ALTAMONT

The Altamont Free Concert was a famous outdoor rock concert held on December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway near Livermore, California. It featured The Rolling Stones and other bands such as Santana, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Jefferson Airplane. Approximately 300,000 people attended the concert.

This show was intended to be a small gathering until The Rolling Stones announced that they were giving this concert at no charge to the public. Although the Rolling Stones  intended it as a thank-you gift to their fans on their 1969 concert tour, the concert was a disaster, resulting in violence and murder.

Problems began almost as soon as the concert was announced. Changes in the concert site and the problems of providing food, water, and restrooms for more than three hundred thousand people left the organizers ill prepared for the large crowd.

At the last minute, the organizers decided to hire the Hell’s Angels for security guards at the concert and pay them for their services with beer, but the security ended up provoking violence by beating concertgoers. Not only did everything that could go wrong, go wrong but it too was all preserved and captured on tape.

As the show began with groups such as Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, the Hell's Angels began to beat people in the crowd who wandered too close to the stage. These fights got seriously out of hand when the Rolling Stones were on stage.

The Hell's Angels stabbed and kicked to death a young African American man named Meredith Hunter not far from the stage. Although the Rolling Stones were unaware of the murder when it happened, the escalating violence forced them to end their show abruptly.

To many people, Altamont represented the symbolic end of the 1960s and signaled that the era of peace and love associated with the 1960s was over.