Rolling Stones' manager Sam Cutler: 'You can't always get what you want'

VICKI ANDERSON
Last updated 11:55, May 22 2018




Sam Cutler sighs and there's a clink of metal.

I imagine it is one of the many skull rings on the 75-year-old's fingers making contact with the TV remote.

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon and Cutler is watching football on TV having had his regular-as-clockwork Sunday afternoon nap.

Chip Monck was the MC at Woodstock, a pioneer in stage lighting who worked with everyone from The Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan.

When I enquire as to the footy result, there's an elegant silence and more clinking of metal before Cutler replies.

"Someone's gotta win, and someone's gotta lose," he says crisply.+

There is victory to be had, however, as this week, Cutler ticks a visit to New Zealand off his bucket list.

"I'm thrilled to be going there," he says, sounding genuinely excited. "Thrilled."

Cutler has lived in Australia for a while, travelling in a house bus and writing furiously, but the British accent of his homeland remains.

The former tour manager of The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead, Cutler has earned a reputation as a somewhat outspoken music industry insider.


He's worked with everyone from Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd.

Cutler was the tour manager for The Rolling Stones during the disastrous Altamont concert that served as the finale for the 1969 tour. He eventually wrote about being left to clean up that mess in his book, You Can't Always Get What You Want.

His is also the voice heard introducing The Rolling Stones at the start of their 1970 live album Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out.

In 1969 Woodstock would define the Love Generation but, by December of that year, the idyllic dream lay "in ruins on a desolate racetrack six miles outside of San Francisco".

Held in northern California, less than four months after Woodstock, the counter-culture Altamont Speedway Free Festival was headlined by The Rolling Stones, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Nearly five decades on from that ill-fated event, tour-manager Cutler is in New Zealand to dispel myths about Altamont. 

"I'm going to four or five places in New Zealand this week," says Cutler. "We are playing the documentary Gimme Shelter, the 1969 tour by the Rolling Stones in America. I'm introducing the movie, talking about it, then, afterwards I do a little question and answer thing."

"A lot of younger people aren't really aware of the significance of Altamont," says Cutler.

About 300,000 people attended Altamont. The Grateful Dead were scheduled to play, but didn't. Members of Hells Angels got into a fight with 18-year-old Meredith Hunter. He brandished a gun and was stabbed to death.

"The whole thing has always been called a free concert by the Rolling Stones," says Cutler. "It was organised by Grateful Dead's people who suggested it several months earlier in England. It was organised out of their office, a combination of West Coast bands, but very conveniently the limeys got the blame."

Cutler's voice grows a little louder, more insistent, as he warms to his subject.

"We got blamed for hiring the Hells Angels, that wasn't what happened."

Altamont has been described as "burying the summer of love".

"It was complete bullshit. After many years of having to deal with misinformation about this event, slowly people get to realise that what the popular concept of what happened is not strictly speaking, accurate. It was just perfectly convenient, wasn't it, to blame those nasty men the Hells Angels for everything?"

For nearly 50 years, Cutler has pondered about Altamont.

"My take on it was the guy who was killed he came to a rock 'n roll show with a gun," he says. "Only in America - they are nuts. He came to a show with a gun, who does that? He fired off two bullets, within close range of people on stage. You could make a fair old claim for the idea that the Hells Angels actually saved The Rolling Stones."

It was, he muses, a "dreadful situation".

"The thing is, man, it wasn't organised, it is doing an injustice to call poorly organised, it was a mess. On top of that, Chip Monck built an inadequate stage in there," says Cutler. "He put The Rolling Stones on a knee high stage in the middle of 300,000 people. He never owned up to it or admitted it but that was the error that caused chaos and pandemonium on the day."

Ah, Chip Monck. Let me tell you about Chipper.

A legendary figure in music, Monck has been present at many key moments in music history.

As the MC at Woodstock, for example, Monck was the one who infamously warned people about the brown acid.

I should declare here, for transparency, that Chip Monck once wrote me a job reference.

He has worked with the best musicians in the world and has some incredible stories to tell.

But, in almost 10 years of acquaintance, we have talked about what happened at Altamont just twice.

Monck made his name highlighting the on-stage exploits of the likes of The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan.

When he talks about The Rolling Stones, Monck always refers to Mick Jagger as "Her Ladyship".

While at the Village Gate, a nightclub at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker St in Greenwich Village, New York, Monck lived in a nearby basement he describes as a "flop house".

Dylan wrote songs in Monck's basement apartment, notably A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, in September 1962.

"Somewhere along the line, I met Robert and I invited him to the Gate," Monck once told me. "He walked around and I told him I had an apartment he could use if he needed some quiet time."

In Monck's apartment was a typewriter.

"It seemed to please him greatly. For the six hours I was working at the Gate he would type his work and then go away."

Monck recalls once finding Dylan's screwed up balls of paper in a waste paper basket.

He ironed them flat on an ironing board and put the lyric sheets in a sealed pocket.

"I felt they were exceptional."

In those days, Monck and Dylan would occasionally go to a place called the Kettle of Fish together. Dylan didn't talk much.

Once, Monck asked him if he needed a co-writer.

"He said 'If I needed a f...ing co- writer I'd ask for one. You may read, but I write', So I would clean things up, move an ashtray and go back to work."

But the best story Monck has told me involves the Newport Folk Festival.

Monck had finished everything he needed to do so decided to go for a scuba dive. He was scooting about under the sea when he encountered a net, which turned out to be a submarine net. He swam through one of the holes and kicked it with his flipper.

"In a moment, a Zodiac with a presidential seal was there. On one side of the boat was a hand with a gun in it and on the other side was someone motioning their hand under the water. I surfaced and discovered it was the secret service."

Monck was taken ashore to the Kennedy compound. He took off his tanks and sat on a wrought-iron chair.

Jacqueline Kennedy then appeared and offered him a drink.

"I said, 'Yes ma'am, a beer'. She said, 'No, you're swimming. You'll have a cup of tea'.

"Jackie brought it back. I offered to have our president, her and the children to the show that evening. She and the kids came and wore wigs, so no-one knew she was there. It was the opening show for Peter, Paul and Mary."

Monck has a billion stories and an effortlessly engaging manner.

But he really doesn't like to talk about Altamont. There's a sense that, even now, as he nears his 80th year, it still saddens him.

"I was totally ill prepared for 1969. It was just too raw. We even dropped the truss in Chicago and I punched out the union steward, and I still can't go back to Chicago," Monck once admitted. "It took me about a year and a half to get through to Meredith Hunter's mother to say, 'I'm sorry'. No-one else gave a f...."

Cutler would probably agree to disagree.

For both men, Altamont was clearly a pivotal event in their lives.

Cutler started life as an orphan in war-torn London. He qualified as a teacher while running a folk club in a room above a pub.

"I was a teacher of emotionally maladjusted children and then I went into the music business, so perfect training," says Cutler, wryly.

In New Zealand, he'll use his background as a teacher and author to encourage critical thinking among our students.

"If you want to paint The Rolling Stones as the bad boys of rock 'n' roll who hired the Hells Angels and aligned them with almost satanic forces, film is the perfect method of doing it."

In the Gimme Shelter documentary, a young Cutler with a lengthy moustache coolly stands beside his friend, Mick Jagger, and the pair try to soothe the crowd as tensions rise.

With the benefit of hindsight, Cutler wishes that Altamont had been cancelled.

"If The Rolling Stones and myself made an error, it was that we thought it was going to be a wonderful day, peace and love and all that stuff but it wasn't. It was a nightmare, but a lot of that nightmare came down to the fact that Americans don't know how to behave in large crowds."

He cites the legendary Stones in the Park at England's Hyde Park as an example of what they were trying to achieve.

"There were just as many people there, that was a beautiful show. The Stones didn't play very well but it doesn't matter... One person went to the first aid tent. The first aid tent was two old ladies of the Red Cross who made you a cup of tea and a biscuit and sent you on your way," says Cutler.

"We do the same thing in America and 4 people die, hundreds end up in hospital, God knows how many people overdosed on bad drugs... hysterical nonsense.  A baby was born, two people were run over by a tractor in their sleeping bags, one person drowned and one person was stabbed. Absurd."


More pix and Altamont trailer at https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/103876254/rolling-stones-manager-sam-cutle...

ladies and gentlemen the GD!! great sounding on those 73 shows.