[af_vet_1981]

By media accounts I meant how the media covered the event. All they wanted to do was to center in on the bad Hells Angels and the hippie movement. One of whom stopped a guy who was pointing a gun at Jagger. It was loaded. Yeah, just like the cops who kill someone to keep them from killing someone else, he could have tried to wrestle the gun away from him instead of stabbing him. BTW, in spite of the biased media stories, he was acquitted of the murder charges.

I find it odd that you defend that particularly violent motorcycle gang.

The Stones had used Hell's Angels at their Hyde Park concert, but English Hell's Angels were a far cry from the visigoths of the Oakland chapter. The Stones' infatuation with the heraldry of the Hell's Angels could be the beginning of a big problem, but attempting to explain this to Mick Jagger was fruitless.

"Listen, man," Scully was trying to tell Mick, "you can't hire Hell's Angels. They're, uh, not for hire."

Jagger quizzed him peevishly, "Wot you saying then, exactly?" Surely, reasoned Sir Mick, the Hell's Angels would leap at the opportunity to act as the Praetorian Guard for the Stones, wouldn't they?

"Waaal, Mick, I dunno...."

Sam Cutler, the Stones' rowdy tour manager, was equally smitten. "Oh, come off it, the Hell's Angels would be perfect. We used 'em in Hyde Park."

"Uh, Sam, those kids, excuse me, were not Hell's Angels. They had 'Hell's Angels' painted on their jackets, fer redacted! Like a costume party! These guys are red-and-white, real-time, Death's Head Angels! They went to Korea! Vietnam! They're redacted killers!"

Mick and Sam exchanged very noisy winks and soon decided to "hire" the Hell's Angels for a truckload of, I'm not kidding, ice and beer.

...

The Stones put the Hell's Angels in charge of security, but the Angels didn't show up; the real dudes were at a big meeting of the entire Bay Area governing board of thieves and plunderers, deciding how to divide up the territory. This is the Yalta of gang powwows, and, Stones concert or no Stones concert, the Angels are very turf-conscious, like a pack of wild boars in rutting season.

So that left "prospects" as the only Angels at Altamont, young cats trying to prove themselves. What you had was East Bay rowdies on Ripple and ludes. Out of control with no one to rein them in. Pure gelignite.

This Day in History

In August 1969, the massive, three-day Woodstock Music & Art Fair had proved that hundreds of thousands of young people could gather peacefully even in a seemingly chaotic environment rich with sex, drugs and rock and roll. Four months later, it would become clear that Woodstock owed its success not to the inherent peacefulness of the 1960s youth culture, but to the organizational acumen of the event's producers. That idea was proven in the violent, uncontrolled chaos of the disastrous Altamont Speedway Free Festival, held on this day in 1969 in the northern California hills 60 miles east of San Francisco.

Altamont was the brainchild of the Rolling Stones, who hoped to cap off their U.S. tour in late 1969 with a concert that would be the West Coast equivalent of Woodstock, in both scale and spirit. Unlike Woodstock, however, which was the result of months of careful planning by a team of well-funded organizers, Altamont was a largely improvised affair that did not even have a definite venue arranged just days before the event. It was only on Thursday, December 4, 1969, that organizers settled on the Altamont Speedway location for a free concert that was by then scheduled to include Santana; the Jefferson Airplane; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and the Grateful Dead, all in support of the headlining Stones. The event would also include, infamously, several dozen members the Hells Angels motorcycle gang acting as informal security staff in exchange for $500 worth of beer as a "gratuity."

It was dark by the time the concert's next-to-last act, the Grateful Dead, was scheduled to appear. But the Dead had left the venue entirely out of concern for their safety when they learned that Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin had been knocked unconscious by one of the Hells Angels in a melee during his band's performance. It was during the Rolling Stones' set, however, that a 21-year-old Hells Angel named Alan Passaro stabbed a gun-wielding 18-year-old named Meredith Hunter to death just 20 feet in front of the stage where Mick Jagger was performing "Under My Thumb." Unaware of what had just occurred, the Rolling Stones completed their set without further incident, bringing an end to a tumultuous day that also saw three accidental deaths and four live births.

The killing of Meredith Hunter at Altamont was captured on film in Gimme Shelter, the documentary of the Stones' 1969 tour by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, which opens with Jagger viewing the footage in an editing room several months later. In the years since, Jagger has not spoken publicly about the killing, for which Passaro was tried but acquitted on grounds of self-defense.

[Syncro]

So OK, you mostly just have the biased media talking point.

The HA are vets? And because of that they are killers?

So all vets are killers now because they served in the military and killed people and broke things?

odd that you defend that particularly violent motorcycle gang.

Sonny Barger didn't want the HA to do anything concerning security at the event.

Odd that you defend that particularly violent belief system that murdered and tortured a great many people. A great deal of them were Christians that were doing God's work. One was even burned at the stake for having the audacity of working to make it possible for everyone to read the Bible, which was not an option with Catholicism back in the day.

I don't know of any reports that the Hells's Angels burned anyone at the stake.

You've got the media talking points down pat, good job.

BTW, I'm in the movie, and hung out with Mick Jagger during the nite before the music died began.

Now back to Mary. Have there been any apparitions believed to be her at any music events?