A Time Ago... Chapter 3. San Francisco & Altamont Speedway (pt 1)

I was back in San Francisco… the City. As far as I was concerned there’s no other city. It was the first major metropolis I’d lived in or been to other than Seattle. I’d left my home in Eastern Washington to ride a Greyhound to San Francisco as a young and naïve boy and I came back after four-years overseas presumably a man. I sat in my room by the window looking across the street at the Saint Charles Hotel. The light filtered through the pulled shades over shut windows. I halfway regretted no longer being a “juicer” and, for a minute, I wanted to take a pull from a bottle of Jack Daniels. I hadn’t had a drink since my first acid trip back in Waikiki and had no desire to start that cycle once more. I rolled a fat doobie from my dwindling stash instead. The Plaza wasn’t exactly what I’d remembered or imagined it to be. There were no longer any bell hops or doormen. The night clerk showed me to the elevator. I was on my own getting to the room. Still, it was the Plaza Hotel and I would not have felt right about staying anywhere else my first night.

Later, I moved into the Sutter Hotel on Sutter near Polk. I paid my rent two months in advance and, every other day or so, I took a bus to the Haight to get a few bundles of “underground” papers to sell on the street. I brought my bundles back to Broadway, Columbus and Grant, at night. I spent my days walking around the city alone. Sometimes I would walk all the way through Golden Gate Park to the ocean and take a bus back as I did before joining the Navy four years before.

A buzz was going around town. Every day I hawked my bundle of “underground” papers (The Berkeley Barb, The Berkeley Tribe, The Good Times, The Oracle) for a quarter each. A Sexual Freedom League pamphlet also sold great at a buck each because of the graphic erotic illustration on its cover; similar-to the ones made popular in Alex Comfort’s, The Joy of Sex. I stood nightly at the corner where Broadway, Grant and Columbus crossed each other adorned with a mad display of “Topless” bars like Big Al’s. My Mecca, the City Lights bookstore, at the top and other end of China Town from the St Charles Hotel was down a half block across the alley from the Vesuvius bar. The buzz going around town was that the Rolling Stones were going to give a free concert like they did in Hyde Park when Brian Jones died. It was being touted as “Woodstock West”. All the West Coast, and some East Coast, bands would be playing; Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills and Nash … and so on.

Rumors were thick. Some thought it would be out at Sears Point. Others had hoped it would be in Golden Gate Park. The freeways were clogged with traffic headed one-way towards where everyone thought it was going to be held at every change of venue. Finally, last minute, the spot was fixed at Altamont Speedway.

And, so it happened that, as I was vending my “underground” papers at Broadway and Grant, I agreed with an acquaintance, Randy … (a six foot-five, long-scraggly-haired, and bearded fellow vender with a cleft palette and breath so foul that it could stop a freight train) to head out to Altamont Speedway by way of the thumb. It was madness at every freeway entrance. Every hippie in San Francisco was cued-up and decked-out with thumbs out in the freak styles of the late Haight Ashbury. By late 1969 the Haight had become a sewer of runaways, junkies, and their constant consorts, those who preyed on them. The rest took up on the street fashion of the day. It was hippie-chic but chic took having a job and working for a living to pull it off. The lifestyle was the other part of chic that just plain didn’t make sense. I’d witnessed things like one hipster that parked his Corvette down on Union Street to panhandle on Broadway just to be part of “the scene”. I was sure of my own lies but these lies helped to betray my only hope for a generation… the generation that brought Woodstock to the world’s attention. What was it about these kinds of lies that was to insure Altamont was to crush that hope?

Speaking of lies: I had been sober for a few months (if one doesn’t count marijuana and an assortment of hallucinogenic drugs) before I caught myself in a lie once more. I’d been selling my rags and idly chatting with my fellow vender, Randy (who rented a room upstairs above Big Al’s at the Dante Hotel). The subject of cross-country running came up. It turned out that Randy had been cross-country running since high school and I had had a brief turn at it myself. However, what I caught myself doing was embellishing my record, thinking no one would know the difference. I did so to such a degree that I was, by my telling, second only to Olympic runner Gerry Lindgren (who was the first high school runner under the four-minute mile back in the day). I knew I was lying but thought that I would never be caught in the lie. However, I hadn’t counted on this friggin-hippy being such a fanatic about running. He had ‘cross-country-running magazines’ going back to the early fifties with every record and their times; second best as well as third and fourth up to that date.

Damn, I thought, what is this? What kind of coincidence would put me in front of a goddamned authority on cross-country running while I tell my first lie since sitting cross-legged on the beach in Waikiki and promising to never lie again? Furthermore: I had to ask myself, what in the hell did I think I was going to gain by this exaggeration? It just didn’t make sense to me but I suspected that oath I’d made on the beach was being honored by a mysterious power beyond my understanding. That suspicion guaranteed that I would hold back on dishonesty as long as I could… if only I could stop lying to myself.

Randy’s lanky form towered over me. I’m sure we resembled a hippy version of Mutt and Jeff as we put out our thumbs at the entrance to the freeway at the bottom of Broadway. There were several others at the entrance going the same way. The site of the concert was settled the day before it was to start. Everyone was headed towards the hills beyond Oakland to a site between Livermore and Tracy: A free concert just like Woodstock, only better because this was California and we know California is the birthplace of psychedelia.

We jumped into the bed of a pick-up among a half-dozen others. Things went smoothly enough until the truck passed Livermore and traffic started to back up. Cars were at first parked alongside of the freeway (smart ones, who knew the area, took the old Altamont Pass Rd. from Livermore). We neared the speedway, cars were abandoned on the freeway and all traffic came to a halt. Hiking the last two or three miles, Randy and I arrived at the top of the hill overlooking the mad scene below as the sun was setting. The crimson sky was highlighted by fires started in cardboard trash barrels burning. Those not being burned were used as improvised conga drums.

The conga rhythms pounded out anticipation that made way only for the calls of hawkers; “Acid! I have acid! Orange Sunshine! Barrel Acid! Two bucks a hit!” Dealers shouted through the din as we passed, calling out and competing with calls for, “Pot…. Maarrriiiijuana! … I got some Mary Jane for ya… a nickel a lid!”

Randy saw me craning my neck to the calls and pointed out, “Don’t buy anything; it’ll all be free by tomorrow.”

Down in the bowl of a valley was centered the stage between twin sentinels of amp towers. A chain link fence separated the new arrivals from the lucky ones (or unlucky ones as morning would tell) who had been there all day helping to set up the equipment and stage. There was also handful of Hells Angels down there too: it was rumored that they were serving as security for the event. Smoke from camp fires dotting the area set up an eerie blue haze contrasting the crimson sky. It was a hellish vision equal to any painting by Hieronymus Bosch, not unlike siege-fires burning… foreboding events to come the next day. No one tried to cross the chain-link fence into that arena as the night drew on until first morning light.

“Pleased to meet you… Hope you guessed my name!”

Rumors made it around saying the Grateful Dead dropped out of the performance… that the Rolling Stones were backing out too. Others said that The Airplane and Santana were already there and that the rumors were just that… rumors making room for more. I didn’t care… at last I was where it was happening. I’d joined the Navy and left San Francisco before the acid-tripping-hippy deal got going and when I returned after four years San Francisco had turned into just one more dirty city: Alioto’s city where you had to watch where you stepped for the dog shit on the sidewalks. The free love of the Haight Ashbury was gone; if it’d ever been there in the first place. I was beginning to think, and would soon find out, that all of this talk of peace, love and understanding was just that…. talk.

First thing in the morning an announcement (some say it was Sam Cutler, manager of the Stones) came from the stage area. The folks who were on the ground in front of the stage in their sleeping bags were kindly asked to wake up and make room for the mob waiting to get in. Most had been up all night setting up the amps and the equipment usually trusted to roadies.

I watched in horror from outside the chain-link fence on the hill above as Hells Angels went from bag to bag with cue sticks beating the crap out of any and all late risers. They came out of their bags with hands out-stretched, fending off the relentless thumps of the cues on their helpless bodies. The announcer’s pleas for peace met deaf ears from the Angels and the beatings only subsided when the last malingerer had escaped.

As the chain-link fence gates were opened I was swept along by the rush of the crown down into the bowl of the arena next to the race track. Randy and I made it past the stage area where Hells Angels warned people away and we settled on a spot halfway down between the speaker tower on the right and the stage. Disregarding the earlier melee as a fluke, we spread out our sleeping bags like picnic blankets eagerly awaiting the early beginnings of the concert. I dropped two or three hits of acid.