The song has barely finished, the last chord just faded. Mick Jagger, 26 years old, in his billowing half-black, half-red shirt, has ended his repeated ad-libs of the last line of Under My Thumb. "I pray that it's all right . . . I pray that it's all right . . . it's all right."
Now here comes Meredith Hunter, stumbling out of the darkness to the left, a few feet from the stage, arms flailing, legs askew. Something unseen has happened and he is moving from it in a hurry. He crashes into the arms of Patti, his girlfriend, and falls away. As his left arm goes down, the revolver in his hand is silhouetted against Patti's white crocheted top, which her mother knitted for her. His arm rises again. The ground around them clears. Patti screams.
Over on the right, towards centre stage, a Hell's Angel strains to see what is happening.. He alone seems to see the gun. You can see his hand go to his waist and this must be when he pulls the knife from its sheath. He rushes forward and is at Hunter's back, his left hand gripping Hunter's gun hand, forcing it down, while raising the knife in his right fist and plunging it into Hunter's neck. Hunter lurches forward, back towards the darkness from where he came. The Angel clings on, moving with him, again raising his right fist and bringing the knife down on Hunter's neck.
In these few feet of film, it is forever December 6, 1969, around 5.50pm. A black man is being killed by racist Hell's Angels. It will soon be claimed that the Stones had hired the Angels to provide security for the free concert at Altamont Raceway & Arena in California. The Stones will face the threat of being charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Thus the film has preserved a controversy and highly sensitive issue for the band and those involved on that crowded stage at that chaotic show. A day so notorious it was said to have helped bring the "flower power" age to an end.
The Stones have been touchy about the case ever since, and have made almost no public comment on Hunter's death for 35 years. In recent weeks the police have been re-examining the killing, conducting a "cold case" review, trying to put Hunter's ghost to rest. And still the band refuse to comment. The true story of that afternoon, the story of Meredith Hunter, who he was, how he died, what happened after, has never been told. He was the young black man who got killed at Altamont. That was all. In most accounts his name didn't get mentioned. In 35 years nobody had called his family to try to find out more. Or establish what it was, if anything, the Stones (and Hell's Angels) were trying to hide.
Nobody, except perhaps the band themselves, seemed to know that their lawyers had tried to get a wrongful-death lawsuit against them thrown out of court on a technicality. Nobody knew that, when the attempt failed, the Stones' lawyers quickly made an out-of-court settlement with Meredith Hunter's mother. Mick Jagger was said to have made a court deposition denying any involvement with the Hell's Angels. But if the Stones hadn't hired them, what were the Angels doing there, standing sentry on stage beside Mick, Keith, Charlie, Bill and Mick Taylor? Who invited them? Who put them in a position where they could kill Hunter?
The footage of his murder was filmed for the documentary Gimme Shelter, which recorded the final stages of the Stones' North American tour in the last weeks of 1969. There had been a dozen film crews out among the 300,000 to 500,000 people scattered over the 83 acres of Altamont during the concert, but only one had captured the killing. The directors of Gimme Shelter, Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, had not known until the material was processed that the killing had been recorded.
The film had helped the Alameda County sheriffs to identify and put a Hell's Angel named Alan Passaro on trial for murder. It also helped Passaro's defence, proving that Hunter really had been wielding a gun. And it left open the possibility — exploited by Passaro's lawyer — that there could have been more than one Hell's Angel wielding a knife. Hunter's body had six stab wounds and Passaro was only seen delivering two blows. Passaro was acquitted in January 1971. Yeeeeooooww, he was recorded as saying when the verdict was delivered. And so the killing passed into the Alameda sheriffs' archive — their "murder book" — as "Hunter, Meredith. Unsolved. 69-SO2262."
Sergeant Scott Dudek had taken charge of the sheriffs' Crimes against Persons Unit two years ago, and began a programme of reviewing the cold cases. He had worked through six "unsolveds" before arriving at Hunter, using modern techniques such as DNA to make breakthroughs that would not have been possible in the past. Though he was not yet a teenager at the time of Altamont — he's now 46 — Dudek was aware of the high profile of the case. The focus of the review would be: was there a second assailant? A "second stabber", as Dudek put it.
Early on in his inquiries, Dudek contacted Maysles Films in New York. Of the directing trio, both David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin had died. Albert Maysles was 78 and still going out filming. He said there was other footage, outtakes from the original reel shot by Baird Bryant that had not made it into the final film and might shed some light on what happened. He never understood why the police hadn't asked to see the whole reel at the time. He spoke of scenes that seemed to show Hunter taunting the Hell's Angels and of another shot that showed an orange flash, perhaps the flash of Hunter's gun being fired. Whether or not he had fired the gun is an enduring puzzle. But Maysles only owned half the film. The Stones had a half share too (including half the profits) but their permission was not needed for any further release.
In autumn 1969 the band had arrived in America for the start of their tour to be greeted by complaints that they were charging too much for their tickets, ripping off the fans. Stung by the accusations, they decided to put on a free concert. San Francisco was the city of love, Haight-Ashbury the headquarters of the counterculture and the obvious place to stage the show. The Grateful Dead had organised a series of free concerts in Golden Gate Park, on the edge of the Haight. They were unofficial, unannounced shows — word always got around somehow — and the Dead would invite the Frisco Hell's Angels along to stand by the generators and ensure nobody shut down the power. The Angels' mere presence tended to deter trouble.
The Stones' 1969 tour manager, Sam Cutler, is now in his early sixties and settled in Brisbane, Australia. He was on stage throughout Altamont, both as the master of ceremonies and looking after his band, which, as he describes it, was like protecting the president. If anyone hired the Hell's Angels to provide security on the Stones' behalf, it was him. But that's not what happened, he says. He's been saying it for 35 years. He says, if you think you can hire the Hell's Angels, go and try it. To secure their presence at the show he agreed to buy them $500 worth of beer. In fact, he passed on $500 in cash to them through an intermediary. Cutler says he thinks he got the money from the Stones' San Francisco lawyer, Mel Belli. He says he kept trying to call Mick Jagger to get some money. The band were on the other side of America in the run-up to Altamont, at Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, recording, among other things, the first version of Brown Sugar.
