Last August, the memory of Woodstock, the famous 1969 concert in upstate New York, was celebrated in retrospectives and concerts around the country.
This Sunday, another famous concert turns 40 but will do so without much fanfare. The free outdoor concert at Altamont Motor Speedway, an unincorporated area of Alameda County between Livermore and Tracy, has been regarded as the dystopian counterpoint to Woodstock’s feel-good image of love, music and drugs in the rain.
With more than 300,000 in attendance to see top acts like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, Altamont has been described as the largest gathering of people in modern California history.
But it was marred by violence that included the death of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old African-American man from Berkeley who went to the concert with his white girlfriend and was stabbed by members of the Hells Angels. His death was captured in the 1970 documentary “Gimme Shelter.”
On Friday morning, I spoke with Dixie Ward, 67, of Oakland, the older sister of Meredith Hunter, about the significance of the anniversary. Mrs. Ward, who runs day-care center, said that before her brother’s death, she and her siblings were close in part because her mother — who died in April — had suffered from mental illness. Her brother’s death changed the family.
Her comments have been edited and condensed:
When Meredith died, I heard it on the radio. There was a mention of someone who had tried to get on the stage and tried to attack the singers. I had no idea. Before he had left that day, I told him it wasn’t a good idea to go to Altamont. It just doesn’t feel right. It was a time when black men and white women were not supposed to be together. He said, Sis, you don’t know what’s going on. I said, Meredith, things are different in Berkeley than the outskirts of town. He left, and I had a real bad haunting feeling that someone was running with no help.
His death changed the dynamics of our family. My brother totally retreated into himself and never recovered. He would sit in front of the house and look down Ashby street. One of the memories I’ll never forget was that the Christmas tree was up and my mother covered it.
Something of this magnitude is like a song that hasn’t been sung. You know in your heart it’s out there, but you can’t retrieve it. Everything, all the children that could have been born, everything just stopped. Time does not heal wounds; it softens them.
I lived all my life in Berkeley. After Altamont, the pendulum went back the other way. There was something almost solemn. The times had changed.
After my sister died, there was a room in the house that should have been a second bedroom. (My mother) put flowers on the wall. And grass on the floors and stepping stones. I never went in there. When she died, I went into the room. There were children in the bed. (Dolls). She had his pictures in a shrine. The only way I could describe it was that it was the room of the dead.
The situation can never be fixed so it is never over for me. … I think the reason that I do what I do today is that there are wounds that need to be healed and people who need to be taken care of.