Song 176, “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones, part 4: “Who Breaks a Butterfly?””

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hinkey.

Song 176

Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones.

Part 4.

Who Breaks a Butterfly?

Before we begin, this episode is another distressing one.

It deals with drug and alcohol abuse, attempted suicide, death by drowning, miscarriage, and murder.

There's also some mention of animal death, and excerpts of a song mentioning rape.

If any of those subjects are likely to cause you distress, you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode.

Oscar Wilde was, as we talked about in Part II, condemned to spend two years at hard labour, during which time he was only addressed as prisoner C-33, kept in solitary confinement with only the Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress to read, and made to work at back-breaking labour all day every day without being able to talk to the other prisoners.

Towards the end of his time in prison he was allowed to read other books, and he renewed his love of the works of Dante, and he wrote a long, long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, discussing the relationship between the two, and also talking about his own spiritual growth and his view of Jesus Christ, who he very much made in his own image, as the supreme aesthete and individualist.

He says at one point, I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets.

That is true.

Shelley and Sophocles are of his company, but his entire life also is the most wonderful of poems.

For pity and terror, there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it.

The absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and Pelops's line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain.

And later, to me, one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the Christ's own Renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St.

Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's Divine Comedy, was not allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St.

Paul's Cathedral, and Pope's poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules.

He didn't send the letter, instead entrusting it to his friend Robert Ross on his release, release, getting Ross to make multiple TypeScript copies and send one to Douglas, who apparently burned it unread.

An expurgated version of the letter, containing just the thoughts on art, Christianity, and the nature of punishment, was published by Ross in 1905.

The full version, with the talk about Wilde and Douglas' relationship, wasn't released until 1962.

between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

Wilde only wrote one major work after he was released from prison.

The Ballad of Reading Jail was a long poem, initially published only under the name Prisoner C-33,

and it was a deeply important work.

While Wilde's last work before his imprisonment, The Importance of Being Earnest, was described by its author in a letter as a trivial play, it is written by a butterfly for butterflies, the ballad of Reading Jail was anything but trivial.

It's one of the most powerful anti-capital punishment pieces ever written, and talks about the mood of the prison in the days and weeks leading up to the execution of Charles Thomas Woodridge, a man who had murdered his wife and who was so repentant that he actually petitioned the Home Secretary of the time to make sure that his execution would go ahead, rather than, as many expected, him being given a reprieve.

The chaplain would not kneel to pray by his dishonoured grave, nor mark it with that blessed cross that Christ for sinners gave.

Because the man was one of those whom Christ came down to save.

Yet all is well, He has but passed to life's appointed born, and alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn, for his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.

I know not whether laws be right or whether laws be wrong.

All that we know, who lie in jail, is that the wall is strong.

Four lines from that excerpt.

And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn.

for his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn, were carved into Wilde's memorial at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

After Wilde's death, many argued he should have no memorial at all, because of what was considered the immorality of his sexual preferences.

But Wilde's friends and supporters prevailed, and these days the memorial has to be protected, not from prudes, but from erosion due to the myriad people who have kissed Wilde's tomb, believing it to be the site of a man martyred for love and thus a holy place, just as Wilde himself once claimed that the grave of his own favourite poet, Keats, was the holiest place in Rome, writing a poem titled The Grave of Keats, which starts, Rid of the world's injustice and his pain, he rests at last beneath God's veil of blue, taken from life when life and love were new, the youngest of the martyrs here is lain.

Wilde's memorial was sculpted by Jacob Epstein, one of the most prominent sculptors of the day, and featured a large flying creature inspired in part by Assyrian sculptures in the British Museum, and in part by Wilde's poem The Sphinx.

Epstein spent four years working on it, but it would be another two years before it was seen in public.

The first problem came with import duties.

The statue had been sculpted in Britain, but Wilde's grave was in Paris.

But then, when that was sorted, the people in charge of the graveyard decided that Epstein's sculpture was obscene, because the winged figure had testicles.

So the sculpture was erected, but immediately covered with a tarpaulin so it wouldn't be an affront to the delicate sensibilities of the Parisian public.

And this is where Alastair Crowley, a man who had a lot of sympathy for devils such as Wilde, entered the story.

Crowley, who was living in Paris at the time, heard about the controversy about the statue and decided to see it for himself.

He says in his auto-hagiography, I went to see it.

I did not greatly admire it.

I thought the general design lumpish and top-heavy.

But the modelling of the winged sphinx or whatever it was seemed admirably simple and subtle.

The aesthetic point was, however, not at stake.

The attitude of the authorities was an insult and outrage to the freedom of art.

The entire innocence of the statue made their action less defensible, though personally I do not believe in any restrictions based on prejudice.

Great art is always outspoken and its effect on people depends on their minds alone.

I was indignant at the insult to Epstein and to art in his person.

I therefore resolved to make a gesture on behalf of the prerogatives of creative genius.

Crowley went into the cemetery and cut almost through the cords holding the tarpaulin down, then attached some very thin but strong steel wire to the tarpaulin, which would not be easily visible in the gloomy Parisian winter.

He then distributed a leaflet announcing that he was going to unveil the tarpaulin at midday on November the 5th.

His plan was to make this a big demonstration for artistic freedom, and to raise his hands, call on the wind gods to blow the tarpaulin away, and have his friend pull the steel wire from a few hundred metres away, making it look like the sculpture was miraculously unveiled by the gods themselves, and in this way also foiling any attempts by the authorities to stop him.

As it turned out, absolutely nobody tried to stop him.

Indeed the police seemed to be under the impression that this was an official unveiling, which rather ruined the spectacle.

The tarpaulin remained removed, and the sculpture in place, but when Crowley went to check on the sculpture a little while later, he discovered that the cemetery had decided on a different plan to prevent any innocent people seeing a stone sphinx's testicles.

They had affixed to it, at the offending part, and much to Epstein's disgust, a bronze butterfly.

There was only one thing to do, and it was only the work of a few moments with a chisel.

Crowley then left Paris and travelled to London, where he walked into the Cafe Royal where Epstein was dining, wearing full evening dress and with the butterfly hanging over his own crotch.

The butterfly had been broken off, and the insult to art had finally been dealt with.

Poetry and art are my symbols for life.

Winsbury will last for many ages,

The first song the Stones worked on in 1969 was one that they had started working on the previous year, and which they'd already given its live debut in the Rock and Roll Circus.

You can't always get what you want was another song like Sympathy for the Devil, which was written by Jagger alone without Richards.

And according to some sources, it was inspired by Marianne Faithful and was a plea to her to stop using heroin, a drug which, like many of the people around the Stones, she had recently started using to excess.

The track doesn't feature Brian Jones, but he did make a contribution to the track of sorts.

None of the normal piano players who the Stones used were available for the session at Olympic Studio in November 1968, where they started work on the track.

It had minor minor chords in, so there was no way that Ian Stewart was going to play on it, and Nikki Hopkins was busy working on an album for Quicksilver Messenger Service and couldn't make the session.

I don't know why Jack Nitchie wasn't available for the initial session, he was definitely there for the later overdubs, but that left them with no keyboard player.

Handily though, Al Cooper was in town.

Since recording with Dylan on the Like a Rolling Stones session, Cooper had become something of a big name.

He had joined the Blues Project as their keyboard player, then formed Blood, Sweat, and Tears, who he'd left after their first album.

He'd then recorded the album Super Session with Steve Stills and Mike Bloomfield, before recording his own first solo album proper, I Stand Alone, a mixture of originals and odd cover versions,

including a song by Traffic, a version of Blue Moon of Kentucky patterned after Elvis' version, Right Down to the Slapback Echo on his vocals, and One, a song by the then little-known Harry Nilsson.

since you went away alone.

And I spent my time just making the rhymes of yesterday

because one is the loneliest number

that you'll ever do

One

is the loneliest number that you'll do.

Cooper was in London on holiday after completing work on his album, and wasn't really in the mood for recording, and ignored the stones when they initially got in touch with him and asked him to play on the track.

But then he bumped into Brian Jones in the street, and Jones asked if he was going to be at the session.

Cooper found that he couldn't say no to Jones, and ended up going along.

As well as piano and organ, Cooper also came up with and played the French horn part that makes the track so distinctive.

In that initial session, Jaguar and Richards taught everyone there, the other stones, Cooper and Rocky Dijon, the song, by handing them all acoustic guitars and getting them all to play through it several times in a circle.

All of them, that is, except Jones, who lay on his stomach for the entire session reading either a book on human biology or an article on botany, depending on which interview with Cooper you believe, apparently spaced out on man drags and alcohol.

As well as coming up with the French horn part, Cooper also suggested a large chunk of the arrangement.

He'd been listening to Etta James' cover version of Sonny and Cher's I Got You, Babe, and started playing one of the riffs from it on the acoustic guitar he'd been handed.

to make it grow.

Well, I don't know if all that's true.

Cause you got me and baby, I got you,

oh baby,

I got you, baby.

I got you, baby.

Say our love won't pay to rent.

Before it's earned, our money's all right.

Richards incorporated that into his rhythm guitar part.

The track took some time to pull together, primarily because Charlie Watts, normally one of of the greatest field drummers in the music business, for some reason was utterly unable to lock into the groove the rest of the band wanted.

Eventually Jimmy Miller, who was a drummer himself, stepped in and took Watts' place.

Watts was typically gracious about Miller taking his spot, saying later that Miller wasn't a great drummer, but he was great at playing drums on records, which is a completely different thing.

You can't always get what you want is a great drum track.

Jimmy actually made me stop and think again about the way I played drums in the studio, and I became a much better drummer in the studio thanks to him.

Together, we made some of the best records we've ever made.

Watts, of course, managed to replicate Miller's part on stage without any difficulty for more than fifty years.

To finish off the track, Jack Nitchie came up with a vocal arrangement for three American gospel singers, Madeleine Bell, Mary Clayton and Nanette Workman, the latter of whom was mistakenly credited on the finished album as Nanette Newman, the name of an actor who was a household name in Britain at the time, primarily for appearing in washing up liquid commercials and panel shows.

Nitchie also arranged the introduction, which was performed by a very different group of singers, the London Bach Choir.

The finished track came in at seven and a half minutes long and would be the climax of the new album.

As the group continued work on the album, it became apparent that Brian Jones was simply not functioning at all anymore in the studio.

On the entire album, Jones only plays two instrumental parts that made it to the finished record.

Some barely audible auto harp doubling Richard's guitar on Richard's song You Got the Silver, and some percussion on the serial killer song song Midnight Rambler.

Roughly 17 seconds of audible drumming on what I've variously seen described as a Moroccan tabel and a tambourine being hit with a stick.

For most of the album, Richards just handled all the guitar parts himself, but it was becoming apparent that the group would need to have a second guitarist to cover for Jones, and Rai Kuda was brought in to some of the sessions.

Some of the tracks Couda played on were held over for a future album, but Couda can be heard on the Stones' version of Love in Vain playing mandolin.

And I looked her in the eye.

But that caused a new set of problems.

Not only was Brian Jones very aware that Kuda was being brought in to replace him, though there was no question of Kuda joining the band full time, Keith Richards was none too happy with his presence by this point, for reasons that have never quite been explained, given that the previous year Kuda had been something of a guitar mentor to him, but seemed to revolve around Kuda's closeness to Jagger, with whom Richards was still having a strained relationship following Jagger sleeping with Richards' partner Anita Pallenberg.

It seems to have been a regular occurrence at this point for Cuda to jam with the Stones minus Richards, who would walk out as soon as Cuda walked in.

But according to Cuda, Richards would later listen to tapes of the jam sessions and steal ideas.

One of those sessions, consisting of Jagger, Cuda, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Nikki Hopkins, was later issued as Jamming with Edward, a nickname the group gave Hopkins after an in-joke.

Yeah, you can't stick to it,

stick to him like move.

We're things in rolls me too.

Couda later said, The Rolling Stones brought me to England under totally false pretences.

They weren't playing well and were just messing around in the studio.

In the four or five weeks I was there, I must have played everything I knew.

Richards has admitted to being influenced by Couda's playing.

And certainly Richards' style from late 1968 on is essentially that of a Couda imitator.

But Couda says that it goes further than influence, and that the group built whole songs around riffs that Couda had previously played.

The example he always uses is the track that would be the group's next single and last UK number one, Honky Tonk Women.

Honky Tonk Women had started out as a country and western song, but it was turned into an electric rocker at some point in May 1969, with Richards playing a five-string guitar in Open G just like Couda, and it had mostly been recorded by the time the group's new league guitarist added his overdubs.

Brian Jones was still technically in the band when the group started asking other people to replace him.

The first person they thought of was Eric Clapton, who had been friendly with the band for years and who had recently played with Richards on a session for Billy Preston.

Richards played bass while Clapton and George Harrison played guitars and gingerbakered drums on Preston's That's the Way God Planned It.

But Clapton was too busy, committed to his new group Blind Faith, and turned them down.

The next person they asked was Ronnie Wood, who was at that time the bass player for the Jeff Beck group, but had previously been an excellent league guitarist.

Everyone knew that group were about to split up and that Wood and Rod Stewart were rehearsing with various other musicians, including the former members of the Small Faces.

But when they phoned the rehearsal rooms to speak to Wood, they got through to Ronnie Lane instead, and Lane didn't want to lose his new guitarist so just didn't tell Wood he'd been asked, and Wood didn't find out until five years later.

So having tried people they knew and had no response, Mick Jagger phoned up John Mayle and asked him for recommendations.

As well as being an old acquaintance, Mayle was known for discovering the best guitarists in the British blues scene, having started out performing briefly with Davy Graham before employing first Eric Clapton and then Peter Greene in his band the Blues Breakers.

As it happened, Mayle was in the process of disbanding his latest line up, as he was planning to relocate to America, and he suggested his league guitarist Mick Taylor, who had been with him for longer than any previous guitarist.

Taylor had joined the band aged only eighteen as Greene's replacement, and like Clapton and Green, had shown his abilities on his first album with the group by playing a Freddie King instrumental.

Taylor was by this point twenty years old, so still several years younger than the established stones.

But he had spent the intervening two years playing with some of the greatest musicians on the British blues scene.

And when he turned up for what he thought was just a session, but which as far as the rest of the group were concerned was his audition, the group were hugely impressed.

Keith Richards later said of that, Mick Taylor turns up and plays like an angel, and I wasn't going to say no.

I thought I'd let the guy develop, because by then I thought it was an old hand.

I was all of 25 years old.

That's what four years on the road would do to you.

You come out at the other end and you were already 50.

You'd seen a lot of things.

The first track on which Taylor played was Live With Me, the start of the second era of the Rolling Stones.

But of course, there's no such thing as a clean break with the past.

Even after Taylor had started playing with the group in the studio and been invited to become a member, Brian Jones was still in the band, and indeed turned up for the photo shoot for a new compilation album a week after Taylor's audition.

And Taylor was still fulfilling his commitments to Mayall.

The group was still pretending, somehow, that Jones was still in the band, but everyone knew it had to end.

Jones spent much of the beginning of June listening to the new Beatles single, and apparently relating very strongly to its chorus.

get to Holland or France

The man in the match said you've gotta go back You know they didn't even give us a chance Chris, you know it ain't easy

You know how hard it can be

The waiting to go in

They're gonna crucify me

There were other problems as well which delayed the inevitable confrontation.

Keith and Anita were in a car crash, apparently one of several often caused by Richards nodding out at the wheel thanks to his new heroin habit, while Jagger and Faithful were arrested for cannabis possession.

The trial would come at the end of the year, and would end up with Jagger getting a conviction and losing his US visa for 18 months.

The same thing that at this point was still the main consideration for why Brian Jones could not be in the band after his own convictions.

Things came to a head in early June.

On June the 7th, the same day that Keith and Anita were in their crash, Mick and Marianne went to see Blind Faith playing a free gig in Hyde Park, the new group's first show.

Rather amusingly, just as the Stones have tried to do their own equivalent of magical mystery tour in 1968 with the Rock and Roll Circus, despite it having been the first real misstep for the Beatles, in 1969 the Bee Gees did the same thing, with a truly terrible TV film called Cucumber Castle.

And as Blind Faith shared management with them, the footage of that hippest of new supergroups playing at Hyde Park was used as a climax for a film starring Barry Gibb as the King of Cucumber and Maurice Gibb as the king of jelly.

The Blind Faith show was put on by a management company called Black Hill Enterprises, which had initially been a partnership between the original members of Pink Floyd and their managers, and which the previous year had put on the first big free live show in Hyde Park, featuring Jeff Rotull, Roy Harper, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and at the top of the bill, Pink Floyd debuting their new lead guitarist David Gilmore.

Meeting up with Sam Cutler of Black Hill, who had also been the compere, backstage, Jagger came to the conclusion that they could possibly do the same with their new guitarist the next month.

Now all that was left was to get rid of Brian Jones.

They did that the day after the Blind Faith gig.

Mick and Keith, the two members of the group who had most lost patience with Jones, went down to do the dirty work, but Charlie Watts came with them to make sure Jones knew that it wasn't just his two rivals who wanted him out.

While it had been a long time since Jones had got on with Mick or Keith, he had always got on better with the rhythm section, and Wyman in particular was still in two minds about whether to actually go through with the sacking.

Even at this point, even despite everything that Jones had done to them and every way he'd let them down, the other stones were making every effort to give Jones the dignity he wouldn't ever give himself.

They allowed him to write his own press statement, saying he was leaving the band because he was no longer keen on the music Jagger and Richards were writing and wanted to do his own thing, and they told him he would get a one-off payment of £100,000, plus £20,000 a year for as long as the band continued without him.

The statement Jones put out included, I no longer see eye to eye with the others over the discs we are cutting.

We shall still remain friends.

I love those fellows.

And oddly, that even seemed to be true to an extent.

He and Richards would speak on the phone every day for the next few weeks, with Jones apparently enthusing to Richards about how well his new music was going.

In truth, though, while Jones was talking a good game about how he was going to get back into making music, things were going pretty poorly.

Alexis Corner, who had been Jones's friend since before he formed the Stones, had recently formed a group called New Church, whose sole album would be recorded later that year.

I see mankind as helping his brother.

I see it, I see it, I see it.

Oh,

I see it, I see it, I see it today.

Places where men sit down to meet Instead of confronting a riot on street, people living side by side,

Corner thought that Jones had been treated appallingly by the other stones, and he initially planned to have Jones join New Church for a planned tour of Europe.

Various members of the group even moved in with Brian temporarily in his new home Cotchford Farm, a farmhouse near East Grinstead, previously best known as the home of A.

A.

Milne, where Milne wrote the Winnie the Pooh books, and whose grounds were filled with statues of Milne's characters.

But while Corner would later say that he decided not to have Jones join the band because a celebrity of Jones' stature would have overshadowed the rest of the group, the real reason was that Jones was in no state at all to make music.

He was pretty much permanently drunk, his chronic illnesses were playing up, he's described as pretty much constantly using his inhaler during this time, and the only time he picked up a guitar at all was when John Mayall joined the rehearsals at Corner's urging.

The rest of the time he would just bang a tambourine or half-heartedly attempt to play Sophrano Sachs, and when he did pick up the guitar, he was apparently too uncoordinated to play properly.

Several girlfriends and hangers-on have since described this period as a joyful one, with Jones newly inspired and about to make the best music of his life.

One even claimed that there were plans for him to form a supergroup with Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon.

The first part of that may even have a tiny basis in fact, as around this time Jimi Hendrix seems to have invited everyone from Arthur Lee to Miles Davis to Paul McCartney to be in a supergroup.

But I've never seen any claims for anywhere else that Lennon was ever considered for any of these notional bands.

But every actual working musician who interacted with Jones at this time describes the same thing, a sick, drunk, depressed man, who could no longer play his instrument and was having difficulty breathing in the oppressive heat of the early summer.

In his autobiography, Mayall says of the visit: We were shocked by how unwell he looked.

He looked incredibly frail and had trouble walking.

In fact, he seemed ready to fall over if he wasn't holding onto something.

He and I tried to get a duet going, but it was sad and alarming for me to hear that he had lost all sense of rhythm and time.

Meanwhile, the new line-up of the stones were recording an appearance for the David Frost Show, with Jagger singing both sides of the group's latest single over pre-recorded backing tracks.

The first time Mick Taylor made a public appearance as a stone.

They're in Paris.

But I just can't say to say anything of my life

Everything was building up to the revelation of the new Rolling Stones.

Hunky Tonk Women, the new single, was going to be released on the 4th of July, and on the 5th the group were going to make their first public live appearance since their short performance for the NME Pole Winners' Party in May the previous year, and their first full show since April 1967.

They were rehearsing for the show in the Beatles' Apple studios in the early hours of July the 3rd, when they heard the news.

A couple of hours earlier, just before midnight, Brian Jones had been found dead.

As with many deaths of rock stars around this period, there has been a lot of contradictory information about Brian Jones's death, and as in many of those cases, people involved have told very different stories at different times, either to avoid arrest for drug use or theft, to settle grudges with other witnesses, or to make money from the ghoulish industry that springs up around celebrities who die too young.

Here's what we know for sure.

Brian Jones was at home with his latest girlfriend, Anna Wolin, Frank Thorgood, a builder who had been working on his property, and Janet Lawson, who has variously been described as the girlfriend of both Thurgood and of Stone's chauffeur Tom Keelock, a man about whom unsavoury rumours have swirled for years, but nothing very substantiated.

Jones and his companions were very drunk.

Jones may also have been on Mandrax, a sedative drug he was very fond of, and it was a very hot night.

Sometime around 10 p.m., Jones suggested that they all go for a swim, and three of them did.

Lawson thought that both Jones and Thorgood were too drunk to be swimming, and didn't want to be a part of it, and headed into the house.

At some point after that, Roland also went into the house to get changed.

Depending on whose account you believe, Thoroughgood also got out of the pool, and at some point after that Brian Jones was found unresponsive in his swimming pool.

Lawson, who was a nurse, attempted to revive him, and an ambulance was called, but he died shortly before midnight.

Over the years, various narratives have been constructed to make what happened seem more mysterious and lucrative than it seems.

Tom Keelock, who stole several of Jones' belongings from his house after the death, claimed in the 90s to have had a deathbed confession from Thorgood, saying that he deliberately drowned Jones.

Thoroughgood's family say that Keelock never visited Thorgood on his deathbed.

After that, Wolin changed her previous story and said that Jones and Thorgood had had a tense relationship for a while, and that Thorgood had been bullying Jones and holding his head under the water, and that while she didn't actually see him do it, she was sure that Thorgood had killed Brian, but it had been hushed up.

After Keelock's death, someone else claimed to have had a videotaped deathbed confession from Keelock, but we know for a fact that Keelock wasn't present at the time.

There have been other, odder, conspiracy theories too, all of which fail even the most basic fact-checking.

But the most plausible explanation remains the one that the coroner found at the time.

and which most of Jones's friends in the music world always believed, that a man who had a history of passing out randomly and hitting his head on things, who was very drunk, and who had bad asthma and was quite likely also intoxicated on respiratory depressants, either passed out in the swimming pool or had an asthma attack and drowned.

The Stones, minus Wyman, who had had an early night, were in the middle of recording a rehearsal of Stevie Wonder's song I Don't Know Why, which fizzled out halfway through when the phone rang at 2am with the news.

You kick me when I'm down.

That's your.

I don't know why I'd love you, baby.

But I can make

you

eight hours later, the group were at a TV studio, taping an appearance for Top of the Pops as if nothing had happened.

Mick and Marianne went to a party that night hosted by Prince Rupert Lowenstein, a Spanish-Bavarian aristocrat and merchant banker, who was in the process of being eased in as the Stones' new financial manager, after Jagger had finally got wise to the way the group were being cheated by Klein.

There was no question of the Giant Hyde Park concert being cancelled.

Instead, it was announced that it would be a memorial for Brian Jones and would go ahead in tribute to him.

Granada TV had the television rights as a way to fund what would otherwise be a free show, and a large lineup of bands were playing, including a new band named King Crimson who had not yet made a recording, the folk singer Roy Harper, the Battered Ornaments, a band formed by Peter Brown, the liversist of Cream, but which had fired Brown and were now fronted by their guitarist Chris Spedding, and Alexis Corner's New Church, the other band that had sacked Brian Jones the previous month.

Nico, Jones's former lover, who had been abused by him as much as anyone had, was also meant to play.

She had asked if she could do so in tribute to him, but turned up too late to do the two songs she was scheduled for.

She did, though, write a song in tribute to him, Janet of Lunacy, which opened her third album, Desert Shore, the next year.

Deceive

And then the stones came on, by which time what was likely the largest audience for a rock concert ever up to that point had gathered.

Estimates of the size of the crowd ranged between a quarter and half a million people, and the security was largely provided by the new British chapter of the Hell's Angels, who had been set up after a couple of LA Angels had visited London at the invitation of George Harrison.

These British angels were a relatively mild-mannered bunch, and did their job in exchange for cups of tea.

At the start of the performance, Jagger read part of a poem, an excerpt of Adenaeus, a poem that Shelley wrote about the death of his friend Keats.

That poem starts with an epigram Shelley translated from Plato Thou wert the morning star among the living, ere thy fair light had fled, now having died thou art as Hesperus, giving new splendour to the dead.

This, of course, chosen because while the association of the morning star with the fallen angel Lucifer, and thus the devil, was not one Plato would have known.

The association fits Shelley's own views on morality and who was admirable.

The rest of the poem, though, including the sections Jagger read, is a pastoral elegy modelled on Milton's Licidious, a poem that Milton had written about a friend who had drowned in his mid-twenties.

He has awakened from the dreams of life.

It's we

that are lost in stormy visions and keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.

And in a mad trance, we strike with a spirit's knife.

Invulnerable nothing.

We decay like corpses in the channel.

Fear and grief convulse us and consume us day by day.

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

The one remains, the many change and pass.

Heaven's light forever shines.

Earth's shadows fly.

Life, like a dome of many coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity until death tramples it to fragments.

Die,

and if thou wouldst be with that

which thou dost seek, follow where all is fled.

At the end of the recital, Jagger made what was meant to be be a grand theatrical gesture, opening a cardboard box full of 2,000 white butterflies, which were meant to fly off in a beautiful, peaceful vision.

Instead, most of them had died before Jagger opened the box.

Different stories have the butterflies suffocating in the box, or one of the hell's angels falling on the box and breaking them.

And what the footage shows is Jagger rather pathetically shaking a box full of dead butterflies over the front row of the audience, with only a handful of them actually flying.

And the entire show was a letdown.

The guitars were out of tune, the performances were subpar, and much like the rock and roll circus months earlier, the group were rusty and sluggish.

But they got through it, their first show without Brian Jones, and the first show in which they played their new, riffy, harder rocking material in public.

Only Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts of the group, the two who had been least keen to sack him, actually went to Jones' funeral, which was held at the church where he'd sung in the choir, though he was not buried in the churchyard, despite his parents' wishes, but at a nearby cemetery, because there were rumours that he was a suicide and thus a sinner.

The rector did pray for him, though.

Richards presumably felt it would be unwise to attend with Anita Pallenberg, while Jagger and Marianne Faithful had travelled off to Australia, where they were to appear in a film based on the life of the Australian folk hero Ned Kelly, a violent armed robber who somehow became an Australian national symbol.

As with performance, Jagger's previous film, there was only one sung by Jagger on the soundtrack, a version of the old folk song, Wild Colonial Boy.

love the wild colonial boy.

The rest of the soundtrack featured country songs written for the film by Shell Silverstein and recorded by Wayland Jennings and Chris Christofferson.

I finally got a shot off.

Just rang off him.

Dowsett hollered, it's old Nick yourself.

The devil.

He's bulletproof.

He'll get us all.

And there he comes, a banging on his breastplate with a butt of his gun and calling back to his comrades, come out, boys, come out, we'll do the lot of them.

And out of the inn crawled Dan Kelly and Steve Hart and firing wildly.

And behind while Faithful had flown with Jagger out to Australia, she was in a terrible mental state.

The two had largely fallen out of love by this point.

Faithful was still traumatized by the miscarriage she had suffered a few months earlier.

She was upset by Jagger's continuing infidelities, and she was now very dependent on drugs.

Not only that, but she had spent much of the previous few months portraying Ophelia in a stage production of Hamlet, where she had had to portray madness and suicidality every night.

Ophelia, of course, drowned, just like Brian Jones did, and on her first night in Australia, Faithful looked at her own reflection, with her hair cut in a boyish style for her role in the film, and saw Brian Jones's face staring back at her.

She decided to take her own life, and took a massive overdose of sleeping pills.

Luckily, Jagger discovered her in time, and she eventually made a full recovery, but she spent six days in a coma.

When she woke up, Jagger was by her bedside, saying he thought he'd lost her.

Her reply was, wild horses couldn't drag me away.

Jagger continued starring in the film, and Faithful's role was recast.

The film was a notorious flop and would be the last film which would feature Jagger as an actor for decades.

His brief fascination with the idea of becoming a film star was now over.

While Jagger was away, the group continued working on their own album, cutting more backing tracks to which Jagger could later add vocals.

And shortly after Jagger got back home to the UK, Wyman and Watts also contributed to the first solo album by the session musician Leon Russell, who would soon be another of the occasional keyboard players and arrangers they would be able to call on.

There seems to be some confusion about which musicians guested on which tracks on that album.

An album that, as well as Wyman and Watts, also featured George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Klaus Vohrmann, and others.

But it seems likely that Wyman and Watts played, appropriately enough, on Roll Away the Stone, which also featured Steve Winward of Blind Faith on keyboards.

Don't leave me laying

At Russell's sessions, either at this time or in early 1970, accounts vary.

Jagger also sang lead on a demo, later released as a bonus track for that album, which had Russell on piano, Ringo Starr on drums, either Wyman or Paul McCartney on bass, and either Richards or Chris Stainton on guitar, depending on which contemporary sources you believe.

The song, song, initially titled Get a Line on You, was inspired by Jones.

Mama, sweet, sweet, monolover now.

But now Jack's film commitment was over, the group needed money and fast.

Alan Klein had promised them he would make the millions, but as it turned out he was keeping most of those millions for himself.

And much of what he hadn't kept had gone on the kind of expenses, big houses, expensive cars and so on, that only lead to further expenses.

And now the group were trying to rid themselves of Klein, a process that would itself take a year or two, and would lead to them losing even more money.

They were also looking at negotiating a new record contract the next year, which they didn't want Klein involved in.

They needed to go back on the road, and they needed to have it be a tour that made a serious amount of money, and that meant a tour of America.

Which was a bit of a problem, because in the couple of years since the Stones had come off the road, the whole business of rock concert promotion in the US had changed drastically.

When the stones had last toured to any great extent, the expectation was to play on a bill with half a dozen other acts playing for 15 or 20 minutes a night.

Now there were new rock-specific venues like the Fillmore and festivals and crowds used to long extended jam sessions.

A headlining act would have to play for at least an hour, likely more, and would have to perform in places completely unlike any they'd been booked in before.

They needed a new management team, but they couldn't actually split from Klein yet.

But Klein was also busy working with the Beatles, who he had finally managed to get to manage, and so the Stones decided to get Klein's nephew, Ronnie Schneider, who worked for Klein but was unhappy with him, to run the booking side of the tour.

Schneider initially operated out of Klein's offices, but had soon set up his own company, Stones Promotions Limited.

Schneider and the Stones came up with a whole new business model for how a tour should be run.

For a start, they were no longer going to rely on local promoters everywhere.

Previously, when the Stones had played in the US, they would have to perform with whatever support acts and advertising the local promoter decided to put on.

This time, the promoters at the venue were only going to provide the venue and collect the ticket money.

The Stones were going to put on the whole package themselves.

That would not only mean one fewer middlemen taking a cut of the money, it would also mean they would have control of the bill.

The group, especially Richards, wanted the support acts to be the best they could find.

Having not performed live on a regular basis for years, they wanted to up their game, and that meant getting support acts who would challenge them.

At the bottom of the bill was Terry Reid.

Reid had previously been the singer for Peter J and the Jay Walkers, who had been at the bottom of the bill of the Stones' last UK tour.

But he had gone on to become a solo performer, recording with Mickey Most to moderate success.

Swamp's mother

Did he got no

imagination

So we went and faded Singles on everyone's shore

Reid had actually been offered jobs with two other up-and-coming bands One band that had been a one-hit wonder, but had had a series of successive flops and had never yet released a hit album asked him to replace the lead singer.

When he turned them down, Deep Purple got in Ian Gillen instead.

And a session player who had played on several of Reed's recordings asked him to join a scratch band he was putting together to fulfil the remaining touring commitments of his band, which had split up.

Reed didn't want to be the singer for the new Yard Birds, so suggested that Jimmy Page check out Reed's friend Robert Plant instead, for the band that became Led Zeppelin.

After Reid on the bill would be B.B.

King, one of the group's blues inspirations.

Nobody seems to care.

Yes, nobody loves me.

Nobody seems to care.

Speaking of worries and troubles, I

do know I've had my share.

And before the stones came on, would be their old friends, the Icantina Turner Review.

Here come old flat top, he comes grooming up slowly.

He's got two

eyeballs.

He won't hold

The ticket prices would also be double those of normal gigs, and the stones would take the majority of it, where previously they'd get a flat fee or a very small percentage of the doors.

This time they were getting a very large percentage of the ticket price, with a large guaranteed minimum, and they were getting paid 50% of that guaranteed minimum in advance to help them fund the tour.

The group travelled to the US, and before the tour began, they spent time in LA finishing off the new album and rehearsing for the tour.

For the final sessions for what was to become Let It Bleed, the group brought in Leon Russell and Nikki Hopkins on piano, and a new addition, saxophone player Bobby Keys, who the group had first met five years earlier, but who would tour with the group, other than a short break in the mid-70s, for the next 45 years.

They also brought in a fiddle player recommended by Graham Parsons, Byron Berliner, for a country remake of Honky Tonk Women, retitled Country Hunk.

But the main track they worked on was a song of Keith's they'd started back at the beginning of the year, one he'd written while stressed about the relationship between Jagger and Anita Pallenberg during the making of performance, and inspired by how sinister and manipulative he found Donald Camill, the director of the film and godson of Alistair Crowley, who Richards believed deliberately manipulated Jagger and Pallenberg into having sex.

That song, Gimme Shelter, would become the opening track of the album, and would also give the documentary that was being made about the tour its name.

The most distinctive aspect of the track, though, was one that was a last-minute inspiration.

Jimmy Miller got the idea that the song would work better as a duet with a female singer, and so at midnight, Mary Clayton found herself being woken up with a request that she come to the recording studio immediately, and she turned up still in her curlers.

Clayton was the suggestion of Jack Nitchy, who had worked with her many times before.

Clayton had started out as a backing vocalist for Bobby Darin seven years earlier, when she was only 14.

She had then been invited by her friend Billy Preston, who was at that time playing keyboards for Ray Charles, to join Charles's Raylettes.

After that, she had tried to have a solo career, and recorded the very first version of It's In His Kiss.

Is it in his eyes?

No, no, you'll be deceived.

Is it in his eyes?

Oh, no, you make believe.

If you wanna know,

if he loves you so it's in his keys, that's where it is.

Oh, yeah, I raised it in his face.

Oh, no, there's just a charm in his warm embrace.

That had not been a success, but Jack Nitchie, who had arranged the track, had been impressed by Clayton and had repeatedly used it as a session vocalist.

She had sung on a couple of the tracks Nitchie had recorded for the performance soundtrack.

Look at eyes

underground

and backing vocals on Neil Young's The Old Laughing Lady, which Nitchie arranged and produced and which also featured Kuda on guitar.

As well as being part of the vocal chorus on You Can't Always Get What You Want, Clayton was rather shocked at what she was being asked to sing, and she phoned her husband, telling him, These boys want me to sing about rape and murder, loudly enough that she could be sure that the group had heard what she was saying in case there was anything shady going on.

But she was eventually persuaded that it was a legitimate part of the song, and she turned in the performance of her life.

Tragically, the next day, Clayton, who had been pregnant, miscarried.

To this day, she blames the stress of singing that part for the miscarriage, and it took her decades before she could bring herself to listen to the recording.

Though she did record her own version of the song the next year for her first solo album.

After finishing the album, the group rehearsed what was meant to be the set list for the tour, a set which would be based almost entirely around songs from Beggar's Banquet and the new album, Let It Bleed.

But as it turned out, even though they put together a show that was about an hour long, when they asked some of the crew, who knew the current American rock scene far better than the Stones did, for feedback after their final pre-tour rehearsal, they were told that the set was still too short.

Out of desperation, they added a mini-acoustic set in the middle, where Mick and Keith would perform old blues songs by Robert Johnson, Robert Wilkins, and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

The group now had a set that would just about be long enough for the new rock world.

But there was another problem, a PR problem.

The Stones were doing this tour in order to make a lot of money very quickly, and so the ticket prices were more than double what other major bands were charging, and in the new hippie world there was nothing worse than being a breadhead.

Ralph Gleason, the San Francisco music journalist, wrote a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the ticket prices an artistic and moral crime and saying, How much can the stones take back to Mary England after taxes anyway?

How much must the British Marger and the American Marger and the agency rake off the top?

Paying five, six, and seven dollars for a stones concert at the Oakland Coliseum for, say, an hour of the stones seen a quarter of a mile away, because the artist demands such outrageous fees that they can only be obtained under these circumstances, says a very bad thing to me about the artists' attitude toward the public.

It says they despise despise their own audience.

At the first press conference before the tour, the stones were asked about this.

Jagger pretended to be ignorant of the ticket prices and claimed to have played no part in the decision, even though Jagger was the one who had taken control of the tour's organisation and had agreed to every detail.

Put on the spot, Jagger agreed to a suggestion from a reporter that they might do a free show at the end of the tour for people who couldn't afford to get to the other shows.

That would be arranged later though.

Now the group had to start the tour, and had to prove themselves to be just as they were described by Sam Cutler, who had come along as part of the crew and who had announced them every night.

As you can hear, one other big thing had changed since the last time the group had toured.

The audiences for their gigs were no longer full of screaming teenage girls, but mixed gender groups of young adults who were actually listening to the music rather than drowning it out.

The group were truly in a totally different environment from anything they'd experienced before.

The first few shows were fairly sloppy, but soon the group had got good enough that it made sense to record a live album, and with the free show starting to take shape, it also made sense to get a film crew to record it, and some of the tour leading up to it, in order to make the free show economically viable.

To film the tour, the group settled on the Mazels brothers and their editor Charlotte Zwarin, who had recently moved up to the position of co-director with them.

The Mazels Brothers are best known for documentaries like Salesman, also co-directed by Zwarin, about door-to-door Bible salesmen, and Grey Gardens, about two eccentric formerly wealthy elderly women living in squalid conditions.

But one of their earliest films had been a documentary about the Beatles' first trip to the USA, and they had also filmed Yoko Ono's Cut Piece.

The film team started filming at Madison Square Garden, the show also used for much of the live album of the tour, Get Your Yaya's Out.

But it's all

right.

And I'm back

The tour was a massive success, but all the time it was going on there were arrangements being made for the planned free show.

The initial idea was that they were going to take up an idea that had been suggested to them by Rock Scully, the Grateful Dead's manager.

The Dead had often played free shows at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and had a whole organisation that had the whole process of doing this, from applying for permission through booking the bands, down to a fine art.

Why didn't the Dead put together a show just like all the other ones they normally did, and then have the Stones appear as surprise guests, only announced on the day?

That plan soon changed, because the Stones needed people to know they were going to do a free show, so that they could get the publicity boost they needed.

But after some brief discussion of doing the gig in San Jose, the Golden Gate Park part of the idea was going to go ahead, and the Grateful Deads team was left to do most of the arrangement.

At least, that was the case until the day when the Dead's team had a meeting with a friendly parks commissioner, who could be relied upon to expedite the permissions process, and would basically nod it through as he had many times before.

Instead, someone from the Stones team contacted Scully and told him to cancel the meeting because the Stones team would take it directly to the Mayor, in the belief that the Rolling Stones' name was big enough that it would open doors the Grateful Dead couldn't.

In fact, the opposite was true.

The Mayor hated the hippies, and as soon as he found out that the Rolling Stones were wanting to do a show there, the possibility of doing one at all disappeared.

So the group needed to find a new venue, but first there was some more recording to do.

The US tour had gone on long enough that the Let It Bleed album, which they had finished work on just before the start of the tour, was out and getting rave reviews, with everyone agreed it was the best thing they had done to date.

And the group were playing better than they ever had, thanks to being on the road playing for audiences who were actually paying attention to them.

So they decided to go into Muscle Scholl's studios and start cutting some tracks for their next album while they were on an upswing.

In those sessions, between some jamming on old blues and country songs, they cut basic tracks for two songs.

One of them, Drown Sugar, written entirely by Jagger, is a song that deserves enough attention that it will be held over until the next episode I do on the Stones, because to talk about it and what it says about the Stones' relationship with black culture would overwhelm an already overwhelming episode.

But suffice it to say for those who haven't heard the song that it's about a slave owner raping the women he had enslaved, and is treated exactly as sensitively as you would expect from the stones.

The other song they taped was a country song, with Jagger writing the verse lyrics and Richards writing the music and the chorus, though the chorus line seemed to have been inspired by Marianne Faithful's words as she came out of her coma.

The group weren't very happy with the song at this point, and only cut the track as a demo to give to Richards' friend Graham Parsons, who would soon record it with his band the Flying Burrito Brothers.

After

we died,

wild

horses

couldn't drag me away

wild,

By this time, there were only a few days to go until the free concert, but they still didn't have a venue.

By now, pretty much the only part of the original plan that was left was a suggestion by Rock Scully that, just as they had for Hyde Park, the Stones could use the Hell's Angels as security.

Scully, who had done this many times before with the dead, assured Richards that the angels are really some righteous dudes, and that they carry themselves with honour and dignity.

The show was arranged after a lot of frantic work by the Stones team, the Dead's team and the Diggers, the anarchic group who ran many free events in San Francisco, for Sears Point Raceway near Sonoma, not in San Francisco itself, but still in the Bay Area.

But then just two days before the gig was meant to happen, a series of disagreements with the racetrack's owners, involving among other things the fact that the corporation that owned the track was in the film business, and thus wanted a share of the profits from the resulting film, led to the venue being changed yet again.

Instead, with only 36 hours' notice, the gig was going to be at Altamont.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

The stage was only three feet off the ground, meaning that the crowd could climb up onto it easily.

There were no real toilet facilities.

The organizers didn't get enough medical facilities together, and on top of everything else, the acid that was being distributed in the crowd was mixed with amphetamines.

Pretty much everyone who was taking it was having a a bad trip, and overwhelming what little medical facilities there were.

To make matters worse, there was a decision made not to announce over the PA that the acid was bad.

Sam Cutler thought that if they did that, it would cause everyone who was okay to start having bad trips.

So, all day, more and more people kept taking the paranoia-inducing combination.

But still, everyone was there to have a good time, right?

The day began with a sunrise performance on the Moog by Doug McKechnie, an electronic musician who occasionally played with the Grateful Dead around this time.

By the time the festival started, one person had already died.

Leonard Krizak, an attendee who was going to turn 19 the next day, decided to go for a swim in a canal that adjoined the festival site, not realising how cold and fast the water was, after giving the finger to a police officer who was frantically waving at him not to from the other side.

His body was found two hours later.

The first band on was Santana, a new band who had only just started to become well known.

And almost immediately the violence started.

The Hells Angels started beating up a naked man, and when one of the hippies in the crowd appealed to them to stop and to be peaceful, they instead turned their attentions to him, and he wound up needing sixty stitches.

The American Hells Angels were a very, very different breed, it turned out, than their British counterparts.

All of this was being filmed by many, many cameras.

The Mazels had recruited every camera operator they could, including several young filmmakers from Francis Freud Coppola's new studio, American Zoatrope.

Sadly for George Lucas, one of those camera operators, his camera jammed almost straight away, and he only got one single shot into the finished film.

Several of the other film crew members had their drinks spiked with acid, but enough others were lucky enough that Altamont became very, very well documented.

After Santana came Jefferson Airplane, and at this point, the violence reached the musicians.

Hey man, I'd like to mention that the Hells Angels just smashed Marty Ballin in the face and knocked him out for a bit.

I'd like to thank you for that.

There's other ways.

You're talking to me.

I'm going to talk to you.

I'm not talking to you, man.

I'm talking to the people that hit my lead singer.

I'm talking to my people.

Let me tell you what's happening.

You, man.

The Hells Angels were beating up an audience member, and Marty Ballin of Jefferson Airplane threw a tambourine at them to get them to stop.

In response to which, one of the angels climbed up on stage and punched Ballin in the face, knocking him out for a moment.

The only set that didn't have any serious violence or injury that day was the Flying Burrito Brothers, who calmed the crowd down enough that they actually listened.

I got my diesel wheeled up and she's running like never before

They just feel charm ahead alright

But I don't see a cough inside Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight

I got ten forward gears and a George Roller The only person who got hurt during the burrito set was Mick Jagger, who arrived and started making his way to the backstage area when within two minutes of him getting to the venue someone screamed at him, F you, Mick Jagger!

But with the actual word, I can't say if I want to keep a clean rating.

I hate you, and punched him, knocking him to the ground.

But other than that, nobody got hurt while the burritos were playing.

This wasn't the case with the next act, the new supergroup, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young.

The violence started up again as soon as they started playing, and one young woman had to have emergency brain surgery after she was hit on the head with a flying beer can.

By this point, things were so tense, and there were so many bad trips in the crowd that there was a fistfight between two overworked doctors in the medical tents over how to deal with patients.

The atmosphere was so bad that the Grateful Dead, who had after all done most of the organisation of the show, decided it would be a good idea for them not to play.

That way the Stones could go on quicker and get the show over with before things got any worse.

And anyway, they didn't want to play in front of a massive crowd of people who were on bad acid and getting beaten up by the Hell's Angels.

There was, however, a problem with this plan.

While four of the Stones were in trailers backstage, blissfully unaware that things were any worse than normal, Bill Wyman had not yet shown up.

Since they weren't scheduled to play until after sunset, he'd gone shopping with his girlfriend, and so with the dead knot going on, and with Crosby Stills and Ash and Young playing a relatively short set, there was a two-hour gap before the stones went on.

Even after Wyman turned up, the group didn't see any urgency in getting on stage.

They liked to keep crowds waiting and didn't understand what was going on in the crowd, so took their time getting tuned up in a tent backstage.

Rolling Stone magazine, in their write-up of the event, rather less sympathetically said, Really, there was something else going on, and it tied in with the whole superstar sensibility in which the stones increasingly enwrapped themselves.

They were waiting for it to get really dark out, so the banks of spotlights would set them off to the most dramatic effect possible.

But even after one of the Hell's Angels came back and told them in no uncertain words that they had tuned up enough, and that people were literally going to die if they didn't get out and start actually playing, it still took more time before the crowd could be persuaded to get off the stage so the stones could come on.

Get down, f it, man.

Oh,

We have footage of much of the show from the film Gimme Shelter, and also audience tapes exist of the entire show, though the audience tapes show how bad the sound was in the venue.

Unlike the soundboard recordings on the film, you can't hear Charlie Watts' drumming at all for a large portion of the show.

Things went okay for the first two songs, Jumpin' Jack Flash and a cover of Chuck Berry's Camel, but the violence broke out again just after the start of the third song, Sympathy for the Devil, when someone damaged one of the Hell's Angels motorcycles.

means everybody just cool out

William cool out everybody

I know

I'm here

Everybody be cool now.

Come on

All right,

how are we doing over there?

Alright, can we still make it down the front?

Is there anyone there that's hurt?

Huh?

Everyone alright?

Okay.

Alright.

I think we're cool.

We can go.

It always happens, something very funny happens when we start that number.

That would be the last time the Stones would play that song live for six years.

Rolling Stone magazine, in their write-up of the event, wrongly said that the moment that Defined Altamont happened during that song, and it became part of rock and roll mythology.

So much so that it turned up in Don McLean's American Pie, as the very climax of his look back at the time between the deaths of Buddy Holly and Janice Joplin.

fire is the devil's only friend.

Oh, and as I watched him on the stage, my hands were clenched in fists of rage.

No angel born in hell

could break that Satan's spell.

And as the flames climbed high into the night to light the sacrificial rite, I saw Satan laughing with delight

But in truth, that was just the first skirmish, and the Stones managed to get the crowd calmed down by immediately changing up their set list, and going into the slow blues set they always played in the middle of the set, getting the crowd to sit down and listen.

But after Love in Vain they started up a version of Under by Thumb, Their Ode to Misogyny and Oppressing Women, playing a slower and scuzzier version of the song than normal.

By this time there were dozens of Hell's Angels on the stage, and Jagger could barely move for the crowds.

More fighting started up and the song drowned to a halt and Jagger once again tried to appeal for calm.

That's the start.

And

the next thing is, I cannot see what's going on.

I just know that every time we get to a number, something happens.

I don't know what's going on, who's doing what.

It's just a scuffle.

All I can ask you, San Francisco, it's like the whole thing.

Like, this could be the most beautiful evening we've had for this winter, you know, and we've really

known why don't let's f it up, man.

Come on, let's get it together.

The song started up again, and people started climbing up onto the speakers.

Among them was a young black man named Meredith Hunter.

According to some witnesses, Hunter was actually trying to get people to come down off the speakers.

But it's also the case that Hunter was on speed and had been thrown off the stage several times previously, so he might have been trying to climb on.

Either way, one of the Hell's Angels grabbed Hunter by his hair.

The angels, who had a lot of white supremacists in their midst, had been giving Hunter and his white girlfriend dirty looks for much of the day.

And after Hunter pulled himself free, he looked angrily at the angel who'd grabbed him, who then punched Hunter in his face as a result.

Hunter tried to run off, but multiple angels piled on him.

Hunter ran away and drew a gun that he'd been carrying for protection.

His family had warned him that there were a lot of racists in that part of Alameda County.

One of the angels pulled a knife and stabbed Hunter five times in the neck to stop him from shooting.

Other angels then started beating him and preventing anyone from getting to him to help him, saying, He's going to die anyway.

Let him die.

Hey, man, look, we're splitting.

You know, if those cats come, if you can...

We're splitting, man, if those cats don't stop beating everybody up inside.

I want them out of the way,

I don't like you.

Hey, people!

Hey, people!

Come on, let's be cool!

People!

Please!

There's no reason to hassle anybody.

Please don't be mad at it.

If you move back and sit.

Hunter was eventually dragged to the medical tent, and his life could possibly have been saved.

But when a doctor tried to get Hunter airlifted to the the hospital, he was told that the helicopter backstage was only for the use of the stones, and the pilot wouldn't take off without authorization, which nobody would give.

Hunter died while waiting for the ambulance.

Meanwhile, on stage, the Rolling Stones continued their set, continuing with Brown Sugar, the new song about raping and abusing enslaved black women, given its first ever live performance, and Midnight Rambler, the song about a serial killer from the new album inspired by the Boston Strangler, ending with the the line, I'll stick my knife right down your throat, baby, and it hurts.

In between the songs, they continued to call for everyone to be peaceful and loving.

Two more people were killed at Altamont later that night.

People sat around a campfire killed by a hitter mund driver, never caught, widely believed to be someone who had taken some of the bad acid that was going around.

In the early days after the concert, a PR story went around that just as there had been four deaths during the event, there had been four births.

So after all, wasn't that like the cosmic balance?

And four people dying is hardly anything, really.

There were, of course, no births.

Keith Richards said on his return to London, it was basically well handled, but lots of people were tired and a few tempers got frayed.

It wasn't until Rolling Stone, the counterculture rock magazine that had taken its name from the band, reported on the events a month later, in a long piece written by a combination of its best writers, including Lester Bangs and Greel Marcus, that the legend of Altamont became fixed as the darkest moment of the sixties, the end of an era, as much for the timing of the event in the last month of the sixties as for the awful events that happened.

And that became solidified when the film of the tour, and of Altamont, came out.

Gimme Shelter is, undeniably, a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking, and it quite rightly made millions at the box office and in subsequent home video releases.

The Stones claimed at the time that they didn't want any money from the film and would give it to charity.

They didn't.

The Mazles, and especially Zwerin, who came up with the framing device of having the group watch the footage as it was edited, turned out a devastating, harrowing film that became an all-time classic of the genre.

You can now buy a Criterion Collection Blu-ray of the film if you want to see Meredith Hunter's murder in glorious high definition with hours of special features and a commemorative booklet.

Alan Passaro, the Hell's Angel who murdered Hunter, was set free by an all-white jury.

Run Schneider, who organised the tour, told Rolling Stone at the time when asked about compensation for Hunter's family, We haven't talked to the family yet, but we'll have to do something about that.

If we come up and say we're going to give $500,000 to the family, it all sounds so tacky.

As far as I'm concerned, if we gave the family fifty million dollars, it still doesn't make up for the kid being killed.

Eventually, after Hunter's mother sued the stones, they settled out of court for $10,000.

Meredith Hunter was buried in an unmarked grave, and no memorial was set up for him until nearly forty years later, when a filmmaker called Sam Green made a film about Hunter and his burial.

Enough donations were sent in for a memorial for him that now there is a small gravestone at least.

Donations sent by strangers, because outcasts always mourn.

A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

This week's is on.

La Conferencia Secreta del Toto's Bar by Lost Shakers.

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A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available.

Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes.

This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser.

Visit 500songs.com

that's 500 the numbers songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here.

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Thank you very much for listening.