Review: 'Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with The Rolling Stones at Altamont"

Meredith Hunter. We all know the name Altamont and its associations, but too few know the name of the young man murdered at the hands of the Hell’s Angels at the infamous free concert staged at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969. His name is Meredith Hunter, and in Just a Shot Away, author Saul Austerlitz makes damn sure that we know that Hunter was not just some pawn in an event lazy writers love to use as the anti-Woodstock or as a pat conclusion to the sixties and its peace and love ethos. No biography of The Rolling Stones, the band that headlined Altamont (of course, you already knew that), fails to mention Hunter’s name, but I’ve never read one that gave a full, breathing profile of the man’s life. Even before his tragic end, it was fascinating, horribly troubled, creative, deeply complex. Hunter was raised by a schizophrenic mother whose piece-of-trash husband forced her into prostitution. Hunter was an artist. He was a juvenile delinquent. He was a druggie. He was a loving and devoted uncle and brother. He was a complete human being who lived a multi-faceted life despite its brevity. I never knew any of these things before reading Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with The Rolling Stones at Altamont, and that's what makes it such a gift. 

It is also a genuine horror story as Austerlitz describes the sickeningly unfolding events of Altamont with a masterful grasp of tone, detail, and character (though he is not above a few sloppy gaffes, the most egregious one I caught being his attribution of Paul Kantner’s on-stage barbs against the Angels to the wrong Jefferson Airplane guitarist: Jorma Kaukonen). We learn all the events leading up to the matter that ostensibly justified the Hell’s Angels’ attack. Yes, Hunter had a gun, but he only took it from his car after the notoriously racist biker gang had been beating on the crowd for hours, and if they were treating white people like that, what would they do to him? I can never defend possessing a gun under any circumstances, but simply having one in one’s possession hardly justifies being stabbed multiple times, having your head kicked in and stood on until your nose is left a smashed mess that makes breathing through it impossible. Apparently, the gun wasn’t even loaded.

While the Hell’s Angels are without question the villains of this story, the Stones have also often been criticized for fashioning the situation that put a bunch of scumbag, violence-addicted, racist, right-wingers in the role of security. Austerlitz not only repeats the truth that too few people know—the Grateful Dead’s camp were actually responsible for hiring the Angels—but also emphasizes the Dead’s cowardice in turning tail on an admittedly hellacious scene while the Stones met it head on in a vane attempt to settle the crowd. Without question The Rolling Stones were a great band, but they certainly never seemed heroic. As described by Austerlitz , their taking the stage at Altamont is probably the closest they ever came despite their ineffectualness. Their silence about Hunter immediately following the concert, however, was unconscionable.

But this isn’t the Stones’ story. To a small degree it is the Hell’s Angel’s story, but it is really the tale of a young, black man murdered by racist “upholders of the law.” Sound familiar? The contemporary relevance of this story is not lost on Austerlitz, who explicitly ties it in with the stories of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and all the other men who have become the victims of racial violence at the hands of cops and vigilantes. In writing of how the Hell’s Angels acted “out a parodic version of American freedom, where freedom itself was an amoral act, unkind and selfish” and “required tuning out the quiet voices that insisted on the inherent dignity of others, and amplifying the ones that demand that others respect yours,” Austerlitz perhaps inadvertently ties this story to the grotesquely toxic White House of 2018. For such reasons, I defy anyone with a conscience to read this account of a 49-year old crime without getting angry as hell today. As you can probably tell, I did, and for that, Just a Shot Away is not only a great piece of historical journalism but an enduringly vital and relevant one too. 

Review: '1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love'

The intriguing progress Rock & Roll started displaying as soon as The Beatles busted out in 1964 hit an ecstatic, elastic, multi-colored peak three years later. Any existing rules were incinerated as the pop song busted well beyond its two-minute structure, guitars were regularly muscled aside to make room for Mellotrons and sitars, and love songs were often sidelined for tunes based on Joyce’s impenetrable Ulysses or ditties about gnomes named Grimble Crumble. The LP officially displaced the single; stereo started doing the same to mono, making way for the ritual of consuming high-concept albums through headphones…possibly while under various influences; and bland band portraits plastered onto jackets no longer sufficed. In other words, Rock & Roll became art with a vengeance in 1967.

Harvey Kubernik pays tribute to the auditory and visual arts of ’67’s revolutionary music in his new book 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. That title is actually misleading unless one regards 1967 as twelve months of summer—and the Californians Kubernik favors probably did. The book is actually a month-by-month chronicle from January through December, dropping details about the year’s major music releases, festivals, innovations, main characters, and attitudes in stand-alone chunks. The book is also something of an oral history, as Kubernik’s own observations are more than supplemented with old and new commentary from the likes of Andrew Loog Oldham, Mary Wilson, George Harrison, Barry Miles, Michelle Phillips, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Roger McGuinn, Ravi Shankar, Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, Ram Das, Ray Manzarek, and many others. There is little effort to link the multitudinous topics, but that’s to be expected when dealing with a year that was probably a puzzling jumble of disconnected ideas and events for a lot of its participants. You know what they say about people who remember the sixties.

A coffee table book at heart, 1967 supplies a vibrant lot of images from pop’s most imagistic year, though some of the year’s phantasmagorically rendered album covers would have made for an even more kaleidoscopic visual experience. Kubernik should still be commended for covering the vinyl within the sleeves as thoroughly as he does—referencing the obvious (Sgt. Pepper’s dominates the June topic along with the Monterey Pop Festival) and the more regularly overlooked (The Hollies’ Butterfly, Donovan’s A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, Captain Beefheart’s Safe As Milk, the Stones’ Between the Buttons, etc.) in kind. The one inexplicable oversight is his failure to even mention The Who Sell Out, my personal pick for the finest album of pop’s finest year. Maybe Kubernik has a hole in his memory where that album belongs because he had a little too much fun in ’67.

Farewell, Paul Kantner

The San Francisco hippie scene is the one major nook of sixties rock that never interested me much. I never liked The Grateful Dead or The Youngbloods and never made much of an effort to explore the music of, say, Quicksilver Messenger Service or Country Joe and the Fish. The one huge exception is Jefferson Airplane. Possessing a true knack for pop craft, and a dark, aggressive quality that is punker than anything the other San Fran bands were offering, Jefferson Airplane is alluring, mysterious, exciting, and provocative. Obviously, all of those adjectives could also be used to describe Grace Slick, the face, and often the voice, of the Airplane. However, if that group of five very integral parts could be said to have had a leader, then that leader was probably Paul Kantner, who died yesterday at the age of 74 after suffering complete organ failure and septic shock following a heart attack.

Kantner's presence in the band was never felt more than on the band's signature work. Surrealistic Pillow may have yielded all the hits, but After Bathing at Baxter's was the studio album that best captured the improvisational spirit and all-out weirdness of Jefferson Airplane, and Paul Kantner contributed many of the albums finest songs. "Martha"is a beautiful and celebratory, yet sinister, portrait of a liberated young woman. "Watch Her Ride" is a dynamic, exhilarating shouldabeenahit, and yet, it is also sinister. "Wild Tyme" and "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon" are sweeping, mighty (sinister) surveys of San Francisco's famed summer of '67. "The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil" is...hell, it's just sinister through and through. 

Kantner continued his mesmerizing streak through the next few Airplane albums with more thrilling songs ("Crown of Creation", the terrifying "House at Pooneil Corners", the majestic "We Can Be Together", "Wooden Ships", "When the Earth Moves Again", and "Twilight Double Leader") before the Airplane became the Starship. I'll leave commemoration of that band to someone who knew it better than I.

All this is to say that Paul Kantner made some of the most thrilling, majestic, beautiful, and yes, sinister music of rock's greatest era. He also embodied and subverted the iconic San Francisco spirit in ways that made him an icon too. Once I was taking a flight out of San Francisco International Airport, and who should I see in his flowy shirt and bandana roaming around the ticket counter? Needless to say, I couldn't imagine a more perfect celebrity sighting to have at a San Francisco airport. Fly, Jefferson Airplane.

Review: Jefferson Airplane's 'Flight Log: (1966-1976)'

The record industry may still be struggling, but reissues of classic albums certainly seem to be arriving with vigor. Even some of the odder compilations have started receiving sonic upgrades. HD Tracks recently issued the U.K. editions of The Rolling Stones’ Big Hits albums as high-def FLAC files (they never even made it to CD). Now BGO is issuing the Western CD debut of Flight Log (1966-1976), the most eccentric comp by one of the most eccentric—and the best—San Fran psych group: Jefferson Airplane. Well, this 1977 double album is credited to the Airplane, but that’s a bit of a misnomer. The first disc is mostly devoted to that band, but the second checks in on the various projects the individual band members got up to following Jefferson Airplane’s early ‘70s dissolution. There are selections from Jefferson Starship, Grace Slick solo, Grace Slick with Paul Kantner, Hot Tuna, and Jorma Kaukonen’s Quah.

The song choices are unusual, passing over most of the popular favorites collected previously on The Worst of Jefferson Airplane for folkier album cuts that present the Airplane as a less punky band than they really were. The post-Airplane tracks are oddballs, too. There’s nothing from the Starship’s breakthrough Red Octopus (and thankfully, this set appeared years before rubbish like “We Built This City” or “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” could have made the running). Rather we get a gritty workout from Hot Tuna that allows Kaukonen room to show off his superior finger-picking skills: the guy was a good electric guitar player, but an absolute dynamo on acoustic. There’s also Jefferson Starship’s magical “Have You Seen the Stars Tonight”, some Slick histrionics on “Silver Spoon”, her more conventionally pretty “¿Come Again? Toucan”, and Quah’s lovely baroque folk “Genesis”. The booklet reproduces Patrick Snyder’s vivid original liner notes, as well as a priceless shot of the band dolled up as lounge lizards.

I love the idea of compilations like this getting second airings. A lot of listeners used such collections as gateways into the catalogues of their favorite bands, so they pack maximum nostalgia value. I’d personally love to see Good Vibrations: The Best of The Beach Boys (1975), The Beatles’ Rarities (1980), and Monkee Flips (1984) dragged out of the basement and into the mastering booth. Flight Log is a nice start, though.