Contractions, chaos, and The Rolling Stones: Were four babies really born at Altamont?
The Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway on December 6th, 1969, is steeped in tragedy, which comes from a carelessness that’s naivety at best and outright callousness at worst.
The show itself was only put on after Mick Jagger half-agreed to something in a press conference without thinking it entirely through. The tickets for the comeback tour of The Rolling Stones had been ludicrously expensive for the time, and at a press conference held before the tour’s opening show, Jagger was probed on the subject.
After being put on the spot about whether there would be a free show for all the people who were priced out of attending, he mumbled something about the pricing being done without the band’s knowledge, and promised they’d make it up for the fans at the end of the tour.
The Stones and their entourage were suddenly scrambling to put together a free concert that looked set to attract hundreds of thousands of people, with barely more than two months to prepare.
No worries, they had a blueprint from their Hyde Park tribute concert for the late Brian Jones, which took place that same year. The London show was a free gig that hundreds of thousands of fans had turned up for, which went off without a hitch. If you ignore the pile of dead butterflies in the corner.
With that in mind, The Stones believed it was possible to simply replicate the Hyde Park show at Altamont, and everything would be similarly hunky-dory. They even went and got the same security that they got for the Hyde Park show, reasoning that if you’ve met one Hells Angels chapter, you’ve met them all. It turns out, you hadn’t.
Everything that happened next at that fateful, terrible show has gone down as one of the darkest chapters in the history of rock. Yet, if you asked anyone involved in the show, there was a symmetry to all of it.
Harrowingly, four people died at Altamont. But four people were also born. The circle of life continues. Or, at least, that’s how the legend goes.
In reality, four people were definitely not born at Altamont. There’s no record of any births at that cursed concert. No one has even claimed to be one of the four kids born at Altamont, and you can imagine some sleaze trying to pick up girls at a Stones show by pretending to be one of them, right? Yet no one has the absolute brass neck to do that other than, seemingly, the marketing arm of The Rolling Stones, who really did need all the help they could get after Altamont.
After all, Jagger, Richards and half the inner circle of the Rolling Stones were constantly in trouble with the police, as well as the press. They did not need any more bad publicity, yet suddenly, four people were dead, and it sure as shit looked like it was at least partially their fault. Therefore, the PR spin of the four births was born, which made the deaths seem like a cosmic result of the passing of time.
Which couldn’t be further from the truth. The deaths at Altamont weren’t natural, or beautiful, or anything resembling that. They were caused by laziness on the part of the crew behind the show and they were too cowardly to admit that. The four births rumour was likely to have been spread by someone within the PR team as a desperate attempt to frame it in the hippy language of the time.
Which was also dying a painful death, but since when have The Stones ever cared about that, right?