Sometimes it’s right there on film.
During the latter part of 1969, documentary directors David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin loaded up their cameras and recorded “the greatest rock & roll band in the world,” the Rolling Stones, both onstage during a couple of live performances and at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, AL, where they were laying down tracks for their upcoming album, “Sticky Fingers.”
Everyone involved ended up with considerably more than they were expecting when filming began, and not in a good way, as far as the Stones were concerned. The resulting movie is an often disturbing study of the twisted relationship between the public’s perception of the Stones and their own artistic identity.
For most of “Gimme Shelter”’s running time, you see the hectic nature of the Stones’ shared existence as they deliver an incendiary Madison Square Garden performance and work on their songs down in Alabama.
If decades of this band treading lucrative water has dulled you to what once made them so great, the show at the Garden will be a real eye-opener. It’s as vital as any live rock & roll footage you’ll ever see.
An entire documentary of just that concert would be memorable enough. But there’s way more going on here than that.
The Stones, you see, suddenly decided to stage a big event to wrap up their wildly successful North American tour, the very first of its kind. And no one wanted to disappoint the Rolling Stones.
The filmmakers repeatedly return to the Stones’ disorganized management team desperately preparing - on extremely short notice - for a free concert at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, a little gathering that was being promoted as an encore to Woodstock’s momentous, albeit considerably deluded, freeform love-in.
But the band members don’t concern themselves with such niggling details as how many tens-of-thousands of acid-gobbling people are likely to show up, as well as how those people are going to be fed, toileted, and kept safe.
Little did the Stones know that their whim would generate one of the more infamous mass-meltdowns in rock & roll history, including the stabbing death of a gun-toting fan by members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club who were recruited to guard the stage.
And there would be cameras there to record it.
It was hideously appropriate that the concert, which finally drew an estimated 300,000 revelers, opened with a groundswell of bad vibes - the Angels punch out Jefferson Airplane guitarist Marty Balin during that band’s opening performance - and closed with a murder.
Outside of Jim Morrison, whose self-satisfied “poetry” was too adolescent to be taken completely seriously, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were the only earth-moving Sixties rock icons who lingered on violence in their songs and hedonistic persona.
Blues men that they were, The Stones investigated the dark side of the music at a time when virtually everyone else of their exalted status was busy counting flower petals (their personal attempt at that kind of thing didn’t go very well) and they convinced millions of people to shake their asses to the beat while they did it.
They fanned the flames for so long, and with such reckless charisma, there almost had to be a nasty conclusion.
Or am I just imagining that?
This kind of apocalyptic talk usually generates little more than another jaded shrug from Jagger. He’s addressed it in interviews many times over the years. He may well be right in his argument that it’s easy enough to affix symbolism to an event in hindsight, that what went down at Altamont was simply a situation that got out of hand and some poor kid wound up dead.
People get murdered every day, after all.
So maybe this doomed free concert wasn’t the end of the Sixties experiment. Like every other development in our society, the decline of rampant Sixties idealism was a gradual transition, not the result of a bomb being dropped. Zonked-out denizens of Haight-Ashbury didn’t toss their beads and flowers in the trash the day after Altamont hit the newspapers in favor of carpooling and pursuing their broker licenses, even though tons of them would eventually do exactly that.
But if you’re trying find a single moment when the Great Collapse began, Altamont will certainly do in a pinch.
Not everyone in the Stones’ audience was bright enough to understand that this was all theater, that their heroes were, to a certain degree, playing roles that had been thrust upon them.
Truth be told, Mick and Keith were really just middle-class college dropouts who invented a new brand of hard-charging rock & roll, then raised the stakes several dangerous notches with the addition of hard drugs and Jagger’s bisexual allure. The trouble is, Jagger and Richards seemed to be buying into their own publicity, which is what happens when you get incredibly rich, famous, and pampered for making a distinctive noise and telling people to fuck off.
Throw in the Hells Angels as concert security - they were paid with $500-worth of beer - and the decade was about to end very badly indeed.
The band is forced to stop several times in an attempt to quell the Angels during the fractured Altamont performance, as Jagger surely begins to realize he’s in big trouble. Even when viewed from behind, as he faces the audience, you can practically see this horrible knowledge enter him physically.
A moment comes when he stops dead in the middle of his usual frenzied dancing and stares into the crowd, wondering what to do next, with the only conceivable answer being, “God only knows.”
This is a shocking instant of self-recognition that could just as readily have happened in a restaurant or a hotel room somewhere, given the size of the Stones’ audience. It’s quite astonishing that it was filmed.
Jagger finally starts pleading with the crowd to calm down, like a weary schoolmarm trying to control her classroom.
Needless to say, it doesn’t work.
Keith, for his part, isn’t having it, and starts berating the Angels for their inclination toward beating the shit out of people, which is something the Stones should have thought of a whole lot earlier than in the middle of the concert.
Richards actually threatens to pull the plug on the show, an act that almost certainly would have created a deadly riot. His response to the Angels seems either brave, quixotic, or extremely foolish, depending on how you want to look at it.
Eventually, an Angel stabs and kills a young Black man named Meredith Hunter as Mick and the boys blast out a bedraggled, half-believing rendition of “Under My Thumb.” You get to watch that happening, too. The camera catches the beginning of the deadly scuffle, and you see the Angel lunge at Hunter with his knife.
Paul McCartney has pointed out that the Beatles could have gone in any direction they wanted to go with the extraordinary influence they had in millions of people’s lives, but they always went with love.
Now, some people will roll their eyes at Mr. Goody Two-Shoes, Paul McCartney, saying that. But McCartney was and is no idiot. It illustrates that the Beatles had more respect for their power as cultural figureheads than the Stones ever did. Due to copious amounts of drugs and booze, and simply not giving a shit, the Stones were too often careless about things.
And it finally bit them on the ass at Altamont.
Zwerin and the Maysles brothers did something risky and rather fascinating during the editing process of “Gimme Shelter,” when they filmed Jagger and drummer Charlie Watts watching the concert unfold on an editing console, in much more detail than they could have managed from the Altamont stage (all of the Stones were invited, but only Mick and Charlie showed up.)
These revealing, surprisingly meta pieces are interspersed throughout the picture. Jagger looks embarrassed and partially humiliated while he watches. He takes pleasure in his onstage antics, but often lowers his eyes when things get out of hand. He’s being cavalier, as usual, but he seems to recognize the significance of what’s occurred.
Watts, on the other hand, is obviously saddened by the tragedy. After listening to a taped “explanation” of the killing by Hells Angels president Sonny Barger, Watts’ collapsed expression reveals the quiet humanity behind his cool demeanor.
There are also moments of unexpected levity, most coming courtesy of everybody’s favorite junkie funnyman, Keith Richards, who looks, in the studio anyway, like a rock & roll skeleton.
While recording in rural Muscle Shoals, Keith delivers an amusing pitch for Goo-Goo Clusters candy bars, then tops it off with a rotten grin that suggests he should invest in a hard-bristle toothbrush.
He appears to be…um…in some way inebriated. Or maybe in several ways.
Another rich moment is Jagger strolling through the parking lot of a Holiday Inn while duded-up in a white suit, an eight-foot long red scarf, and a huge red velvet cap that looks like something one of the Cosby Kids might wear.
But that’s the calm before the storm.
“Gimme Shelter” is one of the greatest documentaries ever made. It records an incident that came to define the latter part of a turbulent decade for many people, and clearly illustrates the transcendent power of rock music itself.
The Stones’ performances are definitive. There’s also an electrifying interlude with Ike and Tina Turner at the Garden, during which a full-bodied, mini-skirted Tina all but strokes her microphone to orgasm.
Turner’s dynamic stage presence briefly upstages Jagger’s posturing via the very things that originally drew him to the music- Blackness, sex, energy, desire, and public release. Even before Altamont explodes in his face, he’s made to seem, regardless of his obvious talent and magnetism, rather like a skinny white boy pretending to be something he isn’t.
It’s a revealing moment, in a movie that’s filled to bursting with them. If you haven’t seen “Gimme Shelter” before, you need to check it out.
I have never reconciled the fact that I love the Stones with all my heart yet find them totally irresponsible in many many ways. This is an essential movie indeed.
This was a rude awakening for my high school pals and I when we sat for the midnight movie in 1979. We were thrilled going backstage with our naughty heroes, but how could they let it all go south? Surely Lou Reed and his bunch moved the earth with hedonism and violence, yet didn't have the funding to kill on a grand scale. Love is all you need.