David and Albert Maysles’ Gimme Shelter is a remarkable achievement. What started as a vanity project funded by the Rolling Stones, to promote their new album, became a chronicle of the death of an entire generation’s hopes and dreams. The action starts, well enough, with the Stones giving a decent New York concert. After “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, we pull back to the Stones watching their footage, along with Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, the third credited director.  The five Stones are complete ciphers, silently smoking their cigarettes as radio reports, giving grim autopsies of the free Altamont concert, paint a picture of complete chaos. No one’s talking about the music, rather about Hell’s Angels, rampant drug abuse, stabbings, and general anarchy. The brief afterglow left behind after Woodstock resulted in one of the most poorly planned and hastily organized concerts in history. “Four births, four deaths, and an awful lot of scuffles reported,” the reporter announces, making one hell of an understatement.

Meanwhile, Mick Jagger blabs on behalf of the Stones at a press concert, managers and lawyers scheme in a boardroom, patching together a free concert at Altamont Speedway after an intended booking at Golden Gate park falls through. The chronology is a bit confusing at first, then the regretful hindsight vantage point really begins to make sense around the time we get to the actual long, hellish day of the concert. Lines of cars stretch for miles, hundreds of thousands of hippies have massed in the middle of a shitty racetrack by dawn, most already bombed on some illegal substance or another. That’s where the Hell’s Angels come in, working as security guards in exchange for free beer. Their entrance, preceded by the roar of their bike engines, is quite ominous, scarier than any restless, drug-crazed mob. They part the crowds with a magical ease, brutally intimidating all in their path. It’s easy to see how they attained a mythical status during that late 60s period. However, this batch of Angels turn out to be violent, remorseless thugs, even more so when alcohol enters the equation. You can see the violence coming from a mile away.

Thanks to dozens of cameramen fanning out in search of abberant behavior or strange human moments, there is no shortage of weird scenes of hippies. Most, predictably, involve drug overdoses of massive proportions. Hippies incoherently babbling while hallucinating, openly making out while smoking joints, and a shocking amount of nudity. As the stage is swarmed, the performances cannot start on time. Delays cause restlessness in the crowd, which lead to some rather brutal “scuffles” amongst Angels and drunken, pissed off concertgoers. Then the music starts, rather dubiously, with the Flying Burrito Brothers, who get in one song before an Angel snaps a pool cue in twain over a half-naked hippie’s skull. Meanwhile, Mick and the rest of the Stones are marooned in their trailers by a restless mob. On and on the nightmare goes.

Jefferson Airplane are a class act, continuing to play on even as drunken Angels stomp what appears to be a harmless black guy, sitting on the stage. As the brother is battered into oblivion by at least four angry bikers, Grace Slick chants “Easy… Please be quiet,” for a while until the sound of general disorder begins to overwhelm her. The lead singer of the group is hit in the face while trying to restrain the Angels, then things get even more violent. “You’ve gotta keep your bodies off each other unless you intend love,” Slick goes on. “Let’s not keep fucking up!” They cut their set short, probably wishing they followed the Grateful Dead’s example and backed out entirely. Meanwhile, the crowd continues to grow anxious,  a general unease abated somewhat by the endless flow of drugs and alcohol.

Finally, long after midnight, after a dramatic re-entrance via helicopter, the Stones come in for their set. Jagger looks like even more of a jackass, cooing to the crowd about “keepin’ it togetha,” and saying the same “let’s have a look at ya” line that didn’t seem so utterly forced before the comparatively tame New York performance. Halfway into “Sympathy for the Devil”, wouldn’t you know it, some other sap gets pounded into the dirt and swarmed by Angels. The song was subsequently removed from their touring playlist. Cutting back to Jagger in the editing room, he looks increasingly put-off by his portrayal in the film. Indeed, as he fruitlessly pleads with the crowd to stop fighting, “behave as brothers”, “act like we’re all one”, and so forth, he couldn’t come across as more of a useless pansy. The rest of the band, chain smoking and being anonymous silent douchebags as usual, can’t even sustain interest in the disposable pop songs they’ve been playing for years on end.

Gimme Shelter doesn’t glorify the Stones in any way, despite their heavy involvement in its production. The cameras capture a lot of quick, fleeting action in massive crowds as well as giving plenty of ground-level angles to make the musical performances more interesting. As a “rock doc”, it’s servicable, with enough music to satisfy fans of the rapidly aging mega-group, but as a social document it’s invaluable. Everything’s raw, unprocessed, following the Maysles’ direct cinema doctrine, which forbids voiceovers or interviews. This is about the worst concert ever given on American soil, and the horror that comes hand in hand with expectations crumbling violently before your eyes.

The actual stabbing death of zonked out, would be assassin Meredith Hunter, is captured for a few fleeting seconds. Two stabs from an Angel’s huge-ass Bowie Knife prove to be fatal and a fitting end to the Stones’ set. A few minutes before sunrise, they finish with the obligatory “Revolution” [ed. note: Low Down reader Dan Deeny has corrected my blunder. The actual song is "Street Fightin' Man". Thanks, Dan.] hop into a helicopter and get the Hell out of Dodge. Meanwhile, 300,000 concertgoers deal with hangovers and ungodly long walks to their parked cars. Poor Dick Carter, owner of the Speedway, trying to use the concert as a way to boost his reputation and instead causing the name of his race track to be associated with the metaphorical “death of the 60s”. At least nobody ever planned a free concert this poorly again. As the crew walks away into the cold December morning (appropriately, the dawn of December 7, that most infamous date), the title song plays. “Rape, murder… It’s just a shot away.” At least Hunter’s cheapo .22 revolver didn’t hit its intended target (likely Jagger). The decisive, yet excessively violent response proved to be a reminder, before this immense crowd, that Woodstock was a fluke unlikely to be repeated. Even with repeated attempts, some 40 years later this still turns out to be depressingly true. While Woodstock ’94 wasn’t the complete anarchic meltdown that Woodstock ’99 would turn out to be, it was no more than a depressing gathering of aging hippies and soulless “adult contemporary” artists. The zeitgeist done passed by.

Fun fact: George Lucas is one of the 23 credited camera operators listed in the end credits. Apparently he shot 1oo feet of unusable film before his camera malfunctioned.

Tags: albert maysles, altamont, charlotte zwerin, david maysles, gimme shelter, hell's angels, rolling stones, woodstock

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