ALTAMONT-Joel Selvin

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rock history. The Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December sixth, nineteen sixty nine has long been seen as a distorted twin of Woodstock, the day that shattered the sixties promise of peace and love when a concertgoer was killed by a member of the Hell's Angels, the notorious biker club acting as security. While most people know of the events from the film Gimme Shelter, the whole story has remained

buried in various accounts, rumor, and myth until now. Altamont explores Rock's Darkest Day, a fiasco that began well before the climatic death of Meredith Hunter and continued beyond their infamous December Night. Joel Salvin probes every aspect of the show, from the stones hastily plan tour preceding the concert, to the bat that swept through the audience, to other deaths that also occurred that evening to capture the full scope

of the tragedy and its aftermath. He also provides an in depth look at the Grateful Dead's role in the events leading to Altamont, examining the bands behind the scenes presence in both arranging the show and hiring the Hell's Angels as security. The product of twenty years of exhaustive research and dozens of interviews with many key players, including medical staff, Hell's Angels members, the stage crew, and the

musicians who are there. Including sixteen pages of color photos, Altamont is the ultimate account of the final event in Rock's formative and most turbulent decade. Book there was examining this evening is Altamont, The Rolling Stones, The Hell's Angels, and the inside story of Rock's Darkest Day, with my guests, journalist and author Joel Salvin. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Joel Salvin, Thanks Dan,

good to be here. Thank you very much. A little bit different book to look at today, but an incredible look back in history and again the darkest day in music's history, definitely. So let's ask I asked this question, why a book about Altamont? Now, how did you become involved? Why did you want to become involved? Tell us a little bit about that.

was time for a good story. This is a great story. I was not so convinced myself at first that it was a great story, because I was so it was such common material to me, I was so a nerd to the drama of it. But it was suggested that I look into this a little bit. Uh, And I went down to Monterey to visit with Rock Scully, the manager of The Grateful Dead Roca told me the story of how Altamont started. It was a beautiful day. I hadn't seen Rock in ages. He looked great. We ate

outside and I drove home. It's about two and a half hour drive to San Francisco, and I drove home just feeling like I had a gold nugget in my pocket. This story, this story was so good, and it's just streamed. This is how a book opens. And about two months later, Rock died. He'd been sick that day. I didn't know it. Like I said, he looked so good. I was taking

photographs of it. But it felt, really at that point like these stories were evaporating and we had to do this right now or it was just going to not be possible. And it's certainly been the case since the book's been published. I think three or four people that I interviewed for the book have died since it.

Woodstock itself, and the sixties counter revolution. So tell us about jan Winner and the humble beginnings of Rolling Stone, and tell us to start to begin to tell us who were the major players before we talk about the December nineteen sixty nine Altamont concert.

three months before the moon landing, the Manson killings. The Chicago police shot Fred Hampton, the Black Panther in his apartment that very week. It was just an extraordinary moment in our nation's history. You mentioned Jon Lennard. The Rolling Stone magazine was successful by that point, was about a

year and a half old. Jon was the publisher and founder, but it was largely a kind of underground music magazine, sort of a hit parade or a tiger beat for hippies, until the Altamont thing challenged him journalistically and they rose to the task. Their twenty thousand word article cover headline let It Bleed was really the first authentically accurate journalistic

account of that day. The mainstream media just kicked that bucket down the hill, and I mean the New York Times noted it is a joyous advanced although one concert go or had been stabbed to death, but otherwise it was wonderful. The local newspaper radio has pretty much taken the same thing it took Rolling Stone to really pull the curtain back on what the violence and negligence of that day, and in doing so they really established themselves as a legitimate news magazine with that one issue.

was not known nationwide as you write. So tell us about what happens with the San Francisco music scene in some of those bands, those players, and how do they get exposure before we talk about again this planned free festival here with the Stones and the Dead and some other bands.

in town, the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom. They were putting on shows every week, and there was a whole variety of new sounding rock music, rock music they had never sounded like this before, with bands with funny names like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big

Brother in the Holding Company. These bands were entirely unheard of outside of certain neighborhoods in San Cisco in nineteen sixty six, but by nineteen sixty seven, the national news media had begun to find out about this fifty thing in San Francisco. In January sixty seven, some hundred thousand people showed up at the Polo Fields and Golden Gate

Park to listen to those dams. They did so without any violence, any strife, and the gewords, which blew everybody's mind that that many people could come together without any you know, horrible incidences. They were compared to professional athletics, and the cops just couldn't believe what a different crowd it was from say, like a football game. So that's like where the beginning of this whole San Francisco mythology began.

It was no mythology, you know, these dams lived in the Haye Ashbury and a Golden Gate Park and they were just if the day was sunny and they felt like they'd take their gear out in the park and just start playing, and they didn't care who came or how,

or if they got paid for it or not. And so this was like a new kind of renaissance of arts and culture on a lite electric psychedelic level in California, and there was no Internet at those times, so there was very little information outside of the immediate experience, right, you know, there were magazines, they weren't newspapers weren't covering it. The record industry was ignoring it. By the summer of sixty seven, which the media called the Summer of Love,

san Francisco is very much and everybody's focus. One hundred thousand kids descended on San Francisco that summer. The Jefferson Airplanes second album, Cyrialistic Pillow, was the biggest record of the summer. White Rabbits and Somebody Love all over the airwaves, and the entire record industry sort of looked at San

Francisco as like having a new answer. San Francisco in London became the sort of axis on which the rock scene revolved at that point, and by two years later in nineteen sixty nine, San Francisco was the center of the rock music universe, and the Airplane was one of the big bands in the world. There was a big brother in the Hold Income. They had a number one album that year. All the great new bands, all the exciting new bands, Creeden's Clearwater Revival Santana was lie in

the Family Stone. Those were all out of San Francisco, and it seemed like that, you know, there was just something so authentic about the music these hippies made that it had resonated all around the world, and especially in London, where the music scene had always been very fashion conscious. You know, understand. I mean they look like they transmografy music into style in England, and that's a very close relationship that they didn't quite understand from five thousand miles away.

With what little faint hints of it they could get lisps, you know, LSD was hard to come by in London and light shows. They were just guessing at what was going on in San Francisco. There was very little back and forth until like sixty eight. So the Rolling Stones in nineteen sixty nine found themselves in a financial bind.

They were broke. They had a manager who had bottlenecked all their royalties and they were advised the only way they could get new money was to form a separate company that he wasn't involved in toured the United States. They hadn't been on tour in the United States for three years. The previous time, you know, they were like do a half hour set at the end of an entire card of like one or two hit wonders, doing three or four songs a piece, and then get the

hell out of Dodge. Right. But in the ensuing three years, the rock scene has just changed so totally. In the United States. I mean, like Leed Zeppelin was the big act that year that fall in October, touring behind their second album, and you know, they had a two and a half hour show with like a half hour drum solo.

So the Rolling Stones seeing the United States as a financial opportunity to show up here to do this tour, and they and it gets complicated by many issues now because they're trying to get into this world of this new world of woodstock rock, and there's so many public pronouncements that must be made. You know, you have to be in favor of free music, and you can't be seen as gouging your fans, even if you're asking seven dollars and fifty cents about twice what everybody else gets

for concert tickets. Right. So the Stones are trying to brush up against this San Francisco thing, and they start talking about this free concert right from the start. It's a thing at the time free concerts, and Jager mentions it in a press conference in Los Angeles beginning the tour.

Once the tour starts and they find out how much impact they are really having, what size of opportunity this American tour really represents, then you know they start over time on this idea of well, let's do a concert movie, and let's let's have a free concert kind of our own Woodstock at the end to frame the movie. Now, they don't even really get this in gear until the end of the tour in New York when they finally meet with Albert and David Masels, the documentary filmmakers who

would shoot the Madison Square Garden shows. But that's just the next to the last show on the tour. There's some footage, but they don't have a movie. The only way they're gonna have a movie is if the Stones go through with this giant Woodstock the in free concert

in San Francisco. Well, behind the scenes, there's then a power struggle between the Stone's front office and the Grateful Dead, and the Stone's front office has taken control of the permit process with the Parks because It was Rock Scully's original idea to get a permit in the name of the Jeffson Airplane and Grateful Dead and bring the Stones on. It's like a surprise special guest announced like the day before the concert, sort of pull one over on the city.

But the Stones insisted are their guys insisted on you taking up the permit process themselves, And that ended any prospect of ever playing in San Francisco, because, believe me, the mayor of San Francisco is not interested in hifty smoothing of the park. So Jagger goes ahead the next day and announces at a New York press conference that they're going to have this free concert on December sixth,

somewhere near San Francisco. We don't know where. As late as Tuesday, before the Saturday of the scheduled concert, they did not have a location. Then they stumble across this racetrack about sixty miles north of San Francisco called Serious Point, strike a deal with the guys that are running the track,

and start building the stage and sound system. The next day, the corporate owners of the racetrack find out about this deal and they call up the Stones lawyer and they do not believe that the Stones are doing this movie for charity, and they don't happen to be in the film business themselves. They want a piece of the film and they want a rental. And now the Stones refused to budge. This is all about money. They don't get to spend any money. They scale me it for twenty

four hours. The stage is going up. At serious point, the sheriff is calling and telling them if they throw there, they're all going to be arrested. And that's when this guy, Dick Carter shows up, calls him to the Stone's lawyer's office. He's got a rundown speedway sixty miles east of San Francisco, and I mean nowhere, past the suburbs, past Exurbia, past hundreds of acres of cowell passer over a hill and in a valley on the edge of nowhere. The biggest

crowd he's ever had, six thousand for demolition. Jersey's almost out of business, but he says the show's can have his raceraft Altamont speedway for free. He just wants to publicity. It's Thursday afternoon. The show's supposed to start on Saturday at noon. Rock Scullia the Grateful Dead, gets in a helicopter with Michael Lang, the producer of Woodstock, not really sure what he's doing with and they fly out over the Livermore Valley where Altamont is to take a look

at it. As they dip down over this racetrackt Rock looks out there and he sees all these broken glass and these oil stains and these wrecked cars from the demolition derby sitting there thinking what the what the and he hears Michael Lang say, oh, this is perfect. We can do it right here. Fst Thursday afternoon, they start moving the gear over from serious points sixty miles away by helicopter. Five trucks that are driven by volunteers raised

from the radio come helpless homes concert. They put the stage together fighting night in the dark, without many flashlights, and they're still plugging in equipment and wrapping tables. When the band starts the next day at noon, there's three hundred thousand people there in the middle of nowhere. No running water, no food, concessions, no parking, no nothing. Just oooh, all these people shut up. The cops had no idea

they were coming. There's a very bad setup for what happened, and what happened was what you know, you would expect from something like that.

you know, everybody was like, oh my god. The Hell's Angels, well, you know they partied with Ken Casey, and Ken Causey was the acid evangelist who provided the environment where the Gatful Dead started, so they all kind of knew each other, and especially the San Francisco chapter. So when the concert was originally planned, Rock Scully said, we got to invite the Angels. They're coming anyway, so we met whom we

should invite them. So he took Sam Cutler, who was the Storms tour director, over to meet with some of the officers of the San Francisco Chapter. And the first thing Pete Nell said was, we're not cops. We're not gonna do security. Oh, you know, we just want you to help out in any way you can. And you know, we want you to feel welcome, and you know, we want to make you feel welcome. And teachers, well, we like beer. The Samson says, well, we'll buy you some beer.

So he buys five hundred dollars with a beer for the Hell's Angels and they come over. Keep in mind, if that concert had been held in San Francisco, which at that time was planned for, then the San Francisco Chapter would have had jurisdiction, and that's a different thing altogether. Those guys were well known to the dance. They hung out backstage, they rode bikes together, they took business together. They were all together, more civilized bunch of Hell's Angels.

And once it moved out of San Francisco and the San Francisco Chapter lost jurisdiction. Then it said a different ballgame, and in fact most of the problems of Altamont were causing the front stage by the San Jose Chapter, which is a brand new chapter, had been formed just that summer after a violent, vicious turf war with a group called the Gypsy Jokers. They've wiped out the Gypsy Jokers and took like a few of the Gypsy Jokers and some of the South San Francisco Angels and formed this

new San Jose chapter. And the Santase Chapter showed up, and they were strung their bikes across the front of the stage because well they were gonna buy tall stage from three hundred thousand people a mile away, and they knew that nobody would touch a Hell's Angels fight. Well that didn't prove to be the case. But the San Francisco Angels showed up. They were backstage, they were on stage. They went out in front with the pool cues. That

was the San Lease guys. One of the most important jobs in my book was to was to teat the Hell's Angels fairly at last, and to give those guys their names. Back By the way, Dan, because I look over all the reports that are reporting that came before and it's just Hell's Angels this and Hell's Angels out. Oh look, you know, these were people, and some of them were as a gass and a paull that what went on that day, as anybody was. Some of them were extremely helpful to the doctors. Some of them were

very helpful to the film crew. There's a lot of different experiences in Altamont for the Hell's Angels, And you know, I wanted to be fair and honest and real about that, you know, like Paul Hibbitts, they called him Animal. That was the guy who beat up Marty ballin the Jefferson Airplane vocalist and I want to you know, he died a few years ago. He spent most of his life up in Alaska. But he was really apparently a very fun, nice guy who's off intoxicated that day, real high, A

lot of people were. There was, as you say, a lot of bad drugs going around. And he also did love the Fist party. So you know, Animal was a bad flash point. And yeah, he beat up Marty once in front of the film cameras. In the second time backstage, and then he beat up Rex Jackson the Grateful Dead's Roady who was the big bad enforcer of that band. And when Rex got knocked out, everybody on stage knew that the Angels own the stage, so some of them misbehaved.

They were putting in a bad position. But the Stones didn't have any idea what they were. The guys that intended to be Hell's Angels in London, that they that they had backstage at their free concert in Hyde Park. Those are some candy ass guys with clean jackets with their colors drawn and chalk and they rode mop heads for prying out loud. They had no idea what a California Hell's Angel was anymore, and they knew what a real California hippy was or what a pre concert was

really like in the park. They just thought these things could be just manifested out of the ether and Jaggers in particular, so a total disregard for like practical realities.

not able to be originally? I mean, you had the other speedway site, but why could have not conceivably been done at say, Golden Gate Park.

He'd get a permit in the name of the Jeffson Airplane and Grateful Dead and then announced the Stones like special surprise guests twenty four hours before then. He was sure he could do that. I'm not sure what Keith thought Rock Scully was. You know, did Keith think that he put on a suit and went to an office in the morning. Rock Scully was a hippie. He was a fantastic guy. He was very very smart and well educated and highly verbal, but he's also like the attention

deficit disordered poster child. He'd taken so much LSD. There his pupils and just full brown blobs floating in buttermilk.

but the idea stuck with Keith. And when the Stone stops a Los Angeles and started seeing all the tremendous excitement around both the Stones themselves and this free concert idea, then they contacted Rock and asked him to make good on his his boast, and he showed up with Emmitt Grogan and the Diggers. They were sort of like a hate Ashbury community group down in Hollywood, and agreed to

do this with him. Now, the permit thing came unglued, and that's another complicated backstage politics deal because there was this guy in the Stones tour going by the name of John James. That wasn't his real name. The Stones didn't know that. He told the Stones he worked for Chrysler and could get them free cars. He told Chrysler he worked for the Stones and could get them an endorsement. And with that he wriggled his way into sort of the touring party management. And he was a big shot.

He was also on the witness protection program and seemed to know some cops. He bought some off duty New York cops around to guard the Stones, you know. And he stepped up at some point and said, oh, I can handle this permit thing, and this he took over the idea of contacting Now that just wasn't gonna work. But Grateful Dead knew the system, and they knew how to tickle it, and they knew how to work with subterfuge, and they had the Parks Commission all lined up and

all that. But the minute the word Rolling Stones came out, then the deal was done and they were never going to get into Golden Gate Park. And this guy James just called up the Mayor's office and you tried to throw the Rolling Stones name around. That was not how it worked in San Francisco, so that was just over as soon as he picked it up. There's an interesting thing that guy ended up being the signator on the contract with Altamon. He was never on the stones as

pay Well. He had no official affiliation with them at all, and yet here he was like guaranteeing all this stuff and when the legal thing went down, he was the guy holding the bag. No wonder he disappeared.

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slash murder. Blue Apron a better way to cook. Now we lass left off, Joel, I want you to our audience to set up, as you very vividly doing your book, the day itself and again the confluence and convergence of events and circumstances that are Altamont that day, including as

you said, the lack of preparation. But talk about the bad LSD and to be fair as well as you do in the book the San Jose guys with the pool cues, these prospects in this new chapter were out of control and there was more than a hint of violence right from early on, we'll say, so take us back to that day and some of the things that even the hippies were seeing, armed with only peace symbols.

watch commander because he's going home and he doesn't know who the Rolling Stones are. Yeah, that's where we go out there. At the beginning, it was just it just flopped on that end of the world. And yes, then you're still right. From the very onset, there was a flood on the ground and violence. The crowd was in a bad mood. The conditions were terrible, and the first

band of the day, Santana, got things going. But somewhere in the middle of their first song, concert goer jumped up on this four foot tall stage and ran across the stage, chased by three or four Hells Angels and caught up with him on stage right and from the keyboard player and beat the kid to a pulp. The band was horrified. They've never seen anything like it. The stage was overcrowded with like two hundred people of a very menacing Hell's angels right over your shoulder. The next

act was Jeffson Airplane. That's when Animal called cocked Marty Ballin and nobody had ever seen that happen before. Musician beat up on stage during the set. That was just incredibly shocking, and nerder to stop the concert Paul Kantner of the Jeffson Airplane and get into a shouting match with Sweet William Fritz at the San Francisco chapter, who was on stage. Those guys knew each other. Canner couldn't

believe what it was happening. Bill Ladner, the road manager from the Jeffson Airplane, used to ride bikes with those guys. He knew every one of them months that were on stage from the San Francisco chapter. They couldn't believe what was happening. The pal cues were out in front and all through Santana's set, all through the Airplanes set, any perceived and in fraction crimes real and imagine were punished. The doctors told me they were surprised how many girls

they were stitching up from with lacerations and invasions. These guys were pumped up on reds. It was a sleeping pill. They tend to like frustrate people. So they had noticed the anger pill and really bad LSD. LSD that has been cut with strychnine or methamphetimine over stimulus is in nineteen sixty seventh the Summer Love. People who made LSD were missionaries. They were zealous, and those chemists want great

links to make sure that those compounds were stable. Two years later it devolved into a criminal enterprise and the chemists were just throwing anything in there that it made it work. Methamphetamine added to LSU would overstimulate the users, causes all kinds of side effects. I guess you call them side effects. And there was a lot of drinking going on now in this so the love again drinking and psychedelics and didn't mix. Now Here we're at Alphamont,

people are guzzling red Mountain lime. And the medical symptoms of mixing psychedelics and alcohol are erratic behavior and violent outburst. And we got a lot of that. So you have all this and the psychiatrists, I thought, the psychiatrists working in the bumber camp, they were overwhelmed from the minute they opened for business. They couldn't believe it for what they were seeing. And then these guys were from San Francisco.

They weren't dabs in the woods. But this was just an extraordinary, outrageous thing that was going on right from the start beyond the tale, and they worried since they knew how remote their kent was, how there were no stage announcements about its existence or any signage pointing the way that they were only seeing the of what was going on out there. So what we're talking about is probably tens of thousands of people on drugs.

the crowd, and the drugs, the weather. It was thirty seven the night before, very cold, and warmed up to the low seventies, really unseasonably warm. And then at the end of the day after coffee stills nastly young, and the two hours before the Stones came on after dark, forty mile an hour winds went through the place and the temperature dropped twenty degrees and then he turned dark and the Stones came on and all helped. Bro Cluse.

some trouble earlier in the morning. He took from both backstage and broke his hand on their faces. So nobody messed with Tony the rest of the day. And you can see pictures of Tony because he's tallering and everybody else. He just stands out in the crowd and he said, oh, yeah, he saw him. Meredith was wearing a bright green suit. He was just out in the max and Paddy was a gorgeous seventeen year old blonde girl. Yeah, Tony saw him from the stage, and he saw the Angels see him too.

before dark. They were outrageously making audiences wait on that tour. They didn't care when they went on. I saw the second show in Los Angeles before them on that tour and they didn't come on until four in the morning. They didn't want to follow out Contina Turner, who had been put on a little too good a show. So that's not really why the Stones didn't go on until then. They went on at dark because what.

going on, and then they left. The angels, you know, the Sunny Barger of the Oakland chapter and his guys showed up about five o'clock just before sunset, filed right all the way through the cloud. They got back and introduced to the Stones. Sony thought they were a bunch of dishies. And they've certainly had plenty of angels around them, you know, acting as a guards and escorts and stuff like that. And you can see in the movie when they pushed through the crowd to get to the stage.

That is quite an intimidating scene. There's usually two hundred people on the stage and many, many, many large and violent looking menacing figures, all crowded around the band and and as you watch the movie you can tell, I mean, the angels just marauded throughout that set. What happened was the third song of this set was simply for the

Devil and Sunny. Barger of the Oakland chapter saw some kids from the audience jumping up and down on a motorcycle and shorting out the battery and setting a fire, and he dashed into the audience to knock the kid off the bike and put out the fire. Well, all the other Angels saw Barger, and they just followed. They didn't know what he was doing. They just they just followed him into the crowd and just start laying waste in the front row. The jagger stops the dan and

starts pleading with the audience. Brothers and sisters, what are we're fighting for?

loose from them and pulls out a gun. That's when Alen Casorrow, San Jose Hells angel standing nearby, reaches down to his ankle where he's got a knife in his seat, and does a pure wet and jumps on Hunter, stabs him in the neck, and as they follow the ground together, stabs him four more times. The angels swarm over him, and Pasorrow is separated from the Hunter, and the angels continue to stomp and kick Hunter and stand on him

and finally leave him alone. A couple of concert goers managed to get him up and carry him to the lip of the stage and they put him on the stage. Everybody saw him, everybody. I talked to people on that stage and they all saw this. It didn't happen long because the angels just came swarming over this and push

the body back into the audience. A young doctor intern named doctor Robert Hyatt had answered the call for the doctor of the stage happened to be standing there and he said his arms had hurt for the next week, but he carried the hundred backstage to medical camp, and doctor Fine, the head of medical there, took a look at Hunter realized that nature of his wounds clearly possibly mortal have put another doctor on the reviving him, and wants to try and get a helicopter to Metavat did

you ever find anybody in charge or anybody that would give him the infermission to use the helicopter? So he called the ambulance. The Hunter died waiting for the ambulance. Now the stumps. Meanwhile on stage, they don't know what to do. They've just seen this body and it's the all concert just falls apart, right, And so the young guy, Mick Taylor new guitars. He says, let's play the new one,

and Jagger says, okay. Well that Tuesday they've been in Alabama recording, and Saturday that at that point, after Mareth Hunter's they publicly debut their new songs Brown Sugar and let me tell you, the concert comes back together in an instant. I've heard these sixteen track mixes that Bob Matthews is the Grateful Dead recorded that day he played them for me, and his living them is the only

place you could hear him. And Ah, the Stones played great and the beatings continued, and by another sort of weird trick of fate, instead of being blinded by spotlights as most performers are on stage, the spotlights never showed up. So the only lights they had at Altamont was fifty thousand watts of back lights, and they used all of it and it made the front rows entirely illuminated the stage.

So all these beatings they had taken place, the Stones are seeing them full living color, which they're not used to. And they powered through another hour of the show after Hunter's death, and they never stop again. They just keep going. And there's problems there was trying to climb on stage, and they just play their flats off just I mean, Charlie Watson and Bill Wyman they had locked down, and Keith Richards and Mick Taylor, their guitars are grinding together

like bears and jaggers. He's singing this really convincing committed thing, you know, like really like he means it, not not that grouping characterizations that he sometimes gets into. So you know, they were terrified. They were surrounded by all these manazing figures, they were witnessing all these beatings. They couldn't figure out anything to do but play their show and get the hell out of there. And they where to go. They hid in the music. They buried themselves in the music.

They that's what musicians do. It's it's just, you know, kind of heroic.

stepping away from him. I mean that was definitely from gutsy stuff. Boy the horns, they say, and Jagger, I got a Jagger credit for really trying to you know, put oil on troubled waters and really you know, reaching into the audience and trying to relate and get these people to wise up and be with them. And that goes on all through the set. At the end, when he says goodbye, he says, well, we have some troubles,

but there's been a good time. That isn't in the movie though, you know, the movie is not a very active partrail of the event. Oddly enough, you.

the trial, and that's when he disappeared. He was reluctant to reveal his name to Rolling Stone, and I believe he's only identified by a single name, And in fact, this journey had a hard time finding out who he was, and then when they did find him and he ran away, they only found him just a few days before he's before he's supposed to testify. Far Bryant was the cinematographer who actually captured the Hunter assault on film. He didn't

know it at the time. He was lying in the prone position on the top of a dam behind the stage shooting of the hol on stage action. Eric Sarnon was also on stage with a camera and saw the scuffle. Both Bryan and Sarno hit their zoom button, but Eric Sarnon hit the wrong way, so he zoomed back. Bryant hit the right one and zoomed in. He never knew what he got on film, or even if he's seen anything.

He just sort of followed his instincts until the film was developed and they saw the dailies and realized that yes, indeed they had the killings on gat Bryant was interesting by the way that cinematographer that shot the cemetery cemetery scene, an easy writer, has a long background in Bohelian life in Paris.

What is the you do? You talk about person drowning, but more importantly you introduced a guy named McDonald, so quickly talk about the other crazy deaths that occurred at ALTAM McDonald.

San Francisco. He says, I'll that be good. So they opened the back door and slays room for one more. He gets in and he's tacking this couple guys in the back seat. There's a young gallon a baby in the front, and another couple of guys driving them and sitting up the front, and they don't all know each other. They're all sort of like you know, ride grouping up and they're going through the cloud very slowly. They get up to the highway traffic still clouded, so they decide

to pull over and make the fire. And Jim has a blanket because he remembered. It gets cold up there and hits like with two there and he gets this flanket out of his napstack and he pulls around his shoulders and his fists and sort of tugs it tightly together, and the next thing he knows, some guy is shaking his shoulder and here's the guy say, hey, this one's

still alive. Some acid craze concert guards stroll in the car under their assumption or beliefs that he's being chased by Hell's angels, drove it through the exiting cloud at speeds up to sixty miles an hour of The Highway patrol figures guests to the top of the hill, launches, crashes down on this campfire, kills two people that Donald's sitting. The next dude seriously injures the young mother and McDonald man.

He's pulled out there by a highway patrol metavac. He dies in the helicopter and has to be brought back to life in the emergency room, where he's blatlined. Mother comes up to hand or his possessions, and he's got this blanket right, and on one side of the blanket his body, his outlines, his squirts of blood, and the other side is a tire attack.

The sound not guilty, Uh because of Hunter pulling a gun. Who knows whether he saw it or not. Who knows who intended to shoot? Uh? Certainly from all accounts and from the film, you know, it looks like he pulled it in self defense. But you know at that point you've updates in the game, and you know that what happened happened that you noticed that I refused to call the murder wasn't a murder, right, was a killing.

out on the West coast. But they noted the death of concert go what was otherwise a flying you know, Woodstock like festival. That was the accepted myth at that point. But Woodstock myth was so large that the media was the mainstream media who were you know, not hit or or with it or at all. But they just read it as like, oh, yeah, somebody died, but it was another woodstock, you know. Yeah, good Rolling Stone to the vaults. They're

real in Canada and that that, you know. I mean, they were so far I heard the homicide investigators had to come over and get an advanced copy of the magazine to figure out what their case was almost about.

fit with the facts. What fits with the facts is you know, a really dangerous, volatile cocktail of of of greed and innocence. Uh and and the Stones uh uh I think we're builvi had lots of both of those. And that's what happened.

It wasn't just an undeydound newspaper guy that had never had a tough breaking story before. But they did great job.

able to see the footage first? Tell us it's a profound story, the stones, the angels, and the police, who gets to see the film and how everybody reacts differently.

director and I associated with the project lived. They were really careful to find out what they had before they found out before they showed anybody, and they brought him up to San Francisco about a week and a half later, and they screening at Francis Coppler's American Zold trop studio for the two district attorneys who then took the footage and had blow up skills made from him. They didn't know what they saw. They couldn't identify the guy. They

didn't know what to do with what they had. The guys who were investigating it couldn't figure out where to go with this. They first ran down to La and chased some rabbit hole down there. Rolling Stone magazine was more health than anything. I mean, they didn't seem to be any big hurry to get out to the traft. They could go out that night because of the traffic, they didn't really go out till Monday, two days later. There's weird investigation. It took them three merchs to fine

to sorrow. He's been in custody since Tuesday after the conscience on another charge, obviously.

heavy two to ten already. And it's crucial because the film and the people who did the film and are there are crucial witnesses, reluctant witnesses that are set for this trial here that maybe nobody was, you know, anxious to put these people in front at a court, but really they do so.

Air Force sixty one bomber missions. Quite by an amazing guy, and he played with Johnny Cochran saying finding for Johnny Cochran made sure that the Sorrow got an entirely all white jury, which is not easily due in Oakland, California, immediately underlined almost every witness the prosecution brought, and then especially the damning piece of film place the prostitution thought would show that to Sorrow killed Hunter, and actually what turned out so the jury was that Hunter pulled a gun.

So George Walker was still a lot ninety two is a brilliant, wonderful man, and he saw this all the way. He said, he never thought he would lose it.

talking about Altamont. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much, Joel Selvyn.