| Grateful Dead – New Speedway Boogie Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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@[bottlerocket88:5572] There was a concert/festival at Altamont Speedway at which the Dead, the Stones, The Airplane and a number of other bands were to play. At the suggestion of the Dead, the Hells Angels were hired to do "security". During the course of the concert there were an escalating series of altercations, one in which Marty Balin of the Airplane was punched in the face and may have been dragged offstage. The Airplane folks tried to calm things, but a little later, with claims that a concertgoer, was trying to rush the stage, he was beaten and eventually, I believe shot, by members of the Hells Angels, and he died. Because of the violence, the Dead actually left before they had a chance to play. It was viewed as an antithesis of Woodstock, which the festival was supposed, originally, to emulate, and subsequently seen by many as the end of the Haight-Ashbury peace love and psychedelia era, and a harbinger of further violence to come. The violence at the music festival was seen as a sign that the corruption, violence, and racism of the society at large, and the insane meaningless violence of the US imperial war in Vietnam had come home (certainly this was the case much earlier with the police attacks in Chicago, the arrest and blatant repression of many activists, the murders of Malcolm X, ML King, and Robert Kennedy, and the murders at Kent State. Nixon had also recently launched his "secret" war and massive carpet bombing campaigns of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) and at last even infected the hippie and youth culture, which had tried to protest it and keep it at bay. It was a loss of innocence. |
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