The Altamont festival

As the final show of their American tour, the Rolling Stones held a one-day rock festival at Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California, on December 6, 1969. The free event was intended as a thank-you gesture by the band to their fans and was to feature Santana; the Jefferson Airplane; the Flying Burrito Brothers; Crosby, Stills and Nash; and the Rolling Stones themselves. The most notable flaw of the haphazardly organized festival (besides its relatively inaccessible location) was the hiring of the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security, a shocking bit of naïveté on the band’s part. Trouble started early on, when Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane was knocked down with an Angel’s pool cue and a confused naked man was beaten to the ground. The disorder reached its climax during the Stones’ appearance, when Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old African-American man, rushed the stage with a gun and was stabbed to death before Mick Jagger’s eyes. Much has been written about Altamont as “the day the ’60s died” and “the anti-Woodstock,” but, given the way most festivals were organized at the time, violence at a festival was perhaps inevitable.