The Truth About the Rolling Stones and Altamont | 11
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In 1965, change was in the air. A new generation of young people were coming of age, and they did not want what their parents did. Theirs was the counterculture, the rebellion and repudiation of the status quo. And for a while, it was all peace and love. Or at least it pretended to be.

Yes, we had the Summer of Love in 1967. The Beatles sang "All You Need Is Love." John Lennon asked everyone to "Give Peace a Chance." And there were demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the military-industrial complex. Hippies, pacifists, and proponents of civil rights and women's rights were sure they could make a difference. And some of them definitely did. But there was a dark side to the 1960s.

Parts of society weren't keen on granting certain parts of the population equal rights. Some groups believed that society needed to be reformed by any means necessary, including the use of violence and domestic terrorism. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. There was violence at political conventions. But many people kept the faith. And the thing that faith ran on was music.

Music was at the center of all this promise of cultural change, social change, justice, civil rights, progress, and more. In August 1969, somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 people converged on Woodstock, a festival billed as three days of peace and music. A noble idea, this concept that music could bring everything together to make the world a better place. The legend of Woodstock continues today, decades later.

Some people loved what Woodstock symbolized. "We need more of that," they thought. So they came up with a plan to end the year and the 1960s with a similar event in California. This would be the culmination of the good embodied by the counterculture and send the world into the 1970s. It did not turn out that way. Instead, the Rolling Stones got something that has gone down in history as an event that symbolized the dark side of the decade.

This is the truth about Altamont. Boy, do I have a story for you. This is episode 11 of Uncharted, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. The Rolling Stones live at Altamont Speedway on December 6th, 1969. This was the third song of their set, and things were already looking scary and dangerous.

By the time the set was over, 18-year-old Meredith Hunter would be murdered right there in front of the stage by a bunch of out-of-control Hell's Angels who had been hired to provide security for the festival. This has left an enduring stain on the legacy of the music of the 1960s. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross, and on this edition of Uncharted, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, we're going to look at what led up to the disaster that was Altamont, what happened at the festival, and where it left everyone afterwards. ♪

Altamont has a couple of origin stories. Here's the first. Spencer Dryden and Jorma Kokkonen of the Jefferson Airplane started kicking around the idea for a free concert at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They envisioned a West Coast version of Woodstock. The airplane would play, the Grateful Dead were in, and who else should be there? Well, that was a no-brainer.

Next to the Beatles, the biggest band in the world at the time was the Rolling Stones. They didn't get to play Woodstock, so maybe they'd like to play this festival. Someone got in contact and the Stones signed on. The other origin story has the Stones at the center of it all. 1969 was a rough year for them.

In June, the band fired co-founder Brian Jones. Drugs and alcohol made him unreliable and a liability when it came to touring. By July 3rd, Jones was dead at the bottom of a swimming pool. Two days later, the Stones played a free outdoor gig in London's Hyde Park. Its original plan was to introduce everyone to 20-year-old Mick Taylor, ex of John Mayall's Blues Breakers, and Brian Jones' replacement. It was also their first public appearance in two years.

Instead, it became a massive memorial event dedicated to Brian Jones. Between 250,000 and 300,000 people were there. Running the gig was a guy named Sam Cutler, the Rolling Stones' road manager. And everything worked out quite well, including an army of fans who stuck around afterwards to clean up the site in exchange for a free Rolling Stones album. The Stones were so impressed with Cutler that they hired him to organize an American tour that fall.

That tour was very important to the band. They'd been away from America for three years, an insanely long time in the world of rock, and frankly, they needed the money. In the fall, the Stones relocated to California to finish recording the Let It Bleed album and to rehearse for the tour, living for a time at the Laurel Canyon house they rented from Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and they rehearsed at a Warner Brothers soundstage in Burbank.

Mick Jagger was unwell for part of the time, suffering from tonsillitis. But the band came through, finishing what would become one of the greatest albums of their career. The tour began on November 7th, 1969 in Fort Collins, Colorado. It wound its way west, looped back east, and then down to Florida for an appearance at the West Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival.

an event the governor threatened to shut down. The entire time, the Stones were hammered over the price of concert tickets. How much? Well, they were selling anywhere from $3 to $8. In today's money, that's between $25 and $70. The group was stung by all the criticism and the bad press. To smooth things over, somebody came up with the idea of ending the tour in California with a free show.

The airplane left things in the hands of some local promoters and went on tour, thinking that everything was under control. Sam Cutler got involved with the logistics, and a date was set, December 6th. As the Stones' tour continued, plans for this West Coast show, apparently in San Francisco, were kept secret. The thinking was, we're not going to announce anything until 24 hours before showtime because we don't want anyone showing up days in advance and creating problems.

This wasn't all that crazy, considering that there was something of a war going on between bikers, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and other revolutionary groups. There was no sense in giving them the heads up so they could organize and crash the festival in a violent way. It wasn't until there was a leak and Rolling Stone magazine broke the news with a cover story entitled It's Going to Happen in Late November that anyone knew about the Stones' plans. Things got squirrely.

The original site of the show, according to the Stones' version of events, was supposed to be the practice field at San Jose University. Not a bad choice. It had recently hosted a three-day festival with 52 bands and 80,000 people, and it worked out all right. But San Jose City Council was in no mood to deal with another big festival, so permit denied. This is when Golden Gate Park entered the picture, with a projected audience of between 50,000 and 75,000.

But San Francisco officials and the police department had seen what had happened at Woodstock, and they were afraid of a repeat of the chaos. Besides, there was an NFL game scheduled for that weekend at Kezar Stadium, which was also in the park. Two events, too many logistical problems. And then there were the concerns about the Bikers and the Black Panthers and all those other groups. So, permit denied. The show was less than a week away.

The third venue on the list was Sears Point Raceway near Sonoma, California, about 30 miles from Golden Gate Park, and a facility with parking for up to 100,000 cars. The Stones could have it rent-free. All they'd have to do is pay for security, cover any damages, and get all the necessary permits. But then, some problems. The Stones hired a crew to shoot a concert film of the event. ♪

The Mayles brothers had recently released an acclaimed documentary about, get this, door-to-door Bible salesmen. The Stones were intrigued by the reality show-like vibe of the film, so they were in.

The owner of the racetrack wanted a piece of that action, even though the proceeds from the film were supposed to be donated to a charity that looked after Vietnamese orphans. Plus, the owner of the raceway wanted somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 in cash up front to cover any damage the crowd might cause. Where was that going to come from? It turns out that the real owner of the Speedway was a movie company called Filmways. They had recently been stiffed by the Stones on a previous project,

So much for Sears Point Raceway. Enter Dick Carter. He owned a struggling racetrack near a small city named Tracy, which, apropos of nothing, was known as the site of the headquarters of the American Nazi Party. He offered up this site because he needed the publicity. So, yeah, the racetrack there had never hosted anything else of this size, but so what?

Well, there was no public transit, there was no shade, washroom facilities were on the light side, to put it modestly, and there was parking for a maximum of 12,000 cars, hardly enough given the size of the expected crowd. No one told anyone in the general neighborhood that the show was happening, and it was doubtful enough food and water could be trucked in in time. But how hard could that be? And it was not a great venue for a concert.

The proposed site was a bowl with a slight incline. Instead of performing at the top of a hill, the bands would now be forced to use a stage at the bottom of one. This created a major problem. The stage had already been built, but it was just three feet high, which would have been fine if the audience was looking up at it. Now everyone would be performing on the same three-foot stage at the bottom of an incline.

This meant that the performers would be barely above the heads of the crowd, and there was no chance to redesign the stage. And there was no barrier in front of the stage either, which meant that gravity would slowly force the crowd down the hill and into the stage, creating a crush. If there had been time, a new stage and barriers would have been installed. But there wasn't. Again, all these venue changes didn't happen over months or weeks. Plans and locations changed almost hourly.

The concert was set for Saturday, December the 6th. Altamont Speedway was confirmed as the location on December 4th, about 48 hours before the music was supposed to start, in front of up to 300,000 people. Now imagine trying to organize and set up the sound system, catering, sanitary requirements, security, parking, backstage facilities, medical personnel, and everything else in less than two days? And who exactly was in charge? No one really knew.

Were things confused and rushed and chaotic and badly organized? Listen, do you have to ask? But it was the late 60s, and everyone was drunk on the peace and love message of the era. Everyone was optimistic and confident that all would be well, and things would turn out just fine, just like it had in Hyde Park back in July. Instead, in the words of an article in Rolling Stone, it was a day when everything went perfectly wrong. I'll take you through everything that went wrong in just a moment.

In very late November and early December 1969, news of the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont Speedway was all over the newspapers. FM rock stations put out calls for volunteers. On Friday, December 5, crews were frantically trying to prepare the site. Most of the gear didn't arrive until Friday afternoon, and when it did, the crew found that everything had been hurriedly packed up after the Sears Point location fell through, and everything was in the wrong cases.

There was a lighting rig, but some of it never arrived. Even if it had, the inadequate stage made it nearly impossible to set things up properly. The stones wouldn't be able to see the crowd very well because they were to be lit largely from the front, blinding them. So if someone decided to launch a beer bottle on their direction, they wouldn't see it coming. The roadies and the volunteers worked through the night. Temperatures dipped below freezing.

The only thing that kept a lot of them going was a steady supply of cocaine. It really was total chaos. There were calls to cancel, but the idea of hundreds of thousands of people showing up to a place where nothing was happening was considered to be a worse option. Meanwhile, a lineup had been confirmed. Jefferson Airplane would be there along with Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones.

But before the gates even opened, a disaster was unfolding. And this is where we need to talk about the Hells Angels. The motorcycle gang first formed in the years after World War II with the merger of several smaller groups consisting largely of army vets who had no desire to go back to a normal civilian life. By 1969, one of their biggest bases of operations was the chapter in San Francisco. Bikers and hippies seemed to be diametrically opposed, but in certain ways they were aligned.

Both groups were anti-establishment. Both hated the cops. Both liked drugs and free love. And they tended to like the same music. Where they differed was on their methods and politics. Hells Angels were strictly authoritarian. You did not break their rules. And their politics were far, far more conservative. They tended to believe in duty and country and patriotism, at least their form of it.

Anti-war protests? That was repugnant to the Angels. Forget all this peace and love business. The bikers were into violence. Still, there was a sort of unspoken truce in effect. In San Francisco, the Grateful Dead routinely used the Hells Angels to provide security at their shows and were quite happy with the arrangement. When the Stones played their Hyde Park gig in London, they used a British offshoot of the gang. And when it came time for Altamont, the Dead recommended that the Stones hire their Angels.

Hey listen, if the dead gave their blessing to them, had to be cool, right? Meanwhile, the concert site was a mess. No one thought to divide the amphitheater ball into sections for easier crowd control. There were no designated aisles. There were no barriers, even to separate the crowd from the stage. And because this was supposed to be a peace and love event, police presence would be kept to a minimum.

Accounts vary, but it's very possible that there were less than a dozen police officers from Alameda County looking after an event with 300,000 people. The Angels' initial job was to protect the generator supplying the electricity to the stage. Then that was changed to guarding the stage itself, and that would morph into raining violence upon the audience. Sam Cutler, the Stones' road manager, gave the Angels simple instructions. Keep people away.

So they did. Again, no barriers, no moat or anything to keep the audience away from the stage, which again was three feet high. The only thing between the crowd and the performers was no more than 25 full-fledged angels plus another two dozen hangers-on. They were paid with free admission to the show, limited backstage access, and $500 in beer. They made their entrance, their presence known, by roaring through the crowd on their choppers and parking the bikes around the stage.

They were told to park their motorcycles right in front of the stage. What could possibly go wrong? On Friday, December 5th, as an army of 300 roadies struggled to move things from Sears Point Raceway to Altamont, people began making the 50-mile trek east from San Francisco to Altamont. Traffic was soon snarled and cars were abandoned on the road.

At 8 that morning, Dale Smith, the sheriff's deputy in Alameda County, got a phone call. Did he know anything about a concert at Altamont Speedway? He did not. Did he know who the Rolling Stones were? He did not. He hung up the phone and went home, not really giving anything much thought. He perhaps should have.

At the same time Deputy Sheriff Smith was heading home from his graveyard shift, there were already thousands of tired, hungry, and cold music fans waiting to stake their claim in the concert bowl. Sam Cutler, the Stones' road manager, later said this, "'Dawn broke at Altamont on December 6, 1969, and from the stage, it looked like I was observing the camp of some dreadful invading army.'"

Once they got in, there was little food. The porta-potties were terrible. There were maybe a hundred for the entire 300,000 people. And there were plenty of bad drugs, mostly speed, meth, and very dodgy LSD. The hardcore fans worked their way down to the foot of the stage, packing in tight. Others climbed the temporary structure set up for lighting. The Hells Angels pushed back on all this, hard.

With no one to supervise them, they were free to conduct crowd control and dispense justice as they saw fit. And it got ugly real fast. While most of the crowd had no idea what was going on, they were too far away. While most of the crowd had no idea what was going on, they were just too far away. Things quickly deteriorated within about a 200-foot radius of the stage. Any perceived transgression was met with a beating

Many angels brought sawed-off pool cues and motorcycle chains that they used as weapons. Cameras were ripped out of people's hands. Women were pulled out of the crowd by their hair. And anyone who approached or, God forbid, touched any of the motorcycles was taught a violent lesson: never touch a Hell's Angels bike.

The music started in the afternoon with a set by Santana. Their performance was uneven, but it seemed to settle things down. But even then, they were forced to stop playing when a very large, very fat, very naked man jumped up on stage and started a fight. During the band's last song, a fan ran across the stage, right through the band with a couple of angels in hot pursuit. Next up were local heroes, the Jefferson Airplane.

During their first song, "We Can Be Together", the band noticed that the bikers, many of whom had been drinking beer all day and were quite drunk, were terrorizing the crowd. As the band got into their third song, "Somebody to Love", Balin saw a biker beating up a member of the audience. He jumped off the stage and tried to break things up. The biker doing the beating was named Animal, and he was easy to pick up because he wore the skin of a dead fox on his head.

He turned to Ballin and knocked him out with a single punch. It's kind of weird up here. Hey man, I'd like to mention that the Hell's 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. Wait, you are, is this on? 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 in the head. You're talking to my people. Let me tell you what's happening. You! What's not happening.

The airplane struggled through the rest of their set. Balvin was evacuated to the band's backstage area, and when he came to, Animal was standing over him. "Sorry dude, but you just can't speak to a Hells Angels the way you did. It's disrespectful." Balvin responded with another "FU." Animal replied by knocking him out a second time. The airplane made it through nine songs and then beat a retreat.

Next came the Flying Burrito Brothers. The rough treatment of the crowd continued, but at least no performer was assaulted during their nine songs. The situation in the medical emergency area was getting worse. At one point, there were 200 patients stretched out, some injured by Hell's Angels, others having incredibly bad LSD experiences. By this time, the Stones had arrived by helicopter and were backstage. A fan who approached Mick Jagger yelled, "I hate you!" and punched him in the face.

Jagger went down. The attacker was immediately knocked unconscious by a biker. The fourth act that day was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. They'd seen and heard what was going on in the crowd while they were waiting to take the stage. Steven Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young were very reluctant to go on. David Crosby had to do a lot of convincing. "Let's go out there," he said. "If we don't, it'll just get worse. Maybe we can pacify the situation."

They were terrified the entire time and only made it through four songs before they'd had enough. Stephen Stills was reportedly stabbed in the leg with a sharpened motorcycle spoke by a very high, very drunk biker. By the end of the set, his pant leg and shoe were covered in his blood. Meanwhile, an 18-year-old black man in a lime green suit and floppy lime green hat named Meredith Hunter was getting concerned.

He really wasn't much of a Stones fan, but he came to Altamont to be part of the event and was among those in that 200-foot radius around the stage. He'd seen the Angels beat up a few African Americans and was scared. So he went back to his car and retrieved a long-barreled .22-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. Was it loaded? Nobody knows. Meredith went back to the Consulate Bowl and again worked his way close to the stage. We'll come back to him very soon.

The Grateful Dead was supposed to be the second last act of the day, but they saw that things were way out of control and were completely freaked out. They panicked and they bailed. They bolted home, leaving the Hell's Angels mess, one they had a part in creating, to someone else. The violence continued and the crowd got more unruly. A few bikes were toppled, which resulted in some severe beatings. One bike caught fire somehow. More beatings, severe ones.

And as the sun went down and the temperature dropped, fans started bonfires. Some wood was scavenged from the road cases containing lights that were never set up. $7,000 worth of gear was destroyed. The stones didn't want to go on until the sun went down. So there was a 75-minute wait between Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and the stones set. The crowd got even more restless. The angels got more antsy and unpredictable with their dispensation of justice. The fights continued.

The Stones finally appeared in the early evening, and the crowd was hostile. Once they were in place, the Stones started their performance with Jumpin' Jack Flash. The crowd surged forward in waves with up to 5,000 people trying to get close to the tiny stage at the bottom of that hill.

But they were met with the bikers and their fists and their sawed-up pool cues and their motorcycle chains. The Stones saw what was going on, and frankly, they didn't know what to do. The third song of the night was a new track called Sympathy for the Devil, but the band was interrupted several times by fights that broke out right in front of them. The violence got worse, but most of the attendees had no idea that anything was wrong.

Unless you were in that crush by the stage, all you heard was tinny music in the distance from a very bad sound system that occasionally stopped for someone trying to say something. Half a dozen songs into the stone set. This would be sometime around six that evening. Meredith Hunter found himself on a perch on top of one of the PA speaker boxes so he could see the show. The angels didn't like that, so one of them grabbed Hunter by his hair and ears and yanked him to the ground.

When he got up, the angel punched him in the face. Hunter suddenly became a target by numerous angels. Was it because he trespassed on the stone's equipment? Or because the hell's angels had been going after black men all day? Probably both. Hunter was scared for his life. He was also enraged at being assaulted. And he was high on meth. I just lost her. I mean, she's the sweetest.

As the stone started playing under my thumb, Hunter reached into his jacket for his long-barreled .22 revolver and held it in the air, outstretched toward the stage. He then turned and tried to run away, but he couldn't. A 22-year-old angel named Alan Passero grabbed him by the arm with his left hand and brought down the hunting knife in his right. Meredith Hunter was stabbed twice, and again, and again, six times in total.

five to the upper and lower back, and one in front of his left ear. Hunter fell to his knees. The angel kicked him in the face over and over and over again. Other angels joined in and began stomping him with their heavy boots. The assault lasted no more than five minutes, but it was a very long five minutes. When the bikers moved aside, a few people in the crowd came to Hunter's rescue, hoping to carry him to the stage where the band could see what happened. The bikers guarding the stage would have none of that.

Jagger did see something happening though. There's one thing we need. Sam, we need an ambulance. We need a doctor by that scaffold there. If there's a doctor, can he get to there? Okay, here we go. We're gonna... I don't know what... When we get to really like the end and we all want to go absolutely crazy and like jump on each other, then we'll stand up again, you know what I mean? Hunter was eventually brought backstage to the makeshift medical area.

The medical tent that had been constructed for Sears Point had been left behind because there hadn't been time to pack it up. Plans were made to evacuate him by helicopter. But it was too late. Meredith Hunter was dead, and the night wasn't over yet. As Meredith Hunter lay dying in the medical tent at Altamont, the Rolling Stones finished their set. After Hunter was carried away, the violence seemed to settle down. The last interruption came during a performance of the song "Live With Me" when a naked woman tried to climb on stage.

The night ended with the Stones' traditional closer, Street Fighting Man. It was the 15th song in their set. And they had no idea that anyone had died in the crowd. The Stones say they saw some kind of struggle or skirmish, but they thought it was just another random fight. Jagger did stop to ask the crowd if there was a doctor around, but then the band picked up and finished the performance. They left the stage, boarded their helicopter, and flew back to San Francisco.

Jagger then left for Geneva and then for the south of France. The rest of the band made their way back to London. Meanwhile, the bedraggled crowd made their way home, completely unaware of what had happened down front. Only Meredith Hunter's family knew the truth. Hunter was declared dead sometime around 7 p.m. His body was accepted by the coroner at around 10. It was delivered to the mortuary in nearby Livermore, California, and the family received a call at 2.30 Sunday morning with the news that Hunter was dead.

In addition to the injuries inflicted by the Hells Angels, there were other tragedies. Before the music even began, 19-year-old Leonard Krizak from Buffalo was high on LSD. He climbed a fence along the nearby California aqueduct. He somehow entered the water and drowned. After the show, two people died in a hit-and-run accident. Richard Solove and Mark Fieger were minding their own business sitting around a campfire when a speeding, stolen 1964 Plymouth flew over the crest of a hill and crashed into them.

Hundreds of people were injured that day. Denise Kaufman was in the crowd. She was the lead singer of a local group called Ace of Cups and was five months pregnant. Someone behind her lobbed a full can of beer down the hill. It hit her just behind her ear, fracturing her skull. She had to be evacuated for emergency brain surgery. There was a lot of property damage. A bunch of cars were stolen.

And there was little news coverage of the violence, too. Reporters from the local papers had early deadlines and had filed their stories before the worst of the violence. They portrayed Altamont as another Woodstock. The only real indication that things didn't go as planned was a call-in show conducted by a local rock radio station on Sunday afternoon that allowed people to vent their rage and tell what really happened. The writers at Rolling Stone, which was headquartered in San Francisco back then, launched an investigation.

There was a 25,000-word report written by 11 different people in the January 21, 1970 issue of the magazine. It was about six weeks after the concert. The story was entitled The Rolling Stones' Disaster at Altamont. Let it bleed. That 14-page article led to more stories, both in Rolling Stone and other publications. Esquire, for example, wrote this.

The day the Rolling Stones played there, the name Altamont became etched in the minds of millions of people who loved pop music and who hated it as well. If the name Woodstock has come to denote the flowering of one phase of the youth culture, Altamont has come to mean the end of it. Meanwhile, the Mayles brothers and their crew, the people who had been hired to make a film with the concert, began pouring over the footage shot that night.

Rumor had it that Hunter was stabbed during Sympathy for the Devil. He was not. It was during Under My Thumb. Their cameras caught eight seconds of Meredith, a few minutes before his killing. Again, he was really hard to miss. He was a black face in a sea of white, and he was wearing a lime green suit. It took months, but everything was assembled into a film called Gimme Shelter. What started as a simple concert film that was supposed to document the end of the Rolling Stones' 1959 tour...

turned into a narrative about the death of the 1960s. The Stones could have blocked its release, but they didn't. The Hells Angels, however, weren't particularly happy. At first, they demanded a million dollars as a release, but that kind of disappeared. The film was completed and released on December 6, 1970, one year to the day of the concert. As a side note, one of the cinematographers involved was a young filmmaker named George Lucas.

Unfortunately, his camera got jammed early in the day after shooting about 100 feet. None of it was used in the final cut. Meanwhile, detectives conducted their investigation into Meredith Hunter's murder. Based on eyewitness accounts and testimony by an attendee named Paul Cox and a few others, Hells Angel Alan Pesaro was arrested and charged. His trial began in 1971

But he was acquitted once the jury saw the concert footage. They saw the gun and heard about the meth found in Hunter's body during the autopsy. So the verdict? Self-defense. Becerro was the only person to ever be arrested in the murder of Meredith Hunter. There was another two-year investigation that began in 2003, but with no new findings, the case was closed forever in May 2005. One final thing.

In 2008, a former FBI agent revealed information that some of the members of the Hells Angels bore a grudge against Mick Jagger for not supporting him after the concert. The story is that a group of them tried to gain access to a house on Long Island where Jagger was staying. The plan was to kill him in revenge. The story goes that they never made it to the house because the boat sank in a storm. No one from the Rolling Stones camp has ever commented on that.

Meredith Hunter's funeral took place on December 10th at the Skyview Memorial Lawn in East Vallejo. Only 30 people attended, largely because there wasn't a time to get the word out. The family couldn't afford a tombstone, so his grave went unmarked for decades. If there was any good news to come out of this tragedy, it's that concert and festival security is much, much better. But as we've seen, there are still disasters where people get hurt or killed.

And the stain of Altamont has lived on and has become part of rock history as the concert that killed the 1960s. You can catch up on all episodes of Uncharted by downloading them from your favorite podcast platform. Please rate and review if you get a chance. If you have any questions or comments, shoot me an email at alan at alancross.ca. We can also meet up on social media sites and my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com. It's updated with music news and recommendations every day. And there's the free daily newsletter that you should get.

And please check out my other podcast, The Ongoing History of New Music. There are hundreds and hundreds of episodes that you can enjoy for free. Join me next time for more stories of crime and mayhem from the world of music. Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. I'm Alan Cross.