ALTAMONT “Destroying all conceits…”

(From LET IT BLEED Ethan Russell recounts getting out of Altamont…. and a few thoughts about what it meant.)

Forty years later what I remember, clearly, is running into the pitch blackness, up the side of a hill until suddenly halted by a chain link fence. Behind me a man was dead from knife wounds,though I didn’t know it.  I remember it being quiet, though it couldn’t have been, since the Rolling Stones were still on stage playing to 400,00 people. Maybe it was my heart pounding or the adrenaline. All I wanted was to get out of there, away from the chaos and Hells Angels, and so I had dropped off the top of the truck immediately behind the stage (where the Hells Angels had deposited me)  and ran off into the blackness to where I hoped the helicopter that brought me to this desolate place would still be waiting.

I pushed at the fence but it wasn’t moving. I then dropped to the ground

and pulled up on the bottom. It gave a little, and I slithered under, but got stuck, my camera equipment caught on a stray link.  I wrestled the bag off me until I could get my body through and then unsnared it, and headed up the hill.

At the top there must have been some light because I  could make-out the helicopter across the

cement of the raceway. Jo Bergman, the head of the Stones’ office, and Astrid Lundstrom,– Bill Wyman’s Swedish girlfriend – were already seated inside. I clambered in. Nobody said anything. Up to that point Jo had been huddling in the tent behind the stage, not even bothering to go out and see the Stones, fearful she had been dosed with some rogue chemical, and Astrid, who had ventured out only to come back and report beatings and chaos on the stage, was listening to a hysterical woman outside the helicopter screaming, saying over and over again, “Is he dead?” Jo and Astrid both had been told to get themselves somewhere safe and had been escorted up the hill earlier, and were now just sitting there, waiting.

Then shortly the Rolling Stones start to arrive, running themselves. They, too,