

Everyone was there,

Derek Taylor, the Beatles

publicist put this whole thing together.

And a lot of people were there.

So a lot of people saw her kill it.

I mean she was great that night.

Rather than being in a relatively small,

semi-provincial American

city, all of a sudden

San Francisco was challenging LA.

LA was the West Coast

center of popular music

with the movies, and all that was all LA.

And San Francisco

had very little part in that.

But now, The Grateful

Dead was San Francisco,

Janis Joplin was San Francisco.

San Francisco, that

summer, became a pop music

capital where it had not been before.

And in attendance of this

historic festival was a Rolling Stone.

Brian Jones, still awaiting sentencing,

had traveled to the event, keen to witness

firsthand the fruits of

this new counterculture.

Brian Jones appearing in the audience at

Monterey Pop, hanging out with Nico was

important to the scene,

they recognized that as

British rock royalty

anointing the festival.

So The Stones were represented there.

It would be the underpinnings of

what would lead them into Altamont because

they felt somewhat separate

from this hip underground

movement and they really

wanted to be part of it.

Jagger especially wanted that for his band.

But it was neither The Stones,

nor the West Coast acts that

would provide the definitive

musical statement of this

new countercultural mindset.

In a remarkable creative surge, with the LP

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,

and the single All You Need

is Love, it was the Beatles

that captured the spirit

of the summer of love.

1967 really was owned by the Beatles.

There was all this thing happening

over on the West Coast.

But "All You Need is Love",

it was so right for its time.

A summer of love that

was, like all the best flowers,

they just die off after a couple of months.

But "All You Need is Love" was the song,

the single song that symbolized that.

They also had Sergeant Pepper

on the album market which,

even reviewers in the Times

saying this is genuine art.

This isn't pop music, this is art.

In my whole career of following music,

and now it's 50, 60 years,

there was nothing ever

and hasn't been since

something like Sergeant Pepper.

This was big, Sergeant

Pepper blew everybody's mind.

Everybody found something to like.

It was just powerful, powerful music.

In late July,

Jagger and Richards

successfully appealed

against their convictions.

And the pair were free men once again.

Determined to keep up with the Beatles,

The Stones quickly reassembled and issued

their own contributions

to the summer of love.

But the single We Love You,

and the album that followed,

the much maligned

Satanic Majesties Request,

offered a less celebratory

vision of the times,

and failed to chime with

the utopian mood of the era.

The Rolling Stones, and peace and love

might seem unlikely bedfellows.

But Jagger and Richards were there

at the recording of All You Need is Love.

And in fact their single

which follows that,

"We Love You", I think is a masterpiece.

The Rolling Stones are,

and Jagger and Richards

in particular are, right in

the firing line at this point.

So, peace and love with with an edge,

because they are being

targeted and victimized.

It wasn't anything like

"All You Need is Love".

It was sardonic.

It was ironic, almost,

the way they sang that

It wasn't inclusive, and upbeat,

and playful, and fun, and international.

So The Stones weren't really playing ball.

The Stones are hardened.

They never fully bit on

all the idealism of the '60s.

They were tougher, it was

like a London thing in part.

They were city kids.

So all of this get back to the land,

and wear flowers in your

hair, and all that business,

that didn't really work for them so well.

They didn't think because

you went to the park

with your friends and waved a flag around

that anybody was gonna

give up anything important.

They totally understood that

that was never going to happen.

And The Stones reluctance

to join in with the prevailing optimism,

was borne out by the more disturbing events

that occurred during the summer of love.

In June 1967, 10,000 peace

marchers were violently attacked

by police during a

demonstration in Los Angeles.

While the following month,

race riots erupted in Detroit

leaving dozens killed and hundreds injured.

Even as the summer of

love was proffering this

kind of vision of a a new world,

there were plenty of problems.

Everything didn't disappear

because you took a pill one day.

"We can transform things by smoking pot."

It was just not realistic.

And soon everyone learned

how unrealistic it was.

The growth of the

counterculture occurs at exactly

the same time as the black

ghetto is rising up in force,

in Detroit, and in many other places.

So, you have these two simultaneous,

not exactly related

movements, but both of them

give you a feeling that

everything is changing.

And a lot of things are under siege

in a way they never were before.

But certainly the riots

in the black ghettos are

the most destabilizing

force in the country,

and the one that terrifies

white people the most,

even more than long haired

rock and rollers, clearly.

The stage was

set for harder times to follow.

And at the very start of

1968 the counterculture's

faith in the authorities

crumbled even further.

Victory in Vietnam was

always presented as a certainty,

the inevitable end to a just crusade.

But the news reports

that broadcast during the Tet Offensive

offered all of America a

very different vision of the war.

William Westmoreland, who's

the Commanding Army General

for the United States in Vietnam

has come home to America

in the fall of 1967 and said

that the war is being won,

and that we have nothing to worry about,

and that we're about to turn

the corner, and of course,

famously there is light

at the end of the tunnel.

And then at the end of

January of 1968 you have

every major city in South Vietnam,

and every major military outpost

attacked simultaneously

in honor of the Tet Holiday.

And you have Vietnamese, including some who

had worked before the American Embassy,

inside the American Embassy attacking it.

And those images of people

inside the Embassy Compound,

as well as the general

mayhem around the country,

have a very dramatic and immediate effect.

It was very clear that the

light at the end of the tunnel

just really didn't exist,

that was a fantasy

that was being sold to the American people

to justify their sons

going over to fight this war.

Once that became part of

people's awareness of what

was going on in Vietnam,

yeah, the tide began to turn.

But yeah there was resistance to that.

My country, right or wrong.

That was something you

heard all the time back then.

Even if Vietnam was

not justifiable you had to

get behind it, and young

people who were kind of

expected to go fight

that war we're thinking,

well I don't think so, I

don't see it that way.

The battle was on.

And this battle was not

restricted to America's home turf.

The youth and peace movements

were active internationally.

And in Europe large demonstrations were

organized to oppose the Vietnam War.

And although Britain had

seen peaceful marches

for nuclear disarmament

since the start of the decade,

in March 1968 outside

the US Embassy in London,

the protests descended into violence.

After the flowers had wilted

there was a reality check.

And the reality check,

Vietnam was becoming an issue

that spread amongst young

people right around the world.

It was the Cold War really

getting out of control, Vietnam.

Young lives are being lost

and people are asking questions

as to why Britain wasn't

sending the forces over,

but there was some

tacit support of the USA.

And amongst the protesters,

observing as the police and

the demonstrators clashed,

was Mick Jagger himself.

Since his trial the frontman's role

in the counterculture had been transformed,

and he now positioned

himself on the front lines.

Jagger's very interesting

in terms of his role

in the counterculture

because there is this instinctive

desire just to be yobbish

and put your two fingers up.

But he's also got this LSE education.

He is attracted by some

of the intellectual ideas

that are underpinning these notions

of different ways of organizing society.

And he starts appearing on British TV

debating with Malcolm

Muggeridge, and Mary Whitehouse,

and these figures who represented

a really reactionary attitude at the time.

The opportunity to go on

TV and debate why he felt

society was being

organized on the wrong lines

was very attractive to

him, and then it becomes

part of his songwriting as well.

And this would

come at a perfect time.

The confrontational mood in

Europe was further escalated

in May when student riots erupted in Paris.

The resistance soon spread to

the French workers themselves.

And the streets became a battleground,

with protesters calling for a revolution.

Into this turbulence

came The Rolling Stones

new single, "Jumping Jack Flash".

You had Grosvenor Square, but you also

had activism in Berlin, in Paris.

And youth was becoming

an international force,

in a way like that, and

The Stones, when they

got there kinda mojo back,

back to the tough R and B,

They were a great symbol for that.

So when you had the Beatles in '67,

embodying everything

that was happening then,

The Stones were poised,

really, to embody the

darker energies that were

kind of unfolding during '68.

I remember the first time I

heard Jumping Jack Flash.

I was thinking like wow,

The Stones are back.

Driven by a riff, and driven by

a kind of rebellious

message, it was exactly

what that moment seemed to call for.

That started them off and kicked

everything off with the

"Jumping Jack Flash".

I mean, born in a cross fire hurricane,

and all of the language

that was in that thing,

it was like identifying

for all those people

felt like life was crazy,

you had all the Vietnam,

all these other things going on so yes,

born in a crossfire re-kicked

everything, it rekindled it.

But where The Stones were being

revitalized, the American

political landscape

was reeling from further tragedies.

In April, civil rights

leader Martin Luther King

had been assassinated sparking off riots

in more than 110 cities, the

greatest wave of social unrest

the country had experienced

since the Civil War.

Despite the turbulence, there was one

political figure who offered hope.

Robert Kennedy, the

younger brother of slain

president John, was a leading candidate for

the Democratic Party to

succeed Lyndon Johnson.

An advocate of human

rights, and social justice,

and an opponent of the Vietnam War,

he suggested that change could occur

from within the political system.

Yet on June 5, 1968, shortly after winning

the Californian primary,

he too was assassinated.

He did represent hope, and

even the people who hadn't

necessarily invested in it,

they knew him to be that.

And the robbery was felt very strongly

throughout the youth culture.

Those two assassinations

did more to destroy

optimism than anything else in my lifetime.

And of course, really, it

was three assassinations

in the minds of us who

came of age in the '60s,

because it was John

Kennedy, and then it was King,

and then it was Bobby Kennedy,

so those were the three most

horrifying events of my youth.

The main thing I think when

you think back on that period

was just how saturated

with violence the culture was.

The idea of putting any kind

of hope in any of these figures

was beginning to look faintly ridiculous.

Because so many of them were being killed,

violently, in front of our eyes.

And for the

counterculture the idea

of peace and love lost its allure,

and revolution became their rallying cry.

Many of those involved

in the youth movement

solely for the sex,

drugs, and rock and roll

now became politically active.

And this reached its boiling

point at a mass demonstration

at the Democratic National

Convention in August, 1968.

Well, the Democratic

National Convention in Chicago

shaped up to be a coronation

of Hubert Humphrey,

Johnson's vice president and hand picked

successor nobody cared one whit about.

And the sort of National

Council of unaffiliated hippies

who called themselves the yippies,

determined to create a diversion, a strike,

a demonstration outside

the convention headquarters.

And they called on youth all over

the country to descend on Chicago.

The fact is Chicago was run by a Mayor,

tough guy named Richard Daley.

And he just didn't see

any reason these kids

should be allowed to do

anything, so it was a battle

in the streets outside the

Democratic convention.

There were thousands

of kids getting clobbered,

and tear gassed, and hauled

off to jail by the Chicago

Police who were acting,

for all intents and purposes,

like the Nazi Police Festival in the '30s.

The police riots at the

Democratic National Convention

in Chicago in 1968 were

absolutely a dividing line.

It would totally radicalized youth culture.

One of the chants of the protesters at

the Chicago Convention was

the whole world is watching.

And that there was that

sense of once you've seen this

you can't look away you can't

unsee it, you can't pretend.

You had to line up on one side or another.

Just as these images of vicious

police brutality were

being broadcast worldwide,

The Rolling Stones released

the single "Street Fighting Man"

inspired by the Grosvenor

Square riots earlier that year.

Declared a subversive

record, it was instantly banned

by radio stations in Chicago and reinforced

the group's anti establishment credentials.

Street Fighting Man captured the feeling

of the time both in America and here.

But Jagger was always good at sensing that.

And he always had that ability.

It was one of his

strengths as a song writer.

Blood was running in the streets.

The temperatures were

rising, rising really fast.

It had changed so much in that year from

"All You Need is Love" in 1967,

"Street Fighting Man" in 1968.

Timing is everything and

to have that song come out

at that moment made

them right at the center of

the zeitgeist in a way that they probably

hadn't been for several years before.

And it's true that the

absolute peak of the Beatles

was with "Sergeant Pepper's"

in 1967, although we have

to remember that "Hey Jude"

was also in 1968 and Dylan's

most powerful political stuff

was, by 1968, behind him.

So yeah, I would say

that The Rolling Stones,

at that moment, were

probably the most powerful

political force in the rock and roll scene.

And The Stones

resurgence was confirmed

at the close of the year with

the album "Beggars Banquet".

Promoted with a drunken press party,

it was a time for

celebration, with not only

Jagger and Richards, but also Brian Jones,

having narrowly avoided

prison time during a difficult year.

Yet the wider counterculture

was not feeling so celebratory,

with the presidential election

of Republican candidate

Richard Nixon in November,

pouring salt on the wounds

that had been inflicted during 1968.

The Stones' new LP, and

its standout opening track,

"Sympathy for The Devil", demonstrated

their continued relevance

and resistance to the existing order.

Anyone who had doubts about what The Stones

were up to after "Satanic

Majesties Request"

had those doubts erased by Beggars Banquet.

If you watch the footage of the movie

they made with Jean-Luc Godard,

they're recording "Sympathy For the Devil".

And in the course of making the movie,

you see Jagger having

to change the lyrics from

I shouted out who killed Kennedy to

I shouted out who killed the Kennedys?

When you have to make a revision like that,

you know that you're operating right on

the cutting edge of what's going on.

As the track that

announced Beggars Banquet,

it couldn't possibly have

been a stronger statement.

Jagger married a hedonism to

an enjoyment of that

sort of Lord of Misrule role.

That's what comes across

in songs like "Sympathy For the Devil".

He falls in love, I think,

with this role of the Lord

of Misrule bringing chaos

and turbulence in its wake.

And it's very attractive but equally

rather dangerous at the same time.

While The Stones were

busy reestablishing themselves

in this anarchic role, another scene

had developed in Britain

over the past two years.

Inspired by the San

Francisco psychedelic acts,

the bands of the underground

had also experimented

with light shows, and elongated soul forms

at the circuit's main club, UFO.

In 1968 the scene's

leading lights, The Pink Floyd

headlined the first major free concert

in London's Hyde Park,

organized by Blackhill Enterprises.

And following the

success of the first show,

in June 1969 they staged

an even larger event,

featuring the supergroup Blind Faith.

Pink Floyd show was seminal because it was

a whole lot of people at it,

but it was kind of small key,

We didn't promote it viciously, as it were.

But the Blind Faith show

was seminal insofar as

they were kind of amalgam

of Cream and Traffic,

that were two huge bands,

so they played in Hyde Park.

There was 150,000 people at that.

Nobody got arrested, there are no fights,

it was a beautiful day, it was very kind of

Fae and woodland in a kind of English way.

And and Sam Cutler

was then contacted by The Rolling Stones.

Riding high after their

commercial success the previous year,

they felt that a large

free concert with added

underground kudos would offer a suitably

high profile return to the live arena.

In May, they had also fired

the unreliable Brian Jones,

and had a new guitarist in

tow, Mick Taylor, for whom

this concert would provide

the perfect introduction.

A date was set for July,

anticipation running high for the event.

And then, two days before the show,

they received news that

Jones had been found dead.

A few days before the show, Brian died.

So the question, of course,

immediately becomes

in situations like that,

well what do you do?

Well, there is of course

in the music business,

like all theatrical enterprises,

there's a the show must go on thing.

Mick and Keith basically, felt that

it should be held as a memorial to Brian.

Blackhill Enterprises

started off with very much

the hippie bands playing;

Pink Floyd, Tyrannosaurus Rex,

and then Blind Faith a bit later.

The Stones is a different thing again

because they hadn't

played for a couple of years,

not since the busts, so much had happened.

And they came out they

released the butterflies

which promptly died, not great omen.

I thought it was one of

the most awful concerts

I've seen The Rolling Stones perform.

They were under rehearsed.

Mick Taylor just didn't know whether

he was coming or going

all the way through it.

Jagger dancing on the

dead butterflies was probably

the most awfully comedic

thing I've ever seen.

And they were just so terribly sad.

Shame they felt they had to do it.

Outside of

the performance itself,

the concert was a major

event bringing together

an audience of over a quarter of a million,

who were oblivious to The

Stones' failings on stage.

In its communal atmosphere,

it echoed the peaceful unity

of the San Francisco

events it was emulating.

And in an homage to the renowned

Golden Gate Park shows,

security was overseen

by a very British version

of The Hell's Angels.

Everyone was impeccably

behaved, nobody went to hospital,

no one was stabbed, no

one was shot, any of that.

And there were these guys

that rode BSA 125 motorcycles,

which would like one

step up from the scooter,

who called themselves Hell's

Angels, and of course had

nothing whatsoever to do

with the American Hell's Angels.

The Hell's Angels in England,

they weren't California Hell's Angels.

They had their colors drawn

on their leathers in chalk.

And they were backstage

at the Hyde Park concert

serving tea, so if that's

what the Rolling Stones

thought The Hell's Angels were,

they were in for quite a severe surprise.

And soon The Stones would come

face to face with the real Hell's Angels.

Following the Hyde Park concert,

the band were making plans for a new tour,

something they desperately

needed to organize.

Despite their resurgence in the mainstream,

the band members themselves were broke.

Back in 1965, manager

Andrew Oldham had brought

New York accountant, Allen

Klein into The Stones' team.

And overtime this tough negotiator

had proven his worth to the band.

Soon muscling Oldham out of the picture,

by 1968 he was the band's sole manager.

And his company Abkco, had control over

their financial affairs and

their collective bank accounts.

And getting Klein to release their funds

was proving increasingly difficult.

They were fed up with

Allen Klein because they

could never get any money out of Allen.

So here they were this world famous band,

virtually starving, and they

had to do a tour of America.

Basically they knew that if they did it

with Allen Klein, Allen Klein would end up

with the lion's share of the receipts.

And they do this huge

tour and have no money.

So they managed, I don't know quite how,

to seduce Allen Klein's

nephew Ronnie Schneider

away from his uncle's company, Abkco,

to come and work for The

Stones and do that tour.

In August, I left my uncle.

A few weeks after that

I got a phone call from

Mick Jagger saying we

want you to do this tour.

And I told them that I had left Abkco.

And they said well we know.

And I said you have to get

my uncle's permission so that

I can go, I don't want to

have a family problem here.

So they said they would get his permission.

And what they actually did

was, that was the first time

I heard from Sam Cutler, what they did was

they flew him over to the UK and fired him.

In firing

Klein, the band's assets

were immediately frozen,

and the run of American shows

became even more crucial

for their financial survival.

And at the end of the

summer, while preparations

for the tour were underway,

a major figure from

the West Coast scene arrived in London.

And from here the seeds of

the free concert were sown.

What happened was that the manager,

well one of the managers

of The Grateful Dead

was a guy called Rock Scully, lovely man.

He came to London, and a

dear friend of his was the head

of Epic Records, of guy called

Chesley Millikin in London.

And Chesley Millikin,

in turn was good friends

with Keith and Mick, so

he introduced Rock Scully

from The Grateful Dead to Keith and Mick.

And Rock basically was a great proselytizer

for the benefits of free

concerts, how wonderful it was,

what was going on in San Francisco.

Rock is summoned over

to Keith Richards house.

And Rock says you guys are coming over

to the United States,

you need to play the free

concert in the Golden Gate Park.

I know exactly how to

do that, I can fix you up.

But then they also talk

about how The Stones should

play the Taj Mahal, and all

kinds of crazy ideas come up.

And Rock leaves there

without really thinking that

he had just offered to set up a concert for

The Rolling Stones in San

Francisco, But Keith remembered.

And the prospect of headlining

another free concert in the heartland of

the counterculture soon

became even more appealing.

In the middle of August, the

three day Woodstock Festival

became a landmark event,

bringing together 32 musical acts,

and an audience of nearly half a million.

Despite the previous year's struggles,

and the election of Richard Nixon,

this peaceful harmonious event proved that

the counterculture was united and thriving.

The counterculture was in

very healthy condition in 1969.

And Woodstock was the high tide, in a way.

I think in 1969 we genuinely

thought we were winning.

We thought we were growing,

and we were an unstoppable force.

I was a teenager at the

time, and that's certainly how

I felt, however naive that may sound today.

But I think the view that

I held was one that was

widely held, that we were

going to change the world.

We genuinely believed that.

And in 1969 we didn't

think anything could stop us.

In late October, 1969

The Stones' team arrived in Los Angeles

looking to secure at least 15

venues for the upcoming tour,

but with no plans

whatsoever for a free concert.

On November seventh, at

Colorado State University

the band took to an American stage

for the first time in three years.

But as with the Hyde Park show,

as a live group they were still rusty.

It showed up in their first show,

how woefully ill-prepared

they were for the tour.

And just before that show, I

was asked to introduce them.

I didn't even think about

what I was gonna say.

But a minute before the

show, I rushed on stage

and went "the greatest rock and roll band

in the world, The Rolling Stones!"

Everyone cheered, the

band came out and played.

At the end of the show Mick came off stage,

and as he walked off stage and passed me,

he went "I wanna talk to

you," not looking very happy.

So we went into the

dressing room all on our own,

and he looked at he said

"man, don't call us the greatest"

"rock and roll band in the

world, it's embarrassing."

To which I replied "well

either you are or you ain't."

They immediately went back into rehearsal.

They got the sound stage for

"They Shoot Horses Don't They",

that film on Warner Brothers lot in Burbank

in California, and they rehearsed solidly.

And from the next show onwards,

The Stones proved that they were

the greatest rock and

roll band in the world.

As they moved west

from Los Angeles to Texas,

Alabama to New York's

Madison Square Garden,

they improved with every show.

Alongside the writer Stanley Booth,

who was one of The Stones' inner circle,

New York Times journalist

Michael Lydon was able

to witness firsthand the

band's remarkable ascension.

I was embedded in the tour,

I never paid for a hotel room,

I never paid for an airplane ticket,

I was just part of the entourage.

And, as you can imagine

this was a plum assignment.

This was extremely groovy.

I remember thinking, Stanley

and I would look at each other

while The Stones were on stage,

and we were behind the amps.

And we go like, funny

luck between each other,

realizing where we are right now is where

every hippie anywhere

in the world wants to be,

right in the band with The Rolling Stones.

And it was great fun.

They were red hot, and they

were crossing the the country.

And they had been getting

better, and better, and better.

In 1969 The Stones were incredible.

I mean they were just masterful.

I remember when the lights

were down, and all you can see

were the red lights on their amplifiers.

and Madison Square Garden in the dark.

And I remember thinking

God, in just a few seconds

The Rolling Stones are

gonna be performing right here.

I remember how thrilling that felt.

And they were great.

I saw The Stones on that

tour at the Los Angeles Forum.

I had tickets for the second show,

which was supposed to

start at 11, it started at two.

The Stones got onstage at

four, and they then proceeded

to put on what was the

greatest rock and roll show

I had ever seen at that point in my life.

And to this day, 50 years

later, remains one of the greatest

rock and roll shows I've ever

seen, they were unbelievable.

But while they were putting on

one explosive show after

another, behind the scenes

plans were developing for

a West Coast free concert.

We played in Oakland,

and all the Grateful Dead

people showed up at

that show, and that kind of

ball that had been started

in London about "wouldn't it"

"be great if you guys played a free concert

"with the Grateful Dead,"

slowly kind of accelerated.

And it became, it became

the case that somebody from

The Rolling Stones had

to go out to California

and meet with the people

from the Grateful Dead

and get serious about

whether this was possible.

So, I was chosen to go there.

Rock Scully's original

plan was to get a permit

for a concert by the Jefferson Airplane,

and the Grateful Dead

and then 24 hours before

the show announce

we've got a special guest.

And they talked about

having The Hell's Angels

create a escort guard and bring The Stones

from the airport into the

concert, that was the idea.

It could have been fantastic,

The Rolling Stones, right?

But, the people in charge

of The Rolling Stones

business strategies began to think

this is getting to be too

valuable an opportunity.

Rather quickly The Rolling

Stones' management,

in the form of Ronnie

Schneider and a strange guy

named John James who

attached himself to The Stones,

they took control of the

situation, "we'll handle this."

And contacted the mayor of San Francisco,

and that was not a good

idea, that ended any prospect

of getting that concert in San Francisco.

Applying directly for permits

for a concert in Golden

Gate Park, the Stones' team

set alarm bells ringing

in the mayor's office.

The Grateful Dead had an envisioned a less

high profile event, with deals

made behind the scenes.

But the idea of 300,000

Stones fans descending

on a city ill-equipped for such

a large festival immediately

shut the idea down.

Now a new location was needed,

with little time to arrange it.

And while alternatives

were being considered,

the involvement of the

Hell's Angels became official.

Rock told me we'd need the

Angels to guard the generators.

There's no electricity there,

so what you did was you had to

hire in big generators to

produce enough electricity

to do the sound, and

lights, and all that stuff.

And I went to meet The Hell's Angels.

And The Hell's Angels went to some lengths

to explain that they weren't cops.

Basically, they were happy

to sit by the generators

and stop people messing

with the generators for sure.

Because they love music too.

The idea initially was that they would park

their bikes in front of the stage.

The beauty of that would

be that no one would

rush the stage, or that was the theory.

While these plans developed,

renowned documentary

filmmakers The Maysles Brothers

were brought on board the tour to capture

the Madison Square Garden shows,

and the subsequent free concert.

And during their New York

leg, The Stones themselves

made a return to the show in which they had

so famously shocked America back in 1964.

They had gone full circle.

Yet as a voice of their generation,

they were more relevant than ever.

They appeared on Ed

Sullivan's Show five years after

the first appearance, what a difference.

They're playing "Gimme

Shelter", this song that

really symbolizes so

much of what was going on

at that time, the tumult in the culture.

They got such great

reach, they're a pop band,

they're a rock band, they're on Ed Sullivan

doing "Gimme Shelter" which is

a very subversive, angry, dark song.

Rape, murder, it's just a shot way.

What is round the corner?

We're coming to the end of the decade.

Things are looking pretty bleak socially.

Musically, they were probably

reaching a new kind of peak.

Have The Stones done a better

song than "Gimme Shelter"?

I'm not sure, it's an amazing piece.

This isn't pop as we know it.

That's The Stones really on top.

On November

28, riding high on the critical

acclaim for their

performances, and aware that

in the music world, they were

the biggest news in America,

they held a press conference to publicly

announce the upcoming free concert.

I read in one of the papers that

you'll be giving a free

concert in San Francisco.

We are doing a free

concert in San Francisco

on December sixth, and the location is not

Golden Gate Park,

unfortunately, but it's somewhere

adjacent to it, just a bit larger.

Not just a Stones

show, the lineup included

the biggest names from

the West Coast scene.

From The Grateful Dead,

and the Jefferson Airplane,

to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.

Yet a location was still not confirmed,

with Dick Saint John's Sears Point Raceway

the most likely alternative

to Golden Gate Park.

They said Ron would you

come out and negotiate

a deal with Sears Point Raceway?

So I flew out to San Francisco,

I sat down with Dick Saint

John, and he basically said

"well your free concert we need $100,000"

"to clean everything up, we need $100,000"

"to cover a 10 million

dollar insurance policy."

They gave me another why they needed money.

And then also we need any rights to a film.

So I said first of all,

it's a free concert.

We're not paying you

$300,000, so that deal blew up.

It was two

days before the event,

and The Stones' team was now desperate.

And at that point, a new

location was offered to them.

The Altamont Speedway,

60 miles east of San Francisco

was a remote racetrack located amidst

the rolling hills of Alameda County.

Owned by ex-racing

driver, Dick Carter it was

an unlikely candidate

for a major rock festival.

Dick Carter, his biggest

audience ever before

was he had 6,000 people

show up for a demolition derby.

It's Thursday afternoon,

and The Stones' people

don't know exactly what to

do, but they got a look at it.

So they get a traffic

helicopter from one of the local

radio stations and they take Rock Scully,

and Michael Lange, the

producer of Woodstock

who showed up for some reason, what not.

And they fly over to Altamont.

Rock looks out and he

sees oil stained asphalt,

broken glass everywhere,

just this horrible panorama.

And he's looking out

there going what the heck?

And he hears Michael

Lange go this is perfect.

We can do this here.

And like that

Altamont had a green light.

With only a day to prepare the venue,

the road crew rushed

to set up this new site.

The Stones' team had

already begun building the stage

and organizing the

lighting rig at Sears Point.

And this was simply dismantled

and re-erected at Altamont.

There was no time to properly evaluate

or rethink the original plans,

although upon his arrival

tour manager Sam Cutler

immediately had concerns.

The major, major problem was that the stage

that had been perfect for Sears Point,

because it was gonna

be on the side of the hill,

was now at the bottom of a hill.

And the stage was knee high, so it was

effortlessly easy for people to get on it.

The show was on a Saturday,

I saw the place midday

on Friday for the first

time and was horrified.

And there was already

100,000 odd people on site.

And this stage was isolated

in the middle of them.

So we tried to make

barricades of trucks and stuff

around it and get set up for a show.

And I knew on the Friday this was gonna be

a massive, massive public order problem.

The show went ahead,

with no food or water stands,

no amenities of any kind,

and only basic medical services on site.

The 300,000 concert goers

who flocked to the venue

had no idea what was awaiting them.

It was the very end of the

'60s, the last mass congregation

of the counterculture

before a new decade began.

This should have been a celebration.

The sun came up, it was a great day.

And then at some point

they officially let people in,

and this mob of young

people came rushing down

the hill with the blankets, and trying

to grab themselves a

tiny little space to sit.

And the mood was definitely

cheerful, and fun, and like

yes this is gonna be like

Woodstock, this is groovy.

I couldn't make it to

Woodstock but I'm here.

But it did not take long

for the atmosphere to change.

The problem was there was a lot of LSD,

bad acid, bad drugs, lots of cheap booze.

So, by the time the show

opened midday on the Saturday,

you had three, 400,000

people completely out of it.

And the fights began, and it

just degenerated from there.

With The Hell's Angels,

a visible presence around the stage

and throughout the festival grounds,

at midday the first act appeared, Santana.

Halfway through the performance

San Francisco peace activist

and promoter, Bert Kanegson

was the first of many victims

to face the wrath of the

concerts brutal security force.

This overweight Latino,

stark naked, whipped out of

his brains on LSD that was probably laced

with methedrine, and

guzzling Red Mountain wine.

He wanders down the hill into the front

of the stage where The Hell's Angels are.

And this is just like bad news right away.

And Bert sees this

happening, and he jumps down.

And he starts in on

this all men are brothers,

and begging the Angels

not to beat this guy.

They turn on Bert, and

they rain pool cues down.

They bust him up so good,

he has 60 stitches in his head.

It was just the beginning.

The Angels' presence on the stage

and at the front of the audience increased.

And as The Jefferson Airplane took

their places for the second performance,

it was hard to distinguish

the band from the bikers.

More of the crowd were

singled out for beatings.

And when the Airplane's

lead singer Marty Balin

tried to intervene, he too was attacked.

These guys were the

real thing, they weren't

the little biking club that

they had at Hyde Park.

They've got psychopaths,

and murderers, ex cons,

and God knows what in

there, they're bad news.

It's all right,

it's kind of weird up here.

Hey man, I'd like to mention

that The Hell's Angels

just smashed Marty Balin in the face,

and knocked him out for a bit.

I'd like to thank you for that.

There's other ways.

Hey wait, is this on?

If you're talking to me,

I'm gonna talk to you.

I'm not talking to you man, I'm talking to

the people that hit my

lead singer in the head.

You're talking to my people.

So let me tell you what's happening.

You are what's happening.

Hey, oh!

No.

Buster hold it, hold it.

This was scary, this was scary.

Sort of rationally scary, we

weren't inventing anything.

We'd seen real ugliness

and hurtfulness and

savagery right in front of our eyes.

The Hell's Angels were horrible.

And it seemed almost more so

because over the past decade

there had been a kind of a

myth about how cool they were.

Really important to understand,

the San Francisco

chapter of The Hell's Angels

was located in the Haight Ashbury.

They were well known

backstage at Grateful Dead

and Jefferson Airplane concerts.

They rode bikes with the road crews.

They were an entirely

different group of Hell's Angels

than say the home office over in Oakland.

The problems with The Hell's Angels at the

eventual site of the concert at Altamont

were all in front of the stage.

And they were almost entirely caused

by members of the San Jose Chapter.

And the San Jose Chapter

was entirely different.

That's an hour away from San

Francisco, they're not hippies.

They're not used to going to the Filmore,

they're not backstage

presences, they are old fashioned

California thugs, and those were the guys

in front of the stage with the pool cues.

Although they were there

to capture a positive

end to the Stones tour,

The Maysles Brothers

and their cameramen were

now documenting the escalating chaos.

And it was The Stones' tour manager,

Sam Cutler, who attempted to restore order.

In many ways I felt essentially helpless.

In the face of people who

were determined to fight

one another, what can a

skinny little Englishman do?

And as the day progressed, and the violence

got worse, I was faced with this dreadful

realization that my band was gonna come.

The Rolling Stones were gonna come,

and we're gonna have to appear here.

And in the early afternoon

as The Flying Burrito Brothers

began the third set of the festival,

The Stones arrived on the

speedway track by helicopter.

And almost immediately

they were met with violence.

Mick arrived, and the rest of

The Stones, minus Bill Wyman

and the first thing that happened was

he stepped out of the helicopter,

and some deranged kid on acid punched him.

They hit

Mick, somebody hit him.

So that was frightening.

And Mick arrived and

got reports from people

about how dreadful the whole thing was.

We were all put in a little trailer.

So, at the beginning

I'm sure we got stories

that some violence, but we didn't see

any of it and know what was going on.

But you can sense it, there was...

I don't know about situations other places,

but you can feel it in the air.

And this ominous mood was enough

to convince local

headliners, The Grateful Dead

to abandon the concert altogether.

Arriving soon after The Stones,

only to discover that

members of their road crew

had already been assaulted

by Angels, they decided to bail.

The band who had pioneered the very idea of

the free concert, wanted

no part of this event.

The bottom line was The Grateful Dead ran.

They backed out of it, they

saw there was too much violence.

If they would have performed I think

it might have been a

whole different ballgame

as opposed to saying oh The Stones...

If The Grateful Dead had

performed there two or three

hour set I'm sure it would

have mellowed everybody,

It might put everybody to sleep eventually.

They were doing all the drugs and all that.

But the end result was they ran.

So now you had that lag time

before The Stones came out.

And all the bad drugs, the violence,

and all that stuff going

on there but The Stones

still came out and

performed, they didn't run.

Following The Dead's departure

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young played

as brief as set as they

could manage, the beatings

by the Angels continuing

throughout their performance.

After only half an

hour, they quickly exited

the stage and immediately fled Altamont.

Now there was only The Stones left to play.

And in the absence of The Grateful Dead,

their headline set wasn't

due to start for hours.

The crowd just sits there,

they've been there all day.

There's no water, or bathrooms, no food.

They're jammed in hip to

hip, shoulder to shoulder.

And they're there for more than

two hours with nothing going on.

Just as the sun starts to go down

Sonny Barger, and the

Oakland chapter shows up.

They'd had a meeting that afternoon.

And they literally did just

drive right through the crowd

down to the front of the stage, get off,

park their bikes, get

off and sat on the stage.

It was an amazing display.

And once darkness had fallen,

The Stones finally took to the stage,

outnumbered by the hordes

of Angels all around them.

As they kicked off their set they managed

to rise above the unsettling atmosphere.

The Stones played out of their skin,

and quite probably out of fear.

Because by this time, The Hell's Angels

are all over the stage,

and if they stopped playing

they might not even have got out alive.

And under duress, and with

that kind of adrenaline flowing

they put on one hell of a performance.

It was just phenomenal,

just Charlie and Wyman

had the bottom locked down,

the guitars were going off

like sparks, and Jagger

was singing like he meant it,

like none of that sort of loopy caricature

the he tends to go, he

was real about this thing.

But this impressive performance

could not suppress the brutality

that would soon disrupt their set.

And although later some of the band claimed

they were unable to see

the full extent of the violence,

the cameras filming the

events on and around the stage

captured a concert descending into chaos.

Things just went from bad to worse.

And really there's no controlling it.

There's fights everywhere,

people rushing the stage,

being thrown off the stage,

fights in front of the stage.

We were more than

aware of what was going on.

All the light was back light,

50,000 watts of backlight,

bright is your living room.

So all this stuff about The

Rolling Stones didn't know

it was happening, and didn't

see what was happening

is complete and utter bullshit.

And you can see in the movie where Jagger's

dancing around and his eyes

happen out in the audience.

Ae sees somebody take

up a blow from a pool cue,

and he just goes bomb and stops dancing.

Jagger has so much command as a performer.

And to see him struggling, it's terrifying.

Let's get it together, I can't do any more

than just ask you, just beg

you just to keep it together.

You can do it, it's within

your power, everyone.

Everyone, Hell's Angels, everybody.

At that point certainly, bands

like the Jefferson Airplane

and The Rolling Stones they

were avatars, they were gods.

And to see them desperate to try to stop

this violence happening

right in front of them,

and failing, it's unforgettable.

You could see it itched in people's faces

at the front of the stage,

just looking at Jagger

and saying please stop, help us out.

This is, we're watching

everything dying here.

And in between the songs

you had these deathly silences.

And then sort of then

sort of the sound of cracked heads and

people shouting "no" and

wanting everything to stop.

The brotherhood of man thing,

which was the hippie dream,

it was all coming really

unstuck there, very very badly.

I was right behind the

amps, so I could see,

I could only see what I could see.

But at some point Keith,

just like Marty Balin,

Keith stops and says

hey, you can't do this here.

And the music stopped.

Look cat, that guy

there if he doesn't stop it.

Listen, either those cats

cool it man or we don't play.

But then there was some

kind of, another one of

these attacks and you

could tell it was just awful.

And people were,

they look liked if you were fish in a bowl

and you dropped a

pebble in, and all the fish

would scurry as fast as they could.

That was like there was a center place,

where something really ugly was happening.

And people would just try to get away

as fast as they possibly could.

I left, I just walked, left the stage

and sort of walked away up the little hill.

Then I realized I'm not coming

to any more of these things

I'm not gonna sort of

believe the Woodstock,

Monterey Pop, human being myth anymore.

The Hell's Angels were a huge mistake.

We're just not all brothers and sisters.

There's just elements of ugliness,

and viciousness, and hurtfulness,

that are too powerful for that.

And the viciousness unleashed

at the concert culminated in murder.

18 year old student Meredith Hunter,

caught up in a brawl with

the Angels in front of the stage

made the mistake of pulling

a gun on his assailants.

He would not live to see

the end of The Stones' set.

Finally they're doing "Under my Thumb",

and a guy pulled out a

gun, got two shots off,

maybe 60 feet in front of the stage,

and was stabbed to death

by one of the Hell's Angels.

The band stopped.

All of a sudden I got told "Ron, Ron

we need the ambulance,

a guy's been stabbed."

So that's what I was

told, so I started running

to go to the side of the

stage to get the ambulance.

And as I'm running along there, I get to it

and there's no driver, typical situation.

I'm screaming for the driver,

and I'm running along there.

Where's the driver to the

ambulance, to get him for them.

And a cop says hey, wait wait.

Are you about that guy that got stabbed?

I said yes, he said you

don't have to run, he's dead.

And that was like a gut, that

was just so bad at the time.

And although the

footage was never released

in The Maysles Brothers

film, "Gimme Shelter",

in the years following the event,

eyewitness accounts

reported that Hunter's body

was brought to the stage

by members of the audience

in an attempt to end the Angels' violence.

I talked to the guys that carried his body

to the stage, and I talked

to the guy who carried

his body from the stage backstage.

And they put it on

the stage, right in front

of Keith Richards and the Hell's Angels

swarmed over and just pushed it back off.

There's a photograph of that.

There's a photograph of

Mick Jagger looking away

with his hand over his

face like this, and a bunch of

Hell's Angels bent over

mysteriously in the corner.

Yeah they just dropped a dead body

on your stage, and they're pushing it off.

What are you gonna do about that fellas?

They're gonna stay on

stage for another hour...

terrified.

I whispered to Mick,

"the guy's been killed man,

you gotta get off stage right now", right?.

"He had a gun, you gotta get off stage,"

to which Mick replied,

and kudos to the man,

and I've always admired him for it.

"We can't get off stage, we can't leave,"

"we have to finish the show."

When The Stones

eventually boarded a helicopter

and left Altamont, they were shell shocked.

Due to fly out for a number of

European shows the next day

their schedule didn't allow

them time to fully grasp

the magnitude of the event

they had just experienced.

In the days that followed,

where some news reports

glossed over the violence of the festival,

slowly the facts began to emerge.

And alongside the arrests

of cult leader Charles Manson

and his murderous followers

only days beforehand,

soon Altamont was being identified as an

event of real historical significance.

Well Altamont is always

the thing that's cited

as being the end of the

flower power era, the hippie era.

And I think, it's certainly a signpost.

I think it was downhill

all the way after that.

Murder does tend to

concentrate the mind a little.

I don't think The Stones

realized the significance,

or the impact of Altamont until long after.

I think most of us didn't.

This is the famous Zhou Enlai

thing when, asked in about 1950

about the impact of the French

Revolution on the subsequent

course of history, and he

said it was too early to say.

So, ultimately the sort

of rock and roll equivalent

of that in a way, no one

knew in December '69

or even by summer 1970 that it was gonna

go down in rock history

as this seminal moment,

this turning point, this tipping point.

The hard truths that those events represent

about how hard change

is to achieve, and what

violence in American culture represents,

and how it can manifest

itself even in contexts where

you would think would be

the last place it would occur,

those were important lessons.

And those were lessons that signaled,

guess what we're not

going back to The Garden.

That became pretty apparent.

I don't think anybody was walking around

with flowers in their hair after all that.

A new equilibrium was found, and actually

very quickly people almost thought,

did that late '60s what happen

then, what really happened?

The negative out punched

the good there, unfortunately.

And people wanted to

distance themselves from that.

So the '70s there was

kind of a marked break.

The flower stuff seemed

just an absolute joke.

I saw Monetary Pop in 1975,

and the audience laughed,

they laughed at the look,

the sound, everything.

I was horrified by that, it's the '60s.

To me, I hung onto

the good part of the '60s.

It had really been put to bed, that period.

People didn't want to know, you know.

It kind of quickly became

the forgotten zone.

And Altamont, and the Manson murders

were instrumental,

really, in closing that door.

And although The Stones moved

ever onwards with their career,

the event also closed

the door for them too.

The bad boys of the British Invasion would

never again be at the

center of the culture,

politics and social

commentary notably absent from

their subsequent work,

they're remarkable reign

as the voice of a generation was over.

There's The Rolling Stones before Altamont,

and there's The Rolling

Stones after Altamont.

Their just two separate things.

All that stuff about the

dark guys, and the bad boys,

and the sympathy for

the Devil had played out

to this absolute, real example of evil.

And having faced that

that could never go back

to their little pretend kingdom.

And you can see that in

the "Sticky Fingers" album.

The three songs recorded before Altamont,

"Brown Sugar", "Wild

Horses", and "You Got to Move"

are completely different type of music

than the rest of that album.

Whatever happened at

Altamont to the Rolling Stones

it changed them forever, and

their music was never the same,

their shows were never the same,

their personal relations

were never the same,

nothing about their lives

went on the way it was before.