Pushkin.
The nineteen sixties are mythologized as a decade of peace and love. But peace and love definitely wasn't the vibe outside the beatles London offices. The genteel calm of savile row was shattered by the unfamiliar rumble of powerful motorcycle engines and sitting astride. These souped up Hardy Davidson's are a dozen American Hells Angels pulling up at the Apple Records Building well in time for the beatles nineteen sixty
eight Christmas party. George Harrison had met the bikers in la Despite their fearsome reputation for violence, these angels seemed cordial enough, and since they were planning a European jaunt, Harrison offered to put them up in the Beatles' offices. In a stern memo to staff, the Beatles said, they may look.
As though they are going to do you in, but don't fear them or uptight them. Try to assist them without neglecting your Apple business and without letting them take control.
By the time the guests assembled for the Christmas party, the bikers were fully ensconced in the building and very much in control. George Harrison wasn't there, but the other Beatles had brought their children along to enjoy magic shows and a ventriloquist act. What they got were Hell's angels, said to be drunk and stoned and high out of their minds. One guest lost his three year old son and the confusion. The child was located not on the knee of Santa Claus, but in the lap of an
angel who was giving him gulps of beer. The bikers were less agreeable with the adult party goers and quite prepared to do them in.
What the fuck is going on in this place?
Screamed an angel called Frisco Pete at John Lennon, we want to eat. Aggrieved by a delay in serving food, the bikers became surly and aggressive, souring the holiday mood. The guest com pleaded for calm was punched. Luckily for John Lennon, a forty three pound turkey, reputedly the largest available in all of Britain, was suddenly carried into the room. They ripped the turkey to pieces, said a witness, trampling young children under to get to it.
I've never seen anything like it.
The Beatles had had their fill of these greasy guests and summoned George Harrison to evict them. His initial attempts to encourage their departure were perhaps too subtle.
Do you dig us, but don't you?
They asked Harrison, Confused, the so called quiet Beetle again couched his request that they depart in soothing, spiritual terms, to the continued bafflement of the bikers. Exasperated, Harrison changed tack.
You know, booger off.
The Apple employees in the room drew breath and waited for the fists to fly. I'm Tim, Hart offered, and you're listening to another cautionary tale. Just to be clear, in Britain, bugger off isn't the politest way to ask guests to leave. But perhaps the quaintness of this Britishism, or George Harrison's soft liver publician accent disarmed the Hell's Angels.
Well, if you put it that way, George.
Said the angels, and away they roared up, savle row. The Beatles had gotten off lightly, but they weren't alone in mistaking the Hell's a Angels for harmless, lovable rogues. Many leading figures in the sixties counterculture writers, actors, rock stars, courted the Angels, thinking them allies in the war against.
The square world.
Of all the cheerleaders in the music community for the Hell's Angels, none were more influential than the Grateful Dead, those demigods of the San Francisco hippie scene. The Dead had played at a Hell's Angels party back in sixty seven, and the Bikers somewhat adopted the band, and the power mysteriously failed at a subsequent gig, the Angels stepped in to guard the generators and cabling, so on a trip to London, the Grateful Dead's manager waxed lyrical about the
Angels to none other than the Rolling Stones. How the bikers were a cost of and crucially cool alternative for policing concerts.
He trusted those cats, man.
Remarked the Stones guitarist Keith Richards. It certainly planted an idea with the self styled bad boys of rock. The Beatles and the Stones were firm friends. The two bands socialized together, appeared on each other's records, and were even considering merging their back office operations. It's rather odd than that the debarcle of the Beatles Christmas Party hadn't made a bigger impression on Mick Jagger and his bandmates, warning them to steer well clear of the likes of Frisco Pete.
You never saw a police force like.
It, said The Stones bass player Bill Wyman.
Black leather suits studded to the eyeballs, Nazi helmets, swastikas and crosses everywhere.
It's a sweltering July day in London's Leafy Hyde Park. Indeed, it's so hot that the roads can't keep the band's guitars in tune, and fans gathering for that afternoon's free giga diving into the park's lake a Serpentine.
To cool off.
At least a quarter of a million young people are expected to swarm the venue, so fifty British Hell's Angels have been recruited to act as what Wyman described as heavy men. They arrive dressed like some greasy contingent of Himmler's SS.
The swastiku is out before the Nazis was even.
Four of, said ron biker, defending his choice of attire, and it was a sign a piece. No one is truly buying the peaceful intentions of these toughs, though, and the Stones head of security reads them the ry attacked. If any of the bikers have come for a brawl, he'll see them after the concert, and he'll be armed with a shotgun. Despite the menacing appearance of this so
called leather militia, the event begins without a hitch. The bikers content themselves with guarding the stones many girlfriends and groupes, and occasionally aiding fans who've wilted in the heat. There are some hiccups, of course, but the Stones plan to release thousands of white butterflies to memorialize the loss of Brian Jones, a founder member of the band, who drowned in his pool just days earlier. Legend has it that a drunken biker fell on a box of these butterflies,
crushing the poor creatures inside. The Rolling Stones, by their own admission, had played badly, out of tune and out of tempo, but the gig was still deemed a success. Mick Jagger, whose singing had been hobbled both by laryngitis and hay fever, said fans weren't that bothered by the quality of his performance anyway.
It's an excuse as well as a groove for them to all come together to join hands and embrace each.
Other, and things had indeed passed off peacefully, very peacefully. There were virtually no arrests, and afterwards fans had enthusiastically gathered up their trash, having been promised free records for every three bags they collected. How much of this serenity was down to the Hell's Angels is debatable. London's parks have their own police force. These bobbies were monitoring the crowd closely, ready to move in at the first sign
of trouble. The black clad Angels might have been fitting stage props to burnish the Rolling Stones bad boy image, but they certainly weren't replacing the actual cops. To their credit, the bikers hadn't started any trouble of their own, which, given the fearsome reputation of this outlaw motorcycle club, might surprise you. That's because the heavy men enlisted by the
Rolling Stones weren't really Hell's Angels. The fifty bikers at Hyde Park were ursats Hell's Angels, cose players in leather and Nazi style helms, a pale imitation of the Angels in America. Indeed, when Frisco Pete and his friends had ridden through London the previous winter. They'd been shocked to see locals with no affiliation to the club sporting Hell's Angels badges. They decided to stamp out these fitters by establishing official Angel chapters and recruiting only bikers who met
their particular standards of deportment. And what were these behavioral norms? As the Rolling Stones would soon find out Cautionary tales will return in a moment. The origins of the Hell's Angels motorcycle club are disputed, but it's broadly accepted the seeds were sown in California by returning World War II veterans, often riding army surplus. Harley Davidson's groups of riders formed and amalgamated, with chapters of the Hell's Angels gradually being
established across America. By the mid nineteen sixties, the Angels were attracting national attention, and for all all the wrong reasons. Bill Ray, a photojournalist with the magazine Life, hitched a ride with them.
They always had plenty of money for gas and beer. Their money had to come from somewhere, but none of them ever worked.
The FBI was pretty sure these rebels funded their lifestyle through drug dealing, extortion, and a raft of other nefarious activities. Then there was their propensity for violence. Ray saw the Angels he had befriended beat the holy hell out of a rival gang. He said, the uncompromising message to outsiders.
Get out of the way, or got a hell.
Since the Angels enthusiastically embraced drugs and just as enthusiastically rejected middle class morez, the beatnicks, heads and hippies of the burgeoning nineteen sixties counterculture assumed these bikers were kindred spirits. The celebrities of the Bee world, poet Alan Ginsburg, writer Ken Kesey, and LSD advocate Timothy Leary even broke bread with the Angels, dropping acid with them, smoking dope, and
listening to the Stones on a high Fi together. In fact, there's a lyric from the Rolling Stones hit Sympathy for the Devil, which neatly articulates the belief that such outlaws were actually heroes standing up against the corruption and hypocrisy of mainstream society. Just as every cop is a criminal begins one verse, and all the sinners saints. When fifteen thousand anti war demonstrators streamed down Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue. They
reasonably thought the authorities would be their sole adversaries. The march was supposed to end at the Oakland Army Terminal, where men and materiel were being shipped off to the unpopular war in Vietnam, but the activists were halted by a phalanx of riot police. The leaders of the march went forward to confer with the police chief when out of nowhere, a dozen or more Hell's Angels assaulted them. Writers communists yelled the bikers, followed by more punches and
shouts of America, first America, for Americans. The police sprang to the defense of the bewildered protesters, arresting several angels clicking their wounds. The activists simply couldn't comprehend what had just gone down. The writer Hunter S. Thompson was at the demo working on a book all about the Angels. He witnessed the incredulity of the marchers. Surely the bikers should be on our side. The angels had to be over went their logic, so Alan Ginsburg was sent to
open the talks. According to Thompson, the swastikas worn by the bikers were a worrying sign of their real allegiance.
The Angel's collective viewpoint has always been for sistic. They had the same kind of retrograde patriotism that motivates the klucos Klan and the American Nazi Party.
The Angels weren't just supportive of the war in Vietnam, they were willing to enter the fray. Sonny Barger, the deve facto leader of the Bikers, sent a telegram to President Johnson suggesting his gang be dropped behind enemy lines to terrorize the viet Cong. So Ginsburg's peace mission went about as badly as you'd expect. At one point, the poet even told the Biker chieftain that he loved him. Sonny didn't know what the hell to say after fellow Angel.
The Angels weren't one over to support the peace protesters, but nor did they stage any more violent counter demos. Sonny Barger said cracking the skulls of the Unamerican marchers.
Would only produce sympathy for this mob of traders.
That's a pretty clear declaration of the Angel's position.
But Hunter S.
Thompson said some in the counterculture still saw this as a sign that the angels were gradually coming round to the hippie point of view. We often find it hard to distinguish between what is true and what we wish were true, and it can have a decidedly detrimental effect on our lives. Colloquially we call it wishful thinking, but really it's a bias, the desirability bias, and it's been
measured in several studies. The behavioral economist Guy Meyraus once recruited a bunch of ordinary people and randomly assigned them to imagine themselves to be farmers or bakers. They were shown a graph and told it was the historical fluctuations of wheat prices. Then they were asked to predict the future price of wheat, would it go up or would
it go down. They'd be rewarded if their predictions came true, and in addition, the so called farmers would get extra payment if wheat prices went up, while the bakers got extra cash if wheat prices fell. In this experiment, the incentive is to make the most accurate prediction that you can and meanwhile hope that the wheat price moves up. If you're playing a farmer and down if you're playing a baker, and yet from exactly the same data, the pretend bakers predicted a dip in the cost of wheat
and the pretend farmers forecast a rise. Both sides predicted what they wanted to happen, wishful thinking in its purest form. The desirability bias appears in politics too, of course. In twenty sixteen, a team of psychologists studied groups of American voters. Some were Trump supporters who doubted their man would actually win, while others backed Hillary Clinton but also thought sheered lose.
These voters were then shown polling data that indeed had bad news about their candidate's chances, but also some indications that they might win. The psychologists found that the Clinton voters suddenly felt Hillary was more likely to take the White House. Of course, on the same data, the Trump supporters were now convinced that he would claim victory two. Both groups had assimilated the good news into their new prediction of the election their favored outcome, but ignored the bad.
In nineteen sixty nine, the stones and the dead were also ignoring the bad news about the Hell's angels, and there was plenty of it. Perhaps they didn't believe the corporate newspapers and their square reporters. Of course, mainstream society would demonize the Angels because the Angels, just like the counterculture, rejected the mainstream. But what of the violence at the Berkeley Walmarch? And Hunter S. Thompson's book setting out the
biker's troubling politics and behavior. Its publication had made Thompson a national celebrity, and he went on numerous TV shows to talk frankly about his two years living with the Angels. The PostScript to that book alone should have given anyone pause for thought about the biker gang.
I push my luck a little too far and got badly stopped by four or five Angels?
Are these really the sort of people that the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones wanted doing their concert security? Seems a sure fire recipe for indiscriminate violence. The Dead's Jerry Garcia was especially fond of the Angels, praising their straightforwardness.
Their brutal But their brutality is really only honesty.
I'm reminded of a viral tweet from twenty to fifteen by author Adrian Bott. It goes, I never thought leopards would eat my face sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces party. The Rolling Stones US tour of late nineteen sixty nine was a roaring success, not to mention money Spinner. Audiences were pleased to see the band, who hadn't played America in years, but reporters repeatedly grumbled
about the steep ticket prices. Perhaps stung by these insinuations of greed, but also motivated by a regret that they had not played Woodstock that summer, The Stones were plotting a free show a Woodstock of the West to end their time in America. The Grateful Dead would be on the bill, and they suggested the venue b San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Unfortunately, the Dead announced the concert without asking the city authorities nor checking if any other events
clashed with the proposed gig. They did, a big football game was scheduled, so Golden Gate Park, with its amenities, police department and transport links, was off the table. With time ticking, a racing circuit a few miles north of the city was booked and the Stones roadies began hurriedly constructing a stage. But even as they hammered away the deal with the track's owners was falling apart, with some
concert goers already en route to the free show. The price for using the raceway was suddenly jacked up, so a frantic search began for a replacement. Hearing of the stone's predicament, the proprietor of another race circuit called with an offer. He'd happily host the festival. The publicity would benefit his venue, and the Altamont Speedway definitely needed some good press. Though only an hour or so inland from San Francisco, it was a world away. While San Francisco
was lush and picturesque, Altamont was dry and barren. While the city was humming with hippie good vibes, Altamont was a rural and conservative backwater. There were no decent transport links, too few parking spaces, and certainly not enough bathrooms for three hundred thousand music fans. But still, the road is tore up their original stage and trucked it to Altamont. As they assembled it again, a new problem presented itself. At the first racetrack, this stage had been at the
top of a slope. At Altamont, they had to build it at the foot of an incline. A general rule is that this is unwise, since gravity pushes crowds downhill and hard up against the stage. If you have no other choice, then a high stage helps prevent fans invading the performance space. But the age they'd brought with them was just three feet high. None of this was ideal, but geography was acting against the stones in a farm
or sinister way. At the suggestion of the Grateful Dead, thet agreed to have the Hell's Angels act as security at the other proposed venues. These angels would have been recruited from chapters well known to the dead and trusted by them. That Altamont was in the East Bay, and the East Bay was very much the territory of the Hell's Angels, ruled by one Sunny Barger Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
With the aid of.
Some chemical stimulation, the road is finished. The Altamont stage as December sixth dawn a sound s and was also rigged together, using bits and bobs from each of the acts appearing. It wasn't great, but it worked. Just Volunteers had been frantically tied dyeing great banners to decorate the stage, but nothing could bring much color or cheer to the dismal raceway. If attendees were hoping for a repeat of the good vibes and togetherness of that summer's Woodstock, they
were in for a rude awakening. It was only after most of the other concertgoers had assembled that around one hundred Hells Angels rode in. They drove through the throng and parked their bikes in front of the low stage. This crowded real estate would become a flashpoint as fans flowed down the slope, jostling to hear and see better. They'd swamp this air, banging into and knocking over the
prized Harley Davidson's of the Angels. There remains much dispute about the actual deal broken with Sonny Barger and his bikers. The accepted story is that they were offered five hundred dollars worth of beer to guard the stage, the equipment,
and the performers. The bikers said they merely agreed to sit on the stage, drink beer and look menacing and spat on the idea that they were there to police anyone but Grace Slick, whose band Jefferson Airplane were playing was clear what she expected of the bikers.
People get weird and you need people like the Angels to keep them in line.
And people got weird, very weird, almost as soon as the music began. Keith Richards had been at the site all night, going ahead of his fellow Rolling Stones him Altamont resembled Dante's vision of Hell.
It was a descent to cave men level thanks to sunny Barja in his lot and bad red wine and bad acid.
Out of their minds. Some hippies striped naked and clambered over the stage the Angels and their bikes. Santana was the first band to play, and knives were drawn and blood spilled before their opening song was done. Jefferson Airplane followed, and now the Hell's Angels flailed up the crowd with the fat ends of pool cues cracking skulls. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane had had enough of the unfolding savagery. Seeing Angels assaulting yet another music fan, Bailin threw his
tambourine at the attackers. A biker known as Animal punched Baby, knocking him out.
Coming to his.
Senses, Baileen leapt down from the stage to intervene once again. In the brawling, fists and pool cues were flying. Grace Slick pleaded into her microphone.
No, now, stop it, Please be kind, Please be kind.
Grace didn't have her contact lensers in, so to her, the violent melee in the front row was just a nightmarish blur.
You've got to keep your bodies on each other unless you.
Intend love, she told the brawlers, as one by one her bandmate stopped playing and took refuge behind the drum kit. Animal approached Marty Bayalin, apologizing for punching him but recommending his show The Hell's Angels more.
Respect in future.
Fuck you, replied the musician, Animal knocked down and out again. The Flying Burrito Brothers came next, then Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. During their set, Stephen Stills was stabbed in the leg by an angel armed with a sharpened wheelspoke. Still's bandmate David Crosby was unsurprised by this turn of events. Unlike his fellow musicians, Crosby seemed clear eyed about the bikers.
If you don't want the tiger to eat your lunch guests, don't invite the fucking Tiger to lunch.
But where were the people who suggested inviting the tiger? The Grateful Dead had just helicoptered in and crossing the site, they'd noticed many unfamiliar, unfriendly faces among the Hell's angels. Hearing of the unfolding violence and noting the sour mood, they agreed this isn't a place for us and scurried back to the helipad. This left a gap in the schedule.
Most of the Rolling Stones had flown in, with Mick Jagger taking a punch from a drugged up giggoer moments after their arrival, but Bill Wyman had missed the flight, so Altamont endured an increasingly tense hiatus until he arrived. It was cold and inkly black when the Stones is set finally began under blood red stage lights. Jumpin Jack Flash was followed by Carol, then sympathy for the Devil, but scuffles that had started even before their show began intensified.
Jagger stopped singing, Brothers.
And Sisters, why.
We don't want to fight?
Come on?
The singer then encouraged the steadily encroaching fans to instead sit down, Thinking h had calmed the tensions. The song resumed, The stage still bristled with angels who crisscrossed in front of Jagger at will, jumping into the crowd as the mood took them to dole out more beatings. Then during under My Thumb, a disturbance erupted to Jagger's left. In a section of the crowd illuminated by the stage lights, a thin, rangy teenager in a lime green suit is
surrounded by bikers. A revolver glints in his hand the blade of a large knife in the hand of an angel. The eighteen year old Meredith Hunter came off worse in the encounter. The knife plunged into his neck and back five times before his crumpled body was stomped on by more bikers. He died before a chopper taking him to hospital could take off. Keith Richards vowed that the Stones would split if.
Those cats don't stop beating everyone in sight.
But the show went on under the increasingly hostile glares of Sunny Bargera and his men. Finally, a helicopter pilot approached bassist Bill Wyman. His was the last flight out, he explained, and the Stones better get aboard now if they wanted to escape. Seen reminiscent of the Vietnam War, the Stones and let entourage played.
We piled in on top of each other. It couldn't even lift off, that's how full it was. Back in their hotel, the enormity of what had just occurred was dawning on the band. Mick Jagger was said to be blaming himself and even suggested quitting rock and roll altogether. Keith Richards wasn't so sure. The dead should have known, the angels shouldn't have been asked to do the job.
But Richards thought the fans at Altamont shared the blame too.
People were just asking for it, All those new fat people just asking for it.
But the music press knew who to blame and was excoriating Rolling Stone, A magazine named in honor of the band, said Altamont had been the product of diabolical egotism, ineptitude, and a fundamental lack of concern for humanity. The magazine said of the Stones, a man died before their eyes. Do they give a shit? But Mick and the boys had more to worry about than their reputation. Sonny Barger was deeply unhappy with them too. He called a radio phone in show, an angrily ranted.
McJagger put it on on us. He used us for dupes men.
One Angel was arrested for the murder of Meredith Hunter, but was controversially cleared by a jury. The White Angel had acted in self defense, they decided. When confronted by the armed teen Sonny Barger and his bikers felt that, what with legal fees and reputational damage, Mick Jagger owed them fifty thousand dollars, and rumors.
Swirled that until this debt.
Was paid, a contract was out on Jagger's life. Unsurprisingly, the Stones began to look over their shoulders. Backstage, Rhodies carried their union cards so no assassin could slip in amongst them. The band also shunned hotel room service for fear of poisoning, and they checked in under assumed names. Keith Richards liked the alias Count Ziganpus. Sonny Barger, who incidentally spent thirteen years in prison for various crimes but beat a murder rap, was more coy about the feud.
If there was a contract out mc jagger, then he'd be dead. It's that simple. He wouldn't still be.
Singing flying home to London. Keith Richards tried to tamp down the criticism over Altamont, telling reporters the gig had been well organized, but.
A few tempers got frayed.
Coming as it did in the dying days of the nineteen sixties, Altamont is often portrayed as the death knell of the decade. Altamont was the end of Rock's innocence, said one San Francisco paper. It's certainly an argument, and one still hotly disputed, but Altamont definitely changed the Stones. Mick Jagger and the band had a rocky relationship with the police. Prior to Altamont. The singer had even faced the prospect of a prison center on trumped up drugs charges.
This might well explain his interest in having the Angels police his gigs, but the killing at Altamont changed that. He moodily said, I'd rather have had the cops. Key sources for this episode include Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, Keith richards On Keith Richards, edited by Sean Egan, and The Stones Memoirs Life by Keith Richards and Stone Alone by Bill Wyman. For a fullness of our sources, visit Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise, but additional sound design is by Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Genevieve Gaunt, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough,
Sarah Jupp, the Saamonroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohene, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardall Studios in London by Noria Barr and Lucy Rowe. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
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