Hells Angel who stuck a pistol in Keith Richards’ side and said: Play ... or die
As founder of biker gang dies aged 83...
The 1960s ideal of love and peace died at Altamont, the free festival conceived by the Rolling Stones as California’s answer to Woodstock, in 1969. But the man who was more responsible than any other for the destruction of that dream didn’t die himself until yesterday.
Sonny Barger, founder member of the hells Angels Motorcycle Club, has always maintained that the blame for the violence and murder at Altamont should be placed at the feet of Mick Jagger and the Stones.
But the truth is Barger, dubbed the Maximum Leader, was an uncompromising thug whose contempt for the law was matched only by his capacity for brutality. At Altamont, he claimed, Jagger and the band wanted ‘ a dark scary environment to play Sympathy For The Devil’, and so they hired his infamous gang of outlaws to stand guard around the stage, which was low enough to make them vulnerable.
The result was carnage. The Angels, who were being paid in beer, became aggressively drunk. Brawls broke out and the bikers started assaulting the support acts, knocking out the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, Marty Balin.
By the time darkness fell, the Stones were reluctant to play. Barger, the president of the Oakland chapter of the Angels, was disgusted: ‘Mick and the band’s egos seemed to want the crowd agitated and frenzied,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘I could no longer picture the hells Angels playing the part of bodyguards for a bunch of sissy, marblemouthed prima donnas.’
When the band finally came on, one fan — a topless woman, who was drugged and delirious — scrambled on to the stage, despite the efforts of several Angels to usher her away. The way Barger told it: ‘Keith Richards leaned over to me and said, “Man, I’m sure it doesn’t take three or four great big hells Angels to get that bird off the stage.” ’
NOTORIOUSLY touchy about his personal concepts of ‘honour’ and ‘ manliness’, Barger reacted: ‘I just walked over to the edge of the stage and kicked her in the head.’ Sickened, Richards told the crowd the band wasn’t going to play any more until the violence was quelled.
‘I stood next to him,’ Barger wrote, ‘and stuck my pistol into his side and told him to start playing his guitar or he was dead.’
Worse was to follow. One man, 18-year- old Meredith hunter, tried to climb on to the stage and then brandished a pistol. he was stabbed in the neck, the back and the head by a hells Angel and died on the way to hospital.
Despite this episode, Barger went on to achieve a sort of twisted fame in the decades that followed because, while he was a man with a mean streak a mile wide, he was also articulate and charismatic, with a controlled menace that was glorified for decades in films, books and TV series such as the hells Angels drama Sons Of Anarchy.
he saw the world in absolutes, applying an arbitrary credo which enabled him always to place himself on the side of a cruel sort of justice. his personal laws, he said, were better than society’s rules ‘because they’re unbreakable and they treat everyone fairly’.
‘To become a real man,’ he said, ‘you need to join the Army and then do some time in jail. The slammer teaches you discipline and survival, and to be on time: when those doors open and close each day, you’d better be set.’
Given this attitude, it’s perhaps not surprising that there was a post- script to the Altamont incident in the shape of an alleged assassination attempt on Jagger. When the singer was staying at his waterfront home at the hamptons, on New york’s Long Island, a group of Angels supposedly tried to attack the house by boat — but abandoned the idea after their craft capsized in bad weather.
Barger scoffed at the claim but he almost certainly believed what he said about this tall story. ‘Tell the truth and never lie,’ he liked to insist, ‘except to the authorities. But it’s OK to lie to them, because they lie to us.’
That code was rooted in a harsh childhood. he was born Ralph hubert Barger in 1938, the son of a navvy who took his family with him as he laid asphalt on the road network spreading across California before World War II.
his mother, Kathryn, walked out when he was four months old. As he grew up, she tried to make contact but Barger threw away her letters unopened.
Suspended from a series of schools, Barger learned little except how to start fights, and win them, with teachers as well as pupils.
he was already a drug user when he enlisted in the Army, aged just 16, by forging his birth certificate and lying about his age. When the deception was discovered, he was discharged — which might have saved his life, as it made him ineligible for call-up when the Vietnam War began.
he worked as a janitor and a labourer and, after seeing Lee Marvin in The Wild One, about two rival motorcycle gangs, he bought a bike. Stoked up on pep pills — Dexedrine and Benzedrine — he began patrolling Oakland with other bikers, in a gang called the Panthers. Desperate for a family he could rely on, a fellowship whose members would die rather than betray each other, he sought out friends who shared his contempt for society.
They rode harley-Davidsons with ‘chopped’ handlebars. One of the gang, Don ‘ Boots’ Reeves, proposed the name hells Angels — taken from a 1930 air ace movie.
The brotherhood spread, with offshoots springing up across California. By 1965, when Barger was 27, the reputation of the hells Angels had spread across America — part Mafia, part beatnik, a satanic version of the cowboys who once rode the Wild West.
Journalist hunter S. Thompson made his name by persuading Barger to allow him to ride with them, chronicling the year-long escapade in a book called hell’s Angels: The Strange And Terrible Saga Of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. his association with the Angels ended when he was ‘stomped’ — beaten up and kicked mercilessly — for daring to tell a biker to stop hitting his girlfriend.
Violence against women was part of the gang lifestyle. Barger called his girlfriends ‘ Old ladies’, or ‘Babes. Chicks. Good-time broads. Can’t live without them, can’t use their bones for soup’.
he believed most women were ‘secretly drawn to wilder, more macho guys. It’s just human nature for a lot of chicks. That’s what turns them on.’
Barger was married four times, but never relaxed his rule that women could not be hells Angels themselves. ‘They should be at home cooking the dinner,’ he said.
his first wife, elsie, died when she tried to administer an abortion on herself with an air pump.
‘An agonising but quick death,’ Barger opined, adding that ‘children didn’t fit into my plans.’
he was acquitted of murdering a drug dealer in Texas in 1972 but spent much of that decade in jail on drugs charges.
In 1982, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, after smoking 60 cigarettes a day since his teens.
BARGER was jailed again in 1988 for conspiring to blow up the clubhouse of a rival gang in Louisville, Kentucky. On his release, he began to lead a more settled life, as a mechanic running a motorcycle repair shop.
he published several books and had a cameo role in Sons Of Anarchy, between 2010 and 2012, as Lenny ‘The Pimp’ Janowitz.
Barger died from cancer on Wednesday at his home. In a statement written to be released after his death, he wrote: ‘Know that in the end, I was surrounded by what really matters: my wife Zorana, as well as my loved ones.’
It’s a strange irony that, if Sonny Barger had been given that family love as a child, from the mother who abandoned him, he might never have needed to fill the emotional void with violence and the hells Angels.