Sam Cutler looks pretty good this morning as he sits, dressed top to bottom in black, in a Toronto coffee shop. The face is lined and creased, for sure, the hair messy and greying under a cap that reads “The Wrecking Crew.” The ’stache is not as piratical as in days of yore.
Still, for a 67-year-old who lives in a bus when at home in Australia, the physique is admirably trim, the eyes clear and focused and – impressively for an orphan born in Britain before the advent of the National Health Service, and whose working-class adoptive parents were devout communists – he has his own set of teeth. In short, and Cutler is short, he seems very much the spry senior.
There was a time, though, when Sam Cutler might as well have had horns on his forehead, methane spewing from his nostrils, and a big, red tail – such was the man’s notoriety.
I never took drugs to excess, because I was too busy working: A tour manager has to stay on top of things, mate.
That would have been in 1969, when he was serving at the request of their satanic majesties, the Rolling Stones, managing the group’s historic 17-date tour of the United States. It was Cutler who, show after show that fall, introduced Mick, Keith & Co. as “the greatest rock-’n’-roll band in the world” – a handle Cutler had coined earlier at a concert in London’s Hyde Park. It was Cutler, too, who was the nominal MC of the group’s free final show, a hastily organized outdoor gig at the desolate Altamont Speedway east of San Francisco.
Altamont was supposed to be “the greatest party of 1969,” as Cutler himself told the crowd of 300,000 that December day. With scheduled appearances by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Flying Burrito Brothers and, for the finale, the Stones, on paper Altamont looked like a condensed Woodstock. Instead, it became a Boschian swarm of bad vibes, bad drugs, freak-outs and unchecked violence, with aggressive Hells Angels meting out pool-cue justice to passive hippies. Altamont and the documentary about it, 1970’s Gimme Shelter, marked the figurative end of all the hopes, idealism and pretensions embodied in the term “the Sixties.”
Unsurprisingly, the Stones – and by extension, Sam Cutler – were deeply implicated in the debacle. After all, it was Cutler who functioned as the Stones’ liaison with the San Francisco music scene, the band’s blowhard lawyer, Melvin Belli, and the Angels, who were ostensibly brought in to work security. It was Cutler’s $500 (about $3,000 in today’s currency) that paid for the beer that kept the Angels lubricated by the Altamont stage. It was Cutler who later claimed that the Stones performed after sunset not because they wanted a dramatic closer but because they were waiting for bassist Bill Wyman to return from a San Francisco shopping trip with his wife.
It was while Mick Jagger sang Down to me/The change has come from Under My Thumb that an 18-year-old African-American named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by an Angel.
All this is included in Cutler’s newly published memoir – new, that is, in North America. You Can’t Always Get What You Want actually surfaced two years ago in Australia, where Cutler, now a citizen, has lived since 1998, and where he has two sons, age 12 and 15. Subtitled My Life with the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and Other Wonderful Reprobates, it is the first in a projected series of five autobiographical yarns, the last of which he expects to call Sex for the Over-80s and Other Improbable Tales.
Senior citizen though he is – and a practising Buddhist, too – there remains a touch of the “wheeler-dealer bad boy,” as a Grateful Dead insider once put it, that must have endeared Cutler to the Stones, and then the Dead, with whom he served as “executive nanny” from 1970 to 1974 and established the blueprint, he says, that “took them from earning nothing to earning a fortune.” Indeed, one of the two silver skull rings on Cutler’s right hand bears the Dead’s famous lightning logo – a sign of membership in the fabled Dead “family.”
