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Sam Cutler claim to distinction is that he has served as tour manager for both the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead — and he is finally willing to talk about the experience. The English-born Cutler got his start in the 1960s working at free concerts at London’s Hyde Park, including a particularly famous one by the Stones that turned into a memorial for original member Brian Jones. That concert led to a job tour managing the Stones for their legendary 1969 American tour, which ended tragically at a free concert at Altamont, just outside San Francisco, when an attendee was stabbed to death by Hells Angels handling security.

Cutler’s long, strange trip continues after Altamont when he joined the Grateful Dead’s organization. After whipping their touring department into shape, he took the band across Europe in 1972 and then Canada on the famed but doomed ‘Festival Express,’ where some of the biggest names in rock ‘n’ roll stayed up and jammed for days on end, fueled by drugs, booze and one another. All kinds of fascinating folks show up in Cutler’s new tell-all book, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ — from Janis Joplin and Syd Barrett to shady gangster types and other unsavory characters. But the most intriguing story is that of the man whose job was to hold it all together: Mr. Cutler himself.

I was always under the impression that the Rolling Stones hired the Hells Angels to do security at Altamont, that the Hells Angels just mercilessly beat an innocent fan to death for no apparent reason and that it was the accident that killed the ’60s. Your story paints quite a different picture.

Yeah, well, that’s all on the media, isn’t it? It was all media bulls—, that kind of narrative. It was just rubbish, man. And that’s why I took a long time to write this book. You need distance and time to analyze things in order to really see them in their true perspective.

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