Photo stills from Gimme Shelter of Meredith Hunter at Altamont
In 2000 the Film Forum screened a new print of Gimme Shelter, the brothers David and Albert Maysles’ (along with Charlotte Zwerin) documentary about the Rolling Stones’ 1969 U.S. tour, ending at the infamous Altamont concert outside San Francisco. It is a splendid film, brimming with great concert footage of the Stones (playing Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain”) as well as a mesmerizing Ike & Tina Turner performance at Madison Square Garden. I’d come across references to Altamont over the years, just as I’d heard of Woodstock, Monterey Pop, and the Isle of Wight festivals. Someone was killed at Altamont by Hell’s Angels hired as security. It was the anti-Woodstock, a bad scene, the “end of the sixties”, etc.
Watching the film, I’d never realized the person killed was a black kid, Meredith Hunter, dressed in a (too fly) lime green suit. He was so unlike the hippies dreamily taking in the music on the grounds of the Altamont Speedway for the mess of a concert organized by the Stones (with Jefferson Airplane and Santana) that one wonders what he could have possibly been doing there. In the footage Meredith looks like Rudy from Fat Albert or someone out of The Mack, amidst a sea of white counterculture faces. This was 1969, before blaxploitation.
I watched the Maysles’ film, afterwards hit the web, and was taken aback by how little information there is about this infamous soul killed at Altamont. (Four people died at Altamont, one drowned in a puddle, and the other two were run over by a car in their sleeping bags). The sketchy, basic bio on Meredith Hunter is this: he was eighteen years old, born in South Berkeley, went to Berkeley High School near the University of California at Berkeley campus, though he did not graduate. He was rumored to be part of a “street gang” called the East Bay Executors, with whom he partook of various illegal substances, some of which he may have dealt. Speed was in fact found in Meredith’s bloodstream at his autopsy. In Gimme Shelter he is inadvertently captured in the background of footage constantly licking his lips, presumably high on methamphetamine (or maybe his lips chapped in the cold).
Meredith met Patty Bredehof, a white seventeen-year old, also a student at Berkeley High, in the fall of ’69, and they began dating. In addition to taking in a Temptations concert together in San Francisco they went to see the Stones at Altamont because Patti loved Mick Jagger. Meredith never made it back to Oakland alive.
A lot of what I know about his story comes from a London Times article by David James Smith written after the reopening of the case into Meredith’s death in 2005 by Alameda County detective Sergeant Scott Dudek. I also poured over Stanley Booth’s 1984 Dance With The Devil, later republished as The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Booth’s book, in addition to being an excellent chronicle of the Stones circa the late 1960s and early ‘70s, reproduces transcripts from testimony used to indict one of the Hell’s Angels for Meredith’s death.
I have always related to this black kid famous for being killed, and not necessarily being black, but black nonetheless, at an overwhelmingly white rock concert. I became obsessed with him, wanting to know his story, because of days I myself spent going to punk rock shows as a youngster and being one of the few black kids present. I had felt the lonely thrill, danger. The racism. Contemporary black rock and afro-punk scenes owe a debt to Meredith because we are his children in many ways.
I’ve envisioned scenes of black rock bands—Tar Mack, Apollo Heights, others, playing 9 Songs-like performance interludes in the film script I’m crafting around Meredith’s story. I’ve spent time listening to a lot of golden age Stones and relevant music from the time—Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys, Betty Davis, Miles at Isle of Wight, the Wattstax concert in Los Angeles. Meredith would have known this music, or should have, perhaps he might have been saved by it.
Sam Green became a little obsessed with Meredith too. Green made the documentaries The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, The Weather Underground, and the forthcoming Utopia in Four Movements. His interest developed while researching the revolutionary group Weatherman and finding that Altamont and Meredith’s death seemed to pop up everywhere. The onscreen death in Gimme Shelter was one of “the most gruesome film moments” Green had ever experienced, and he began researching a possible documentary on Hunter. Except there wasn’t much there, the film Green made became a nine-minute short. My preliminary explorations into Meredith led me to Sam’s documentary. Though it screened at a number of film festivals, Lot 63, Grave C (the grave plot at Skyview Memorial Lawn cemetery in Vallejo where Meredith is buried) was never picked up for distribution. My only way of viewing it was to contact Green and buy a copy directly from him. The film is a reverent and haunting entry into Meredith’s tale, more a search for Meredith Hunter than it is filled with information about his life and death. Sam Green and I wound up developing an email friendship, and he helped guide me to what information exists on Meredith, as well as being a nice sounding board for my Meredith obsessions. One of my early emails: “I am an evil post-modern meta-classicist singing the blues. I do not know who I am—feel I’m channeling Meredith.”
What I craft is not biography, but fiction based upon the historical record. Fictionalized biographical history, the process of taking someone’s life and reconceptualizing for creative, and personal, reasons. Nothing about this is new, but in a post-Frey world begs clarification. Perhaps I am creating Meredith, and killing him, all over again. I am so close I feel I know him.
A young man, Paul Cox, stood beside Meredith before his death at Altamont, and according to Booth’s book spoke to a grand jury and Rolling Stone magazine about what he witnessed:
An Angel he’s hassling this Negro on the side of me, reached over and shook this Negro by the side of the head, thinking it was funny, and I knew something was going to happen. The next thing I know he was flying in the air, just like all the other people it happened to. He scrambled to his feet and he’s backing up trying to run and all these Angels jumped off the stage, and his girlfriend was screaming to him not to shoot because he pulled out a gun, and his girlfriend is like on him and pushing him back and he’s trying to get away and these Angels are coming at him and he turns around and starts running. And then some Angel snuck up from right out of the crowd and leaped up and brought his knife down in his back. And then I saw him stab him again, and while he’s stabbing him the guy is running. This Negro boy is running into the crowd and you could see him stiffen up when he’s being stabbed. The Hell’s Angel grabbed onto both of his shoulders and started kicking him in the face and he fell down. He grabbed one of those garbage cans, the cardboard ones with the metal rimming, and smashed him over the head with it and then he kicked the garbage can out of the way and started kicking his head in. Kicked him all over the place. And then the guy that started the whole thing stood on his head for a minute or so and then walked off. And then the one I was talking about, he wouldn’t let us touch him. He said, “Don’t touch him, he’s going to die anyway, let him die.” We turned him over and ripped off his shirt, rubbed his back up and down to get the blood off so we could see and there was a big hole on the side and there was a hole in his spine and there was a big hole in his temple. All of us trying to help were drenched in blood.
This is my excerpt edit of the transcription. According to San Francisco Chronicle articles Cox at least partially restated this story at the 1970 trial of Alan Passaro, the Hell’s Angel indicted and ultimately acquitted of Meredith’s death. In addition to Booth’s book, Smith’s London Times article, and Green’s film, I also read Hell’s Angels biographies. In my script the character I create for Meredith is in no way a Black Panther but I nevertheless spent most of a year reading obscure Panther biographies. I became obsessed with these. Verdict: The Panthers were both the closest to real 1960s American revolutionaries you can find, and cold-hearted criminals—not in the least a contradiction.
While on vacation in Sonoma in the autumn of 2008 I spent time in San Francisco’s main library researching Chronicle articles and scores of counterculture weeklies from the late ‘60s—the Berkley Barb and Tribe, Ann Arbor Argus, many more. My wife and I had wonderful Mexican food in the Mission with Sam Green, our first face-to-face meeting. I convinced Shari to spend a day driving from Oakland out to the Altamont Speedway in Livermore along the roads I’m sure Meredith would have taken on the last drive of his life that fateful day in December of 1969.
The road to Altamont
We took the Warren Freeway to Interstate I-580, the picturesque drive along Altamont Pass to Grant Line Road, which you can follow until you reach Midway Road. There are rolling hills everywhere and scores of green energy windmills these days. The roads are quiet. We came up on the Speedway out in the middle of nowhere. The raceway itself was a letdown, nothing of the majestic track I imagined it would be. (The track shut down for good shortly after our having visited it.) Though it hosted NASCAR races it looked more like a high school football field.
Altamont Speedway
We visited Meredith’s grave at Skyview Memorial about an hour north of San Francisco, and the experience floored me. Though there was no headstone on his grave for decades, I had been told that one had been put there a few years back. The woman at the Skyview visitor’s desk assured me there still was no headstone, and gave me a photocopied map to the “plot of grass” where he is buried. It took my wife and I twenty minutes to find it. Despite the cemetery associate’s protestations, Meredith’s grave indeed has a headstone now that reads, “In Loving Memory, Meredith Curley Hunter Jr., Oct. 24, 1951 - Dec 6, 1969”.
Meredith's headstone at Skyview Memorial Lawn cemetery in Vallejo, CA.
Visiting Skyview Memorial cemetery
Meredith’s father, who he knew only briefly, was Native American, from whom Meredith got his full name. I imagine a relationship between the two of them. I have suspicions as to who put the headstone on Meredith’s grave (not his father), but have yet to confirm.
Comprised partially of flashback’s to the ‘60s, my script is equally set in present day New York, with a character not unlike myself obsessed with Meredith’s story who travels around the country interviewing people who knew him (ala Kane’s reporter)—his brother (fictional), the girlfriend he was with at Altamont, a partner-in-crime friend he got in trouble with—all fictionalized, or invented.
I haven’t interviewed anyone who actually knew Meredith. I will most likely do so one day. I’ve been pushing back an attempt at getting in touch with Sgt. Dudek, the detective who completed the re-investigation into Meredith’s death (no new charges, case closed). Why haven’t I done so? Fearing closure? Afraid to have the actual lives of Meredith, his mother, and the woman out at Altamont with him—both still alive but reportedly in, quote, “bad shape”—intrude upon the invented reality I’ve crafted for them? Does “bad shape” mean old age? Drugs? Poverty? This is secondhand hearsay through Sam Green from Dudek. A lawyer friend told me it’s difficult to get access to grand jury testimony due to privacy protections, and was not sure of the rules in California, especially with cases as far back as the sixties.
You can search the historical record for information about Meredith Hunter but there isn’t much. He was eighteen. He was poor, black. He had no history—you run into a cipher. I’ve tried to fill in the blanks. Contemporary references: the subprime mortgage crisis, heroin use, tunnels under New York City ala Dark Days, the death of skateboarder, actor, and downtown icon Harold Hunter. I have Eldridge Cleaver and Mario Savio recite speeches. There’s a big time Oakland drug dealer. What I’m writing is a reflection on the ‘60s but also an exploration of the current times we live in, filtered through the memory of Meredith, as I imagine him. I’m not sure how well it works.
Counterculture weeklies of the period are filled with stories of “problem teenagers” hanging in Provo Park across the street from Berkeley High engaging in a robust trade of “reds” and “bennies”, “acid”, “grass”. Black and white kids—though their drugs of choice split along racial lines. Perhaps someone gave the methamphetamine to Meredith at Altamont and it was his first time, a lark. Teenagers have had fun on the wild side since the beginning of time. I have a character talk about ‘60s heroin in Oakland, and the rampage of crack in the early ‘80s. Black Panther leader Huey Newton was shot to death in a botched crack deal in Oakland in 1989. Rumored last words: “You can kill my body, but you can’t kill my soul.”
The Criterion Collection DVD of Gimme Shelter features audio of Hell’s Angel leader Sonny Barger calling into San Francisco radio station KSAN railing on about how unfairly Angels were portrayed in the aftermath of Altamont. He is probably right. Though I do not doubt that Meredith was murdered, let’s not be mistaken: he had a gun, pulled it out, no one can know what he was going to do for sure. But the real question is why he pulled the gun. When we see the gun in the film a good amount of violence has already occurred. I read Barger’s autobiography, and a few other books about the history of the Angels. They mainly concern partying, drugs, movie cameos, and criminal activity, not necessarily in that order. These guys were criminals. I am scared shitless by the very idea of the Angels, similar to my childhood fears of the Manson Family—I’m exaggerating—or South American street gangs. I have always been uncomfortable walking past the Angels headquarters in the East Village. I am of the opinion the RICO statutes were used unfairly and habitually to target and bust up motorcycle gangs, as much as they were used against La Costra Nostra. All the Angel tomes have swayed me to this thesis.
Gimme Shelter is beautiful propaganda, the Stones come off as incredibly talented, majestic, and hopelessly hip. The DVD outtakes show Jagger backstage at Madison Square Garden playing the blues with Ike Turner, flirting with Tina, and who knew that Mick himself was such a killer guitarist? It is all a very beautiful and mesmerizing chronicle of the sixties. Meredith is still dead. Alan Passaro was acquitted, Meredith’s death at Altamont deemed “justifiable homicide”. I do not know how many times I’ve watched the Maysles’ film at this point. At integral moments in the creative process I’ve felt it necessary to check myself against Gimme Shelter again and again. To hear its lies, search its ultimate truth (the camera does not lie). The real Meredith is there somewhere, he must be. I can feel him.
The Stones were not told someone had been killed until after their performance. They stopped playing for much of the violence in front of the stage, and knew there was trouble, but once Meredith had been killed launched into another song. Everyone went back to grooving. The Stones followed “Under My Thumb”, the last song Meredith Hunter heard in his young life, with “Brown Sugar”. Perfect, medicine for the melancholy indeed, go figure.
Gimme Shelter stills of Meredith's death at Altamont
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Sources:
“The Stage of Death”, The Sunday Times Magazine, London Times, March 27, 2005, by David James Smith
Dance With The Devil by Stanley Booth, Random House (1984), a.k.a. The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, Chicago Review Press (2000).
“Sam Green: a tour through lot 63, grave c”, SF360.org
San Francisco Chronicle, various articles December 1970-January 1971
Gimme Shelter Criterion Collection DVD
