Woodstock West — Altamont
Over the years, several people have asked me if I went to Woodstock. I didn’t. In August, 1969, when that iconic rock concert took place, I had just graduated from college and had been hired as a high school math teacher. I was preparing for that job and simply did not have the time to devote to the trip. Probably the main reason, though, was that I couldn’t afford to go. So what was undoubtedly the greatest rock concert of all time had to proceed without me.
Although I missed Woodstock, I did go to a concert in 1969 which many have referred to as “Woodstock West.” It turned out to be nowhere near as auspicious as Woodstock. “Notorious” is a better way to describe it. It was an ill-conceived, ill-planned mess that is now mainly forgotten, but on many levels for me was the worst weekend ever.
With my girlfriend Barbara in college in, of all places, Oregon (she was a Duck), and me living at home in Indianapolis with my parents, I had nothing to do but throw myself into the teaching job. I enjoyed it, but the main thing I learned from being a high school math teacher was that wasn’t what I wanted to do for a living.
I got nearly through the first semester living a mundane and celibate life until early December when I got home one afternoon and got a phone call from Barb. “The Stones,” she announced, “are putting on a free concert in San Francisco next weekend. I have tickets. Want to meet there for the weekend?”
Barb and I had met in San Francisco in 1967. We were both sophomores, she at Oregon and me at Indiana. After spending most of the summer together I went back to school and she dropped out of college. We had had an off-and-on relationship since then, but it heated up when she promised her father she would go back to college if she could go to IU. Her dad wanted her to go back to Oregon but was all for her getting back into college, so he gave her the blessing to take summer classes at Indiana. For that summer and the next she took classes at IU. During those summers I worked as an orderly at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, and I headed for Bloomington every chance I got.
After the summer of ’69, she left for Oregon in late August and I hadn’t seen her since. So when she suggested we meet in San Francisco, I didn’t think twice before agreeing to go. The only question I had was why the hell we needed tickets to a free concert. She didn’t know but, by God, she had them. I knew nothing about booking flights, but after I got off the phone with Barb, I immediately called a friend from college, Arland Reinhard, who was working as a travel agent. I wanted to go Thursday night, but the only direct flight was Friday morning. He strongly recommended I go direct, so I had him get me tickets on a flight leaving early Friday and returning Sunday.
During the entire year I taught, I only took one day off Friday, December 5. Barb had driven down from Oregon. The instant I emerged from the plane she hugged me and announced the concert had been called off. I didn’t much care. Now we had three glorious days and two nights to share together in beautiful and semi-warm San Francisco.
Barb was a consummate free spirit but somehow, incongruously, she was a member of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority. Sororities and Fraternities were totally “out” with the hippie crowd of the day, but her membership came in handy. Zetas from all over had rented a house in South San Francisco to use during the 1967 “Summer of Love” and had kept it ever since. So we stayed there instead of at an over-priced motel in San Francisco. The “Top of the Mark” was a little beyond my budget.
The next morning, with a free day ahead of us we decided to go to Sausalito, a cutesy little burg just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Not wanting to waste a precious minute of our time together, we got up early and headed up there for breakfast.
Barb drove her gun-metal gray 1963 Dodge Dart up there. It wasn’t a bad car, really. Her dad had given it to her in 1966 and she drove it to San Francisco a year later, which was when we met. Then he almost took it away from her when she dropped out of college, but that’s another story. We went to a small breakfast nook she knew about.The food was great but as we sat there Barb told me with all that summer school, she had enough credits to graduate in January. She would have an accounting degree and had accepted a job with a big accounting firm in Portland. My heart sank. I still had the teaching job back in Indy that would run through the upcoming semester and I had started to make plans for graduate school. Economically the only place I could go was Indiana or some other state school. Moving to Portland was out of the question, so now we were staring down the barrel of a continuing long-distance relationship. I asked why she couldn’t get a job closer to Indy or Chicago where her parents lived. She had a number of excuses, including not wanting to be close to her parents, then asked why I couldn’t get a job out where she was going to be, which I had already tried, but to no avail. We argued all through the meal. I wondered why she hadn’t told me the night before, but in a way I was glad she didn’t. At least we had one good night together. Apparently she had wanted me to come out there to see if she could make one last stab at getting together — on her terms. We finished breakfast and headed back out to the car on a downer, still having plans to explore Sausalito. When she started the car, an excited disc jockey came on the radio saying the on-again-off-again concert was back on.
We had a brief conversation about whether we should try to go. The concert was at Altamont Raceway, about an hour east of San Francisco. For my part, a Rolling Stones concert trumped walking around checking out stores for cute knick knacks any day. Besides, I figured it would help take my mind off of what I saw as a pending breakup. We decided that’s what we were there for and headed east.
About an hour and a half later, we were on the road approaching the concert site when our car crested a small hill and we could see maybe about a half mile ahead of us traffic was at a complete standstill. As we approached the brick wall of cars it was obvious we had hit the end of the trail.
Some cars had just stopped in the road. Others were parked alongside. Barb drove up as far as she could and parked off the side of the road behind the last car in line. All my years of experience dealing with the traffic jams at the Indy 500 kicked in. I suggested she turn the car around and back up to the last car in line, leaving maneuvering room behind us, but not enough room for another car to squeeze in. Then we grabbed a couple sleeping bags she had in the trunk for the occasion and hiked in. We were about two miles from the site but finally made it following the stream of people ahead of us.
The crowd was immense. I have since heard estimates there were 200,000 or more in attendance, and we were at the back of the pack. Even though we were pretty far back the speakers boomed almost too loudly at times. The sound was distorted and echoes coming in from hills and buildings surrounding the site made it annoying. To this day I do not know what band was on the stage when we arrived. The more I think about it, it may have been a sound check. After about five minutes they stopped playing and left the stage, so we found a spot on the perimeter of the mass of humanity, spread out our sleeping bags, and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. For about the next hour, nothing happened. It looked to me like they were still building the stage, but it was really hard to tell exactly what was going on that far away. Bored to death, we sat there and didn’t have much to say. For the first time in a long time I felt uneasy with Barb. At least on the trip to the concert we had the radio to break the silence. The highlight of that hour or so of waiting was when a girl came by with leaflets and a bucket collecting money for the “Panther Defense Fund.” Barb and I both dropped a dollar in her bucket. The next bit of entertainment was when a motorcycle came inching through the crowd toward the stage. People said it was carrying one of the entertainers. God knows who.
Barb broke out some chocolate chip cookies for lunch or dinner. By this time I wasn’t sure what time it was. The whole place wreaked of pot and that’s what the cookies tasted like. Up toward the stage were a couple of really tall scaffolds with lights and speakers on top. There were a couple guys on each and later when the music started, one of them started gyrating around what looked to me like a very unstable structure. A scene from the Indianapolis 500 came to mind when one of those scaffolds fell, killing some of the occupants. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the same thing happened there.
Back where we were there were no restrooms, a.k.a. Porta-Poties. There were some up by the stage area, but to use them would have meant a trek through the stoned crowd and a long wait in the lines that had formed there. So back in our area, people used a couple of small hills for shelter. One was “boys” and one was “girls.” It probably worked out better than the Porta-Poties. At least there were no lines.
I estimated about half the crowd was high and many others were stark naked. Fights sprung up here and there and someone said a woman in the crowd had a baby. The did have a medical tent set up, but that was mainly for kids on bad trips. The concert was shaping up to be a mess. I remember thinking maybe hunting for knickknacks in Sausalito might have made for a better day after all.
People were milling around the stage, pushing up toward it and some were climbing up onto it, only to be escorted or thrown off by the security staff… none other than the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club.
Amid all the confusion my mind kept wandering back to the bombshell Barb had dropped on me at breakfast. The day was turning into a huge downer. I could see our two year relationship coming to a grinding halt. We had broken up or at least taken a break from each other a couple times over the physical distance between us. After I graduated I tried to get a job in Oregon but… well… maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I figured if she really cared for me she would have tried to get a job in Indiana or at least have talked to me about it.
Finally, Jefferson Airplane, a group I recognized, came up on stage. I figured things were bound to get better but they didn’t. The band started to play and Gracie Slick began to sing. As the show went on, people became more aggressive about pushing up onto the stage. After just a few minutes things got pretty bad. The music stopped and Gracie stood up on stage repeating over and over, “Easy, easy, easy.” She looked scared and had a right to be.
One of the members of the Airplane and a Hell’s Angel started shouting at each other. Gracie gave a lecture about peace and love. It fell on deaf ears.
The commotion at the stage never really let up. It came in waves with people trying to climb on the stage and getting pushed off. The next few acts were OK, but the view from the “South 40” where we were wasn’t good and the sound never improved.
The Stones finally came out and did a couple numbers. Then they broke into Symphony For The Devil and things got worse. From our vantage point it looked like a massive fight was going on up at the stage. The music stopped and Jagger asked everyone to cool it. His little talk seemed to do some good and the music started up again. The band went into a long instrumental set while Mick seemed to talk to a few people on and off stage. It kind of looked to me like things had calmed down a bit but then the music stopped again and Jagger kept asking, “Why are we fighting? Why are we fighting? Who is fighting and why?” Mick continued to lecture and threatened to stop the show. From where Barb and I were sitting, I couldn’t see any fighting. It more or less just looked at this point like people were milling around the stage. At one point Mick called for an ambulance and then the music started up again.
With all the interruptions, the show was pretty uninteresting. Barb was disgusted, “I wish they’d just get on with it. I’m getting cold.” She was right. Night had set in and the temperature was dropping. You could “see your breath,” as they say, when you talked. I figured we had come all this way for the show and I wanted to see it through to the end, but half of me was ready to leave. I asked Barb if she wanted to go and she said, “Not yet. Let’s see if things settle down.”
Barb and I had a little wine. That’s it, but to me it looked like at least half the people around us were stoned blind. And that held true as far as I could see clear up to the stage. The Stones stopped singing again and then more scuffles ramped up up by the stage. Things got really quiet. Then a helicopter took off from in back of the stage. I learned later the Hell’s Angels had killed some guy who had pulled a gun.
Things actually did settle down and the Stones did a few more songs. At some point, with the music still playing, I started to think about getting out of there. I figured it was going to be the traffic jam of the century; and it was getting pretty cold. In all the histories of Altamont you never hear much about the weather. I suppose the sleeping bags would have been OK, but neither of us wanted to spend the night. So, in the dark, with the sounds of the concert still going on behind us we started to walk out.
It was way too dark to see. A full moon sure would have helped but, no such luck. We stumbled through the field out to the road and that made the going a little easier. I had no clue how we were going to find our car among the rest of them. We just kept walking, following the edge of the road and every once in a while a car would drive by and its headlights would temporarily light the way for us. We walked for what seemed like forever. After I thought we had gone enough distance I started checking out every car we passed. Then I remembered we had turned the car around and sure enough we finally came across Barb’s Dart facing the other way. Traffic was much lighter than I had anticipated and we probably wouldn’t have had to turn the thing around, but it helped a little.
I offered to drive but Barb said that was unnecessary. Besides, I’d had more wine than her and that sealed the deal. Originally, we decided to go back to the sorority house, but neither of us wanted to go clear down to South San Francisco. We were dead tired. Neither of us spoke much as we drove along. After we had driven for about a half hour we saw a motel sign and stopped there. It wasn’t fancy, but they had a vacancy and that was enough for the both of us. The minute we hit the room we both dropped into bed and fell dead asleep.
The next day we slept until almost noon, leaving an uncomfortably short amount of time to get to the airport. I hadn’t packed my things when we left Saturday morning, so we had to head for the sorority house which was, thankfully, fairly close to the airport.
The ride back to the sorority gave us plenty of time to rehash our dilemma. We had been through the “distance” issue many times and were both tired of it. Barb’s take on things was “this isn’t working.” My take was also, “this isn’t working.” Not at all surprisingly, we agreed it wasn’t working. So that was it. I don’t remember any moment when we officially broke up, but just kept agreeing thinks weren’t working out and sitting in somber, depressing silence for a lot of the ride.
I grabbed my things at the sorority house and Barb drove me to the airport. More silence. More depression. She parked and walked with me to the gate. We had just made it on time. The plane was boarding, so there would be no long goodbyes. We embraced and I turned toward the gate: “Don’t look back,” I thought, “don’t look back.”
I turned around anyway. Barb was crying. That told me something. She did care. Somehow I knew this wasn’t over. I would see her again and patch things up like we had done before. I took one final glance as I went into the gangway. It was the last time I ever saw her.
