Altamont

From a review of Sam Cutler’s book You Can’t Always Get What You Want by Ben Paris

“Finally, and this is where the intrigue starts, there were a few highly connected people who, despite not having any official connection to tour management, became centrally influential players in daily operations.

One of these was Ken “Goldfinger” Connell, a rich and well-stocked drug dealer, a friend and confidant of the West Coast rock scene, who had lost a hand in a freak accident while running drugs out of Mexico. Another was a certain John Jaymes who first introduced himself as the “man from Chrystler,” on scene to smooth out a little trouble with missing rental cars. Within weeks, however, Jaymes was inexplicably handling security with twenty off-duty NYPD officers and a private drug dealer to keep the band and crew well-supplied with cocaine and everything else, entirely without contract or payment from the Stones’ management.

The Altamont concert was a half-baked idea thrown about on the suggestion of Bay Area acquaintances, primarily the Dead’s Rock Scully, which grew legs of its own when Mick Jagger, constantly needled by media attacks about greed and high ticket prices, announced the free concert as a fact. The West Coast people organized it, such as it was, as a one-day festival, while it was represented in the media as a Rolling Stones affair. Cutler had serious reservations about the feasibility of the event, and into the breach stepped Jaymes. He claimed to represent the Stones (with no legal authority to do so) and, unsolicited, set about “making it happen.” The last-minute venue changes, the pathetically small stage and the organizational issues of the concert itself are fairly well known, but there were wider intrigues as well, including a huge, mysterious batch of extremely potent LSD which had extremely adverse effects on a large portion of the attendees, causing freak-outs and fights almost from the moment people started showing up 24 hours before the show.

The central revelation of the book is Cutler’s assertion that the Federal authorities had a major hand in the catastrophic mood of the concert. He asserts that Jaymes was a small-time mafioso affiliated with the Castellano mob in New York and who had testified against another mafia group in New England, and that he was somehow also working for the FBI. The Feds were supposedly seriously concerned with the potential impact of the Woodstock culture and were determined to sabotage any further mass concerts. Largely on the word of Ken Goldfinger, Cutler states that Jaymes and a lawyer, also involved in the planning, had recently been meeting with the FBI, and that there were a number of undercover federal agents at the show, including the head of the FBI’s San Francisco branch. He also reveals that the mysterious acid contained a nearly toxic 1600 micrograms of pure LSD, “almost seven times the normal “meeting God” dose,” and that, according to the small Bay Area community of underground LSD manufacturers, it was created using a pill press worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a sum vastly beyond the means of any underground chemist but easily accessible to a government authority.....https://moderndeadhead.blogspot.com/.../sam-cutler-you...

Woodstock was a bomb going off in the middle of the culture/drug war. Nobody knew there were THAT many hippies including most hippies themselves. We were supposed to be a few freaks here and a few there, not enough to bring the New York State Freeway to a halt.

The lack of violence and demonstration that an enormous number of people could keep it together under strained condition made the man's story about us look foolish. This is an extreme example, Altamont but there are plenty of others continuing right up to today of suspicious characters boogering demonstrations and marches.

Reactions

SB: Frikken Goldfinger

BB: Interesting data. I was at that concert. Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead (who declined to play due to the rowdiness around the stage), Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull), and the Rolling Stones. We were about 2/3 of the way back in a crowd of about 400,000 and enjoyed the music. Only saw one interruption, when the Hell's Angels responded to someone waving a gun threatening to kill Jagger and the Angels killed him.

SDD: I was also there standing on a truck behind the stage.

The vibe was weird when I got there and I wanted to be somewhere relatively safe.

I was tripping, but not on something I got there.

Michelle Phillips and I stared at each other for about eight minutes from perches on opposite trucks. It was hot.

I think I may have written a fuller account. If I can't find it, I will write another.

I wasn't far from the freak out tent, and there were a number of them. You can see one of the angels in the movie, really going through it.

Author, DH: I continue to be amazed that the people designing and running these culture and drug wars are content with leaving their own children in harm's way. I thought 'war' was included as as P.R., to make the issue look important, or something we were fast tracking, like the War on Poverty. But it actually meant that it was operating on an 'anything goes' war footing.

BC: Speaking of children placed at risk from parent-fought 'wars': the father of the CIA spawn I dated in college was stationed in Chile then Colombia during Allende days. In order to upgrade his lifestyle, what was an under-funded, undergrad based in Colombia to do but dabble in a bit of cocaine-smuggling? Naturally, a bust followed and guilty, Master-of-the-Universe parent showered errant son with cars and cash to make up for whatever parenting deficit surely must have occurred. Not exactly character-building. No consequences to speak of other than the unleashing of a mildly sociopathic scion on society at the end of the day.

DH: Thank you for your service to our country for spawn management. What was the outcome for the smuggling operation gone wrong?

BC: It was a Customs bust for coke coming in the mail in an ingenious method. An innocent-looking, rolled-up magazine, that you could look thru like a telescope - a section neatly razored out inside to accommodate a substantial bag of very pure product.

The magazine was delivered, casually tossed on the vestibule floor with a surveillance team staking him out. Phone tapped, workmen in the building, people on the street, etc. He picked it up, but didn't open it, so when they knocked on the door and it was sitting on a sideboard, he had deniability as to the contents. Clever boy!

They subsequently tossed the apt., collected all my ids, including passport, and the worst - dug thru a beautiful lasagna his mother had made. But, the apt was clean. He spent a night in Philadelphia lockup.

A lawyer was hired with money borrowed from a fellow student from a wealthy Puerto Rican banking family. Charges were dropped. Manna flowed from misguided guilty parents & he went on to GU Law. Those were the days!!!

If your dad was at the Agency in the 70s, he definitely knew the father, who managed to survive the various and sundry purges of that era and might have gone on to become Deputy Ops. He had come to the Agency via William F. Buckley, fellow Bonesman at Yale. I like your story - sounds very heroin chic and much more decadent. BTW, I have a Randolph line in my mother's family.

DH: Buckley was a strange one....that Mid Atlantic drawl was pretty hard to listen to. Trying to remember something I came across yesterday that made me want to keep scrolling quickly...may have been about immigration.

Glad your friend had a narrow escape. We had less luck smuggling. One of our number went to Amsterdam fashioned an elaborate lining to a Samsonite suitcase (which have no lining, raising the question, how long would it take a customs agent to alert to funny business) and made it back through customs with a load of hash only to sell it to a Jersey State trooper in his home town.

Next valuable lesson: never hire an ex-cop come prosecutor for your lawyer. After raising the equivalent of $40,000 all we got for our trouble was a fantasy about how innocent our friend was because of entrapment, the constitution blah blah and a direct quote from the Judge "Fuck the Constitution, we're making an example of that boy" and the sight of him jumping bail to Cambodia where he quickly found himself in a prison camp. As his father said, "George was not a smart criminal."

......interesting about the Randolph connection. My Mother had a letter from William Randolph Hearst's Aunts asking someone I don't remember who, if it was alright if they used the Randolph name, as they were planning to borrow it for little Willie.

I think about it driving down Telegraph Avenue straight toward the Campanile which he gave to UC. Was enlightening to read my Great Grandfather's notes starting with him driving his cousins to the front in the war. No waiting until you were sixteen in those days, he was eleven. Got through the whole account without using the word slave but reframed the whole thing in my mind, hadn't thought of it as something "we" did. Found out recently that there was a slave market close to the other end of the block where I grew up. I thought it would be in some out of the way place down behind the train station or something due to shame, but no, Georgetown was a prosperous part of town where the customers are. It had been going on since the late 1600 hundreds by then, so there’s that.

I was trying to think of something today with a similar disconnect: here we are going backwards fifty years, still having to listen to man 'decide' issues of women's rights. The fact that that is even a topic still will sound as improbable as the dithering over slavery is to us today. You could not run for office on a pro slavery ticket but send women back fifty years is a juicy topic, let's fight. A child some years from now: “Really, you did what?...you fought over that?“

Also makes me think of the war on drugs, invented in order to break up black civil rights movements and white anti war efforts by flooding the streets with heroin and weed and arresting people, handing out life sentences for nonviolent 'crimes.' The fact that many of the children of the people who used this tactic died or were imprisoned was not an impediment. "OH, yeah" echoes John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s architect of the war "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." Flippant denouement to millions of lives lost and overturned.

The word 'slave' was Never heard in conversation and my Great Grandfather never used it in his memoir of his childhood during the civil war and after. 'Our peculiar institution' was one dodge uttered shortly before changing the topic entirely.

The Rope Walk the path to the playground in the next block where slaves ran a long machine that stretched the length, twisting hemp into rope, vital for the shipping industry. None of this was common knowledge, not spoken about anyway when I was a kid. When I visit the last time there was a plaque at the entrance, that how I know. I saw that it was gone, looking on google maps recently. I don’t know why but thought perhaps it was because the word slave was too harsh and no one could find a synonym.

My brain is skittering sideways today [keeping up with the fascist takeover is stress inducing]. So on the subject of children in harm's way I landed on the children of David Ormsbey-Gore who was British Ambassador in the Sixties.

A well-known story told of him at Eton is that, when a boy in his house killed himself, the housemaster called the boys together, and asked if any of them had any idea why this should have happened. Ormsby-Gore put up his hand and asked, "Please sir, could it have been the food?"

It was at his house that I first heard the Beatles standing on the thickest carpet ever. He had two daughters that roamed the streets of Georgetown. Painfully glamorous, affairs with English rock stars, glamourous.

I thought they both were junkies, I know one OD'd. Remember being annoyed with my Mother a devout Anglophile, was going to say snob, because she gave them a pass at the news whereas she was down on the people I knew. She shocked the doctors at Payne Whitney by saying "someone must have put LSD in David's coffee." I never put LSD in my coffee. I put it straight in to my mouth.

photo from Give us this Day our Daily Bird [a photo essay] either Jane or Victoria

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion”

The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

BC:Your mention of Ormsby-Gore sent me to Wikipedia where I found this marvelous, perhaps prescient quotation: "It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump."

“The universe is born. 13.8 billion years pass. 200 billion trillion stars are born. A band of murderous monkeys on a rock circling one of these stars says, “We must be the reason for all this.” Shortly after, the monkeys blow themselves up.”

Coda:

Immediately after Altamont, the Rolling Stones skipped town as fast as possible to avoid the media and police frenzy over the death of Meredith Hunter, the gun-wielding concert-goer stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels in front of the stage.

As Cutler tells it, he stayed behind of his own volition to represent the band and defuse the inevitable backlash that would follow. Jagger tried to discourage him but finally acquiesced, promising that all his expenses would be paid.

Nothing came of the promise and Cutler found himself penniless, homeless and friendless. The only people he knew in the area were the Grateful Dead, who had been his main contacts in the planning of Altamont, and he made his way to Mickey’s ranch in Novato. The GD family welcomed him. Jerry invited him to stay with Mountain Girl and himself at their place in Larkspur.

He offered Cutler the position of co-manager, with David (and Bonnie, by default) Parker and Jon McIntire; they would be in charge of tour management, accounting and general management respectively. The Dead were in a huge financial hole…. In the next few years, Cutler would overhaul the Dead’s touring practices, putting together tours that made geographic sense, he would streamline their travel arrangements and structure per diems to eliminate waste and conserve as much money as possible. He also founded Out Of Town Tours, a company based down the street from GD headquarters in San Rafael, that handled travel arrangements for the Dead, The Band, the New Riders, the Allman Brothers and others.