What Really Happened at Altamont

Meredith Hunter

I don’t know if anyone actually even cares any more, but Altamont was not what most people think. Most people think Hell’s Angels ran riot and murdered somebody, ending the Sixties era of “peace and love.”

Actually, it was an engineering problem.

The stage at Woodstock was at least three metres high. The stage at Altamont was only a metre high—so that audience members could climb on. At Woodstock, audience members naturally stood back, or else they would not be able to see what was happening on the stage. At Altamont, the stage was at the bottom of a slope—audience members naturally crowded forward.

This was not anybody’s fault. The organizers had only 24 hours’ notice that they had to move the concert to Altamont; it was originally planned for San Jose. There was no time to fix the problem.

Possibly the Hell’s Angels used more force than necessary to keep the crowd from swamping the stage and mobbing the performers. But they had an impossible task. Moreover, they were doing it as volunteers, Good Samaritans. They were not being paid for it, and there was no explicit agreement that they were responsible for doing it. They were just stepping into the breach. If they hadn’t, there would have been chaos, and quite possibly many deaths.

One man was killed in the melee; but he was not murdered. Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a member of the Hell’s Angels. But he had a gun, was pointing it at the stage, and may have fired it. This is clear from film taken at the event. The Angel who stabbed Hunter probably saved Mick Jagger from assassination. He was acquitted of any crime by a jury of his peers.

That should end it. Only one person was clearly at fault at Altamont, and that is the dead man, Meredith Hunter.