Forty years ago today, the 1960s came to an unholy end. As evening approached on Dec. 6, 1969, the Rolling Stones, who were then just reaching the height of their street-fighting Satanic majesty, took the stage at Altamont, a hastily organized, all-day-long free rock concert held on the outskirts of San Francisco — an event planned, in essence, to be a kind of Woodstock west. Infamously, though, this was no happy-mud orgy of peace, love, and good vibes. The very fact that the concert was held next to a gritty speedway was a sure sign that no one there was really planning to get “back to the garden.” From the start, the crowd was testy and anxious and very drugged up, marked not by that moony-eyed, almost bovine Woodstock benevolence but by a certain West Coast aggressive good-time solipsism. Over the course of the day, scuffles broke out, most of them prompted, in one way or another, by the Hell’s Angels, who had been hired, for $500 worth of beer, to patrol the front of the stage, which they did using sawed-off pool cues as weapons.
Shockingly, the stage was only four feet high, with nothing but a few yards of grass in between the audience and the performers. I’m not sure if a Miley Cyrus concert would come off without a bare-knuckle fight or two under those conditions. As the day wore on, the unruly incidents escalated, and by the time the Stones took the stage, the whole event was a pressure cooker looking for release. Just after the band finished playing “Under My Thumb,” Meredith Hunter, a young black man in a lime-green suit, high on methamphetamine and brandishing a gun, was stabbed in the back, five times, by one of the Hell’s Angels; he died shortly afterwards. This sickening event was immortalized when it was caught on film by David and Albert Maysles, who featured it in Gimme Shelter (1970) as the horrific snuff climax of the ’60s.
Here’s what I wrote in EW about this cinéma vérité classic when it was re-released in 2000:
“Gimme Shelter…remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller. It’s like Woodstock directed by Oliver Stone. As the movie spirals toward its bloody catharsis, it feels like nothing so much as a rite of exorcism, with the queasy yet inexorable pull of multiple dark forces coming together. The Hell’s Angels, it’s clear, were looking for a fight (in an era that hated the cops, they got to be the cops), and the concert was atrociously planned…Yet none of this might have mattered much if the hippies, roughnecks, and love generation waifs weren’t already imploding under the anarchic spell of their own freedom. What they needed shelter from, it turns out, was themselves.”
Thinking back on Altamont, it’s easy to get moralistic, to view the concert as a lesson that the counterculture needed to teach itself. The hippies were trying to create a life without rules, based on the idea that if you let people be “free,” they’ll be good to one another. That, of course, was a notion profound in its naiveté. So Altamont was, in a sense, a kind of comeuppance to the arrogance of youth. The first half of Gimme Shelter features the Stones on stage at Madison Square Garden, in the middle of their 1969 tour, and it’s still amazing to behold the cock-of-the-walk Sybaritic grandeur of Mick Jagger in his prime, as he flounces and gyrates and struts around in an American-flag top hat. Later, on stage at Altamont, launching into “Sympathy for the Devil,” he is put in the paradoxical position of being chastened, if not downright intimidated, by the anarchy unleashed by his do-what-you-feel charisma.
Like most people, I’ve always thought of Altamont in terms of what ended that day. The counterculture would, in many ways, go on — for a lot of folks, it was just getting started. There was more indulgence in “sex, drugs, and rock & roll” in the first half of the ’70s than there ever was in the ’60s. What crashed and burned at Altamont (with more than a bit of a deathly jump start a few months earlier by the Manson murders) was, of course, the idealism, the utopian reverie of the ’60s: the vision of a harmonic rainbow society that could overturn the established order. That dream died because, in hindsight, it was always a starry-eyed boomer fantasy.
Yet watching Gimme Shelter again just a few days ago, what struck me most about Altamont is that it also marked, in its way, the beginning of something. As the Rolling Stones perform, the area in front of the stage becomes, in effect, the world’s first mosh pit. Our eye keeps getting drawn to the crowd as it surges and buckles. Mick Jagger is doing the same moves that were so mesmerizing in the Garden concert, only now, in a strange way, he’s upstaged by the power of the audience. They take over the concert; they take over the movie. And suddenly, the Rolling Stones are mere bit players in their own rock & roll seance. What you see in Gimme Shelter, apart from the end of the hippie dream, is the dawn of a new age, the one that we’re in right now, with the audience surging forward to become a drama unto themselves, maybe even threatening to take the place of the artists they once revered.
What a scary decade.
You mean this decade that’s about to end? Yeah you’re right…
Gimme Shelter is a unique cultural document, and there’s much to mine there. I wrote a short piece about it last year: http://diarrheaisland.blogspot.com/2008/10/nightmare.html.
Who the hell are you and why should we care? Also, your blog has a god-awful name. I’d change it if I were you.
You’re absolutely right, Owen. The Altamont concert has long been held as this cultural benchmark signaling the end of 60′s hippie innocence. ‘Gimmie Shelter’ makes a strong case for this argument as it vividly documents how that particular event went oh-so-wrong, but in doing so the film also reveals – albeit less obviously – an evolving music business too. That particular Stones tour revolutionized the industry with its concentration on larger venues (i.e. arenas instead of clubs) and a more sophisticated sound system to accommodate them. Simply put: more tickets sold = more $$. [Let's not forget that Jagger studied economics before joining the band.] In demonstrating to their peers how touring could be done successfully on a bigger scale, I’d argue that the band was also a huge influence on the corporatization of rock in general, however unintentionally. In that sense, the disaster that was Altamont was an anomaly, a free concert that also became a hard-learned lesson on how NOT to put on a big show. But if the huge arena tours of the 70′s – featuring the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Kiss, the Who…and the Stones, of course – are any indication, the biz quickly learned how to better exploit the burgeoning cash cow of rock tours and got organized.
Which isn’t to suggest the Stones should be entirely blamed for the corporatization of the music industry. Given their chronic tax woes at the time, you can’t really fault the band for wanting to make touring more profitable for themselves. Similarly, I resent how certain movie critics love to blame the massive success of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Jaws’ for creating the summer event movie, supposedly ending the golden age of 70′s cinema. You can’t fault Lucas and Spielberg for delivering first-rate, mass-appeal entertainment. Blame the studios who’ve been feverishly trying to duplicate those successes ever since.
There are a lot of things about the Altamont concert that bear mentioning. One of them was the fact that the concert was so hastily assembled; the promoters had about 24 hours to get everything set up, which is almost impossible when you’re expecting more than 300,000 fans to show up. It was also very cold when the concert was held and the bristling Santa Ana winds didn’t quell down the already sick atmosphere at the concert. Also, one of the acts scheduled to appear was The Grateful Dead. However, they decided not to perform after finding out that Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane was knocked out by The Hell’s Angels, perhaps rightfully sensing that they might get hurt, too. It took about three hours for The Stones to get onstage and it was almost midnight. So, you look at the Altamont situation that way and it seemed only inevitable that a disaster was about to occur. For me, Altamont was a Murphy’s Law for the rock generation. It showed how everything that could go wrong at a concert can go wrong, horribly and tragically.
The other thing worth mentioning. The Hells Angels have historically been blamed for the murder of Meredith Hunter. And yes, while the Angels were guilty of some terrible behavior – the killing of Hunter was not part of that. Mr. Hunter was packing heat and looking for trouble – and if the guy who stopped him was not a member of the Hells Angels, he’d be considered a hero. The politically correct narrative has always been ‘the racist biker murders a poor black man’. Watch ‘Gimme Shelter’ closely and you see Meredith Hunter, way before the murder, standing in the crowd, all jacked-up on some bad s**t reaching into his pocket making sure his gun is there. The whole event is sad and depressing, and absolutely riveting. That day, the Angels did everything wrong – and everything right. That’s life.
Altamont was just a big bar fight that’s been turned into a myth. a bunch of people got loaded, a bunch of people got into brawls, and somebody got killed. happens every weekend in every city in the country.
I have to more or less agree with couchgrouch. These events are mythologized beyond all reason after they happen. Intellectuals heap importance on these events, but I guarantee you the empty-headed morons who made up the culture did not, even instinctively or intuitively, feel this “change” at all.
For a more in-depth look at “Ten Mesmerizing Images from Gimme Shelter,” please check out http://www.larrygetlen.com
I was there but I was so loaded I didn’t remember that it was midnight when the murder happened. I can’t remember what bands were playing that day. I thought it was Santana but I am not sure. Anyone have a list of the bands playing at Altamont? I knew by the time Altamont happened that the “love generation” had died, Altamont just solidified my opinion.