What was intended on being a free concert based around peace and love turned into a violent hellscape on December 6, 1969.
After the cultural success of Woodstock several months earlier, a group of musicians in San Francisco set out to host a similar festival.
The plan was for a free concert in Golden Gate Park, with organisers sneaking the Rolling Stones onto the stage as an unannounced headline act.
The Rolling Stones were keen on doing a free concert as a way of atoning for the high ticket prices of their American tour.
The prices were unheard of at the time, costing as much as $105 in today’s money.
When Mick Jagger revealed the plans for a free performance two weeks earlier, the city immediately backtracked.
Despite the popularity of Woodstock, municipalities elsewhere did not want hundreds of thousands of hippies descending on their cities.
The concert organisers were then forced to find another venue in a hurry.
They found the Altamont Speedway, a venue an hour away from the city.
The rushed preparation meant there weren’t enough portable toilets or medical facilities.
And acting on the advice of other bands, organisers hired the bikie gang the Hells Angels to act as security.
The Hells Angels were paid with $500 worth of beer.
The festival soon turned violent. Nearly 800 people were treated for “bad trips” after drinking wine spiked with LSD.
The heavily drunk bikies started to beat up members of the crowd. When Jefferson Airplane lead singer’s Marty Balin jumped off stage to intervene, he was knocked unconscious.
Later, Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills and Nash was stabbed in the leg by a Hells Angel armed with a sharpened bicycle spoke.
Because of the violence, the Grateful Dead refused to go on stage, and the Rolling Stones were urged to follow suit.
But they were determined to play, and went on stage even after Mick Jagger had been punched in the face.
In the mayhem of their show, the Rolling Stones did not realise a concertgoer had been stabbed in the back multiple times by a Hells Angel mere metres from them.
They continued their set for another 11 songs as Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old man, died waiting for an ambulance.
A jury found the bikie who stabbed him, Alan Passaro, not guilty because Hunter had been holding a gun.
Rolling Stone magazine described Altamont as “rock and roll’s all-time worst day”.
“If the name ‘Woodstock’ has come to denote the flowering of one phase of the youth culture, ‘Altamont’ has come to mean the end of it,” Esquire’s Ralph J Gleason wrote.
It has since gone on to be described as the end of the hippie era.
