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which, more or less, demanded a disastrous chaos to salve his Wild West bruise and which inadvertently predicted Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone rag's yellow-journalistic smear of the people instead of the business.

"It was my fault because I didn't try to stop in any way that I could, the four hundred thousand people who were specifically convened to appear as extras in someone's idea of a home movie, promising that a percentage of the take from the film's profits would go toward a permissiveloony-bin-of-a-playground for the adventurers-in-poverty freaks, instead of toward reality which is Haight Street and Hunters Point in San Francisco and Uptown in Chicago and the Lower East Side in New York.

"It was my fault that the California Hells Angels who came to drink beer, have a good time and party with the community like they've been doing for years, ended up hassling to protect a trembling stage for a pussy who loves to provoke audiences into childhood hysteria and who thought that he was appearing before a flock of teenyboppers and flower children, rather than before a crowd of four hundred thousand men and women who discovered a long time ago that flowers die too easy. Even if they have thorns.

"It was my fault that several groups in the Bay Area came to distrust me because my silence duped them into thinking that the Altamont affair was sanctioned, when actually I should have blown the covers off of the fiasco weeks before it was allowed to take place and make suckers of us all.

"It was my fault because I permitted hip San Francisco chauvinism to dictate my silence into a belief that a good time would be had by all, even after the adequate Sears Point site had been vetoed when the professional sharks of the Filmways Corporation demonstrated that the business acumen of Schneider was that of a minnow and forced him to play out his dead hand of solitaire at a barren racetrack in the town of Livermore which no one even knew was in California.

"It was my fault that the Workable Lie which was the Rolling Stone Concert at Altamont wasn't seen clearly until, as Sweet William says, 'Everything it ever was, is all being sold.'

"And to the people to whom I was totally irresponsible, all I can say is mea culpa.

"And to all those false-bottomed-hipsters and the short-change-artists who like to deal dead hands and who like to think that they run things around here, un bacio d'morte.

"And Meredith Hunter dying like a sniveling maniac instead of like a determined man--that was his fault."

It was the first month of the 70s, and just about thirty days after Altamont went down forever, replacing Woodstock in the hip lexicon of expresssions, when Emmett Grogan began to feel he had [end page 491]