Film Friday: The Rolling Stones – 'Gimme Shelter'

In 2006, I saw the Rolling Stones at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. I didn't have great seats and the show kicked off with some guy named Kanye West rambling about golddiggers. Nonetheless, it was quite powerful, with Mick Jagger dancing his head off and Keith Richards doing his best to stand up straight. The Stones' modern empire has been built on shows just like the one I saw, plus all the revenue they get from the 'lips' logo and endless re-issues of their music. However, that empire was not built as effortlessly as we may think. The Stones' history includes plenty of dark events and among the darkest days is December 6, 1969 – the day of the free Altamont Speedway concert in San Francisco.

In 1969, just before they released Let It Bleed, the Stones when on a tour of the U.S. and documentary filmmakers David Maysles, Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin deiced to make a film about it, starting with their Madison Square Garden show in November. The Maysles brothers had previously filmed The Beatles on their first American tour in 1964 and while that tour was frenzied, the atmosphere surrounding the Stones in '69 couldn't be more different. The tour was set to culminate with a free show somewhere in San Francisco. At the last moment, it was moved to Altamont and organizers, well...just couldn't get it organized. Thus, what started out as a typical document of a rock tour turned into something else.

Gimme Shelter, the resulting film, starts off innocently enough. We see footage of Mick introducing the audience to the “breakfast show” at Madison Square Garden before going into “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.” There's funny images of drummer Charlie Watts with a goat, taking the cover to Get Yer Ya -Yas Out!. Then things turn serious. The viewer is taken to the editing room where the filmmakers are putting the movie together. A stunned Watts and Jagger try to make sense of the footage, months after Altamont.

So what made Altamont the disaster that it was? There is plenty of blame to go around and the Maysles brothers and Zwerin appear to be saying that the Stones could have been at fault as well. The audience hoped it would be “Woodstock West,” but that would be pretty hard since this was supposed to be a one-day event. Only a handful of acts were set to perform before the Stones, including Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Then, the Hell's Angels were recruited for security. But the Hell's Angels hated the people they were supposed to be protecting and were constantly getting into fights with the audience. It was essentially a disaster from the start and Gimme Shelter captures all that.

Even though Gimme Shelter came out in 1970, long after the entire world had heard about the Altamont fiasco, you can see that the filmmakers still try to show the better moments from the Stones' '69 tour. We see a few more performances from the New York City show and even a song from Ike & Tina Turner is thrown in. There's a fun scene at the legendary Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, with the guys mixing “Wild Horses.”

But the specter of Altamont is always around, building until the final moments. If you know how it unfolded, you start to squirm when you hear them start “Under My Thumb,” because at that moment, Meredith Hunter and a member of Hell's Angels get into a fight. Hunter is stabbed and killed after he pulled a revolver on the Hell's Angels member. Since so many fights had gone on during their performance, Mick just tried to shrug it off, having no idea what had happened. “You couldn't see anything, it was just another scuffle,” he tells David Maysles in the editing room. Seeing Mick watch the film is powerful and easily one of the reasons why Gimme Shelter is one of the best rock documentaries.

I watched Gimme Shelter recently, right after I watched D.A. Pennebacker's Monterey Pop. If that event was the ushering in of the 'love generation' era, capturing the optimism of the time, Gimme Shelter puts the period at the end of the sentence as reality sets in and a new decade begins. Gimme Shelter is more fascinating that it should be, with its depiction of the Stones in the middle of chaos. It all makes it hard to sympathize with the devil.

On Home Video: Gimme Shelter is a member of the Criterion Collection, which released it on Blu-ray in 2009. While there's a commentary from the filmmakers and extra footage of the Stones, the most fascinating feature is excerpts from KSAN Radio's 'day after' program. In it, then-DJ Stefan Ponek talks with witnesses about the Altamont disaster.

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image: Amazon