From the stories I’ve read and heard about the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway (or, as it was hyped, “Woodstock West”), it seems the concert went terrifyingly wrong in almost every way. As Michael Lydon describes it, it would have felt like it was truly the beginning of the end of the carefree, communal days of Hippie peace and love.
Perhaps doomed to epic failure from the start, Altamont began with cancelled venues, greedy business owners, commercial hype, and disappointed hopes… none of which seems to be in the spirit of the Hippies. Among other last minute events surrounding Altamont, the owners of the Speedway did not volunteer their services until Friday afternoon, after multiple venues fell through and only hours before the concert was scheduled to open on Saturday morning. In the meantime, competing radio stations were turning the entire festival into a commercial bonanza, in complete contradiction to the intent of a free concert.
Not all was lost at first though, as the hawkers of old Stones concert flyers were chased off the premises and drugs were freely given away and passed around. Lydon compares Altamont to Woodstock insofar as the high expectations of community and cooperation, but he describes the failure as partially due to those very expectations: at Woodstock, necessity produced the amazing final outcome; whereas at Altamont, everyone was trying far too hard to produce another Woodstock.
It seems an old lesson, to want something so much that you can’t see what you really have. The concertgoers, organizers, and participants wanted the event to be something it was not so badly that any real outcome would have disappointed and frustrated. Lydon writes about “the wanting … the unfulfilled desire,” the idea that everyone was trying to escape, but they didn’t know what they were escaping or where they were escaping to… This must have been a horribly frustrating and confusing experience.
The one ideal moment that Lydon portrays happening at Altamont was when the Stones first began to play. I love his description of that perfect sense of “being” brought on by the experience of the music, and I think I have a feeling for what he’s talking about. At a large, outdoor music festival, as evening comes on and the band everyone has been waiting for steps out and begins to play, there can be a powerful sense of shared experience. The culmination of all emotions leading up to that one perfect moment in time is released into the emotion of the music, and, combined, these emotions spill over from each person to all those surrounding. The result is almost a collective consciousness, lost in the power of music and the sense of community.
Unfortunately, the dangerous combination of Hells Angels and Hippies once again brought an unhappy end to the festivities. Reading about the Angels’ random attacks in the crowd was harrowing enough; knowing that they beat a man to death only feet away from the stage is simply incomprehensible. It’s disturbing to know that no one was ever punished for this heinous act, but it may be even more outrageous to know that nobody ever saw (or came forward) with information, even though it happened directly in front of 300,000 people. Lydon may explain this best when he remembers that everyone “seemed beyond the law at Altamont, out there willingly…and on our own.” There is truth to that statement, at least.
No comments:
Post a Comment