RIP: Hells Angels founder Sonny Barger dead: Motorcycle club leader ‘passed peacefully’ from cancer at 83.

Barger wrote six books, including an autobiography titled “Hell’s Angel – The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club,” in which he detailed the infamous 1969 Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in Livermore, California.

The Angels were on hand as security for the Rolling Stones at the counterculture event where Santana, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performed. It was designated the “Woodstock West” with the Grateful Dead headlining.

But the concert became so bloody and violent with multiple fights and the stabbing death of concert attendee Meredith Hunter by Hells Angel Alan Passaro that the Dead refused to perform. The entire incident was caught on tape and became the basis for the 1970 documentary”Gimme Shelter.”

Flashback: 53 Years Before the Astroworld Concert Disaster, There Was Altamont.