A little bit of background – The year was 1969 - the
Rolling Stones hadn’t toured America since 1966. In the interim, they made one crappy album [Their Satanic Majesties Request] and two
classics [Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed]. Mick and Keith were busted for drugs once in
1967. Brian Jones was busted for drugs
three times. Brian’s girlfriend Anita
Pallenberg left him for Keith. Brian did
more drugs, became increasingly dissipated and increasingly unreliable. In June 1969 the Stones fired Brian and
replaced him with Mick Taylor. Three
weeks later Brian was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool. Two days after that the Stones played their
free concert in Hyde Park.
After they finished making Let It Bleed they toured America.
Filmmakers Albert and David Maysles made “fly on the wall”
documentaries. They filmed the Stones
playing one of their first shows of the tour at Madison Square Garden [audio
from which made up the live Get Your Ya-Yas
Out]. Filming went well there so the
Stones invited them along to film the rest of the tour. Not only did they film the show in New York,
they also filmed a photo session for Get
Your Ya-Yas Out, the band at Muscle Shoals, and the free concert at
Altamont.
Interspersed
among all the music is the behind-the-scenes negotiating for the Stones to put
on a free concert at the end of their tour.
After getting some grief from fans and journalists about ticket prices
the Stones decided they would put on a show for free. They hired attorney Melvin Belli [who
apparently liked the sound of his own voice] to negotiate the details for
putting on the show. Belli got a lot of
screen time in a movie about the Stones. The first location was supposed to be Golden
Gate Park in San Francisco, but the city said “no!” The second option was Sears
Point Raceway. The owners said “no” –
they wanted $300,000 up front to cover potential damages. The owner of Altamont Speedway said he wanted
the publicity, so he said yes. Let the
games begin!
Songs in the film:
New
York – Madison Square Garden
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
Satisfaction
Love In Vain
Honky Tonk Women
Street Fighting
Man
Ike
& Tina Turner [they opened for the Stones] – I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.
Tina looked great!
Muscle
Shoals
[no actual recording – just listening to playbacks only]
Wild Horses
Brown Sugar
You Got to Move
Then
the scene shifted from Alabama to California.
The Stones arrived by helicopter to see a huge mass of humanity there
waiting to see them perform. Michael
Lang of Woodstock fame is there. For me
that was a foreshadowing of doom since Woodstock was a mess, but I
digress. People were finding places to
camp out and watch the show, a white woman was soliciting funds for the Panther
Defense Fund, another woman was dragged off-stage before the show – “I wanna
see Mick Jagger Goddammit!” Then the Hell’s Angels showed up with their pool cues, and the games began.
Altamont
Flying
Burrito Brothers – Six Days on the Road. The Angels beat the shit out of one guy as
the song was ending.
Jefferson
Airplane - The Other Side of This Life. They didn’t
finish the song. Marty Balin jumped off
stage into the crowd, only to have his face smashed by a pool cue. He got better… Paul Kantner and one of the
Angels got into an argument - "Hey, man, I'd like to mention that the Hell’s
Angels just smashed Marty Balin in the face, and knocked him out for a bit. I'd
like to thank you for that." To which a Hell’s Angel sitting on stage
grabs a microphone, and replies: "You're talking to my people. Let me tell
you what's happening. You, man, you're not happening!" Grace Slick pled for sanity…Jerry Garcia and
Phil Lesh got the scoop of what was happening from Michael Shrieve [Santana’s
drummer] – the Dead opted not to play.
Smart move…
The Stones went on after dark. The relative calm that was the Flying Burrito
Brothers vanished almost immediately. From
this movie one gets the impression that things were so bad at Altamont that the
Stones played only three songs and got the hell out of Dodge. The concert didn’t happen that way. Things were pretty bad, but the editing made
it look even worse. They played a full
set, but only three numbers from Altamont were shown, including:
Sympathy for the Devil – they
stopped playing, Mick tried to “cool out” the crowd because the Angels were
wreaking havoc in front of the stage.
Mick - “Always something funny happens when we
start that number”… ya think?
Keith – “Either those cats cool it or we don’t
play!”
Under My Thumb – as the song
finishes, then a black guy in a lime green suit holding a gun gets stabbed in
the back by one of the Angels. He died
at the scene. He went to the show with a
white girl. In slow-motion, you can see
his gun silhouetted against her. I did a
little research, and according to what I found the guy who did the stabbing was
acquitted of a murder charge. He claimed
self-defense because of the gun, and the jury bought it. What the film doesn’t show is how the Angels
were hassling this poor guy for bringing a white girl to the show.
Street Fighting
Man
– just a few seconds was shown. Then
they quick-cut to the Stones hauling ass out of Altamont on a helicopter. There are lots of people staggering out in
the darkness, like some post-apocalyptic scene.
Jagger looks at the camera in horror after seeing the guy getting
stabbed. The freeze-frame makes him look
like he’s seen a ghost [maybe he did…]. Cue
the song Gimme Shelter…
The
Joe Bob Briggs Score - One dead body, four naked bodies, drunk angry Hell’s
Angels tripping on bad acid, unconscious singers, Charlie Watts actually
speaking, pool-cue fu, knife fu, wasted concert-goers fighting, and the hippie
dream born at Woodstock killed dead.
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