Creativity Quote by Paul Kantner

Kantner’s line is a refusal to let a convenient villain carry the whole story. The Hell’s Angels are the headline-ready bad guys in the post-’60s mythology, but he points the camera back at the crowd - at the audience that came to consume a “scene” the way you consume a show. It’s a musician’s version of the cold shower: you don’t get to mythologize chaos as someone else’s problem while you’re standing in it, cheering it on, or pretending it isn’t happening.

The context is the hard comedown from the era’s utopian branding, especially around Altamont, where the dream of peace-and-love was staged with the same logistical naivete and moral outsourcing that made it dangerous. By blaming “the people who were there,” Kantner is also blaming a culture that treated counterculture as theater: pay your ticket, take your drugs, watch the spectacle, then walk away with a story. The subtext is complicity - not just in violence, but in the appetites that invite it: the thrill of transgression, the hunger for authenticity at any cost, the belief that “freedom” means nobody’s responsible.

It works because it flips a familiar narrative. Scapegoats are comforting; they preserve the fantasy that the movement was pure and only corrupted by outsiders. Kantner, a believer and insider, suggests the rot was structural: if you hand authority to people with power and no accountability, and you show up as a crowd instead of a community, you’re not witnessing history. You’re helping produce it.