When the Rolling Stones come to play your University, you go. You just go. It doesn’t matter how old you are and if you live on campus or not. It doesn’t matter if you only actually attend the University online, like I did. It is just required. Therefore, when the Rolling Stones were to perform at the University of Montana, I went. It was an awesome, life-altering experience. The Rolling Stones songs open a certain channel into my soul that connects me to a universal feeling of living through the trials of life. I lose myself in the way the songs invite you into an experience though a story or melody. But you don’t need me to explain the Rolling Stones, they are like breathing, you just get it.
Inspired by my concert trip, and new Netflix account, I arranged for the 1970 movie “Gimme Shelter” to arrive at my home. The movie chronicles the Stones’ 1969 tour with the inevitable conclusion of their tour at the Altamont free concert for some 300,000 guests. With big names like Ike and Tina Turner, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (among others), it was designed to be the West Coast’s version of Woodstock. However, instead of a love-fest, things took a dark turn with four people eventually ending up dead by the event’s conclusion.
The Grateful Dead, who were scheduled to play the show, removed themselves from the lineup because of the increasing violence during the show. Originally they, along with Jefferson Airplane (who’s Jorma Kaukonen and Spenser Dryden came up with the idea for the concert), were supposed to play a free performance with the Rolling Stones in Golden Gate Park. After several venues refused them and various problems that weren’t entirely settled until the day prior to the show, they eventually secured the Altamont Speedway for the event on Dec. 6, 1969.
I received my Netflix copy of “Gimme Shelter” and began watching it late one evening. Fuzzy on the details of what exactly happened at Altamont, but knowing that something bad happened, I watched the movie in anticipation of the events. The movie went along and bands played the stage at Altamont, with random fits of violent going on in the crowd. The Stones came on stage and shortly after that things approached the boiling point. Mick pleads with the crowd to settle down stops the music. You can tell that he is concerned for his and everyone’s well-being. During “Sympathy for the Devil”, a man walks across the right side of the stage and my heart stopped for a moment. It was a strange sense of recognition like I’ve never felt before. In an instant it hit me. The man walking across the stage was my current next door neighbor.
I had always thought his slow, stalking gait was a product of age and hard living, but there, almost 40 years earlier was the very same walk. Stunned, I played the section over and over. It was the same every time. Didn’t he say he was from California and used to ride motorcycles? I couldn’t call that night, but the next morning I phoned and it was him on stage. I was living next door to the Past President of the Oakland Chapter of the Hells Angels. The same Hells Angels who had been hired to provide security for the Altamont show. The only thing he would say about the incident was that the Hells Angels were hired to protect the Rolling Stones and that was what they did. It sounded like a standard answer for him, as though this was a question he had answered 100 times before. I didn’t press for more specifics.
Still stunned that my neighbor was involved in such a historic event, I struggled to conceive that the man next door made his way from Altamont and a life in the Hells Angels to the most ordinary house in rural Idaho. However, this certain place in rural Idaho was one where rustlers and outlaws came to hide at the end of the nineteenth century. Apparently, its reputation continued and it was still a place for outlaws to come to at the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps there are more local residents whose infamous past lives still haunt their dreams. I just haven’t had the pleasure of being their neighbor.
Emily Hagedorn-Wegher
emilyhagedornblog 