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Stones' ex-manager sets record straight
03:01 AEST Wed Oct 1 2008ago
By Steph Gardiner
When Sam Cutler reunited with the Rolling Stones four decades after he was dropped as their tour manager, he was warmly greeted by rock and roll standards.
"F**k me, Sam Cutler. Or should I say f**k you?," legendary guitarist Keith Richards said when he saw Cutler backstage at a 2003 Australian concert.
Cutler remembers the moment in his new book You Can't Always Get What You Want, a memoir about his time on the road with the Stones and the Grateful Dead.
He hadn't seen the band since a 1969, when a man was stabbed and killed by Hells Angels during the Rolling Stones' set at a free concert in the US.
His memoir describes how he was left behind to clear the air with Hells Angels members even after Mick Jagger told him to "split" in the wake of the now notorious Altamont gig.
Despite Cutler's history with the band, reuniting with the Stones in 2003 was a lot like seeing family, he says.
"It was nice, I enjoyed it. It's a bit like meeting your aunt after many years. They were very kind," Cutler told AAP from Brisbane.
"Nice to see that everyone had lived through the experience."
Cutler hopes to clear up any misconceptions about the Rolling Stones' role in the violent concert in his book.
Rock and roll legend has it that the band paid the Hells Angels $500 to act as security, which led to the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter, a concert-goer who was carrying a gun.
But Cutler writes that the band felt compelled to play the free concert and were told by Hells Angels members, "Nothing's gonna happen to your band, get `em to play and it'll all be cool."
"There's a lot of rubbish written about the Rolling Stones, especially the thing at Altamont, that we hired the Hells Angels ... and it was the Rolling Stone's free concert which it wasn't," Cutler says.
"It's kind of enter rock and roll mythology that we organised the concert, which we didn't.
"That we were responsible for what went down, which in part we were, but only in part.
"I wanted to write my version of the truth."
After the terrifying experience at Altamont - which he writes was "the worst violence I had ever seen" - he went on to work with the Grateful Dead.
He has happier memories managing that band, who he describes as "an extended hippy family".
"I still consider myself a member of the Grateful Dead family," he says.
"If you were around the Rolling Stones you were either a friend or a person in the band or Mick or Keith had hired you to work for the band.
"Mick was basically in control of it all.
"In the Grateful Dead it was all very much looser, who knows where half the people came from.
"The Grateful Dead directly kept about 40 people, whereas the Rolling Stones would never dream of doing that."
Cutler considers his stories of rock and roll debauchery - he writes about smoking a joint with Jimi Hendrix and hanging out with Janis Joplin - his own part in contemporary history.
But these days his rock star lifestyle has been replaced with time spent "writing and daydreaming" in Australia, away from the stresses of the music industry.
"A tour manager is a combination of many things from a psychologist to a friend to an employee a confidant," he said.
"We have to wear multiple hats - a tour manager is the person who handles all the stress."
He jokes his next book will be about "Sex for the over-80s".
As for the Rolling Stones, Cutler predicts they won't stop rocking until they're dead - and even then they may still be playing in heaven.
"Eventually, I think they'll die on the job which is great," he says.
"They can't do anything else other than be musicians, that's what they are.
"So they've embraced that totally and there's no reason you should stop until they're dead.
"And who knows, maybe they'll get a job playing harp for God."
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