A British Broadcasting Corp. documentary airing tomorrow will report that Mick Jagger escaped an assassination plot in late 1969 by the Hells Angels. The Rolling Stones singer “had vowed not to use Hells Angel members as bouncers following the death in December 1969 of an 18-year-old fan at a notorious free performance at Altamont Speedway in Northern California” so gang members decided to kill Jagger at his holiday home in Long Island, the BBC show reportedly claims.

So what happened? The Angels lost their will to kill? They couldn’t get past Jagger’s security people? Something tells me that your garden-variety Hells Angels psychopath of that era didn’t have the stealth or the smarts to pull off a celebrity hit like this.

Eons ago some friends of mine had to deal with a second-rate motorcyle-gang psychopath who went by the name of “Wild Bill.” It was 1:30 am in a small apartment that three of us were staying in next to a performance bar called Fat City in Wilmington, Vermont. And somehow Wild Bill muscled his way in and wouldn’t leave. (I was asleep in the bedroom.) He was fried and dangerous, they said. You could feel the boiling rage. He wore a chrome-plated Nazi helmet. My friends decided to humor him. It was that or maybe get knifed.

Wild Bill got his switchblade knife out soon enough, and my two friends and he began to throw it at the kitchen door. Except Bill began to get more and more angry that his knife-throws weren’t sticking. (My friend was better at this than Bill was, but he felt he had to deliberately miss so as not to enrage Bill all the more.) Then a new game started with Bill putting a wad of cocaine into a rolled-up dollar bills and then blowing it into a recipient’s nostrils, like a dart gun. Each friend took a nose blast or two.

It went on and on like this until at least 4 am. I missed the whole thing, thank God. I wouldn’t have been very good at the humoring part.