Gimme Shelter
Photographer Ethan Russell’s 1985 book, Dear Mr. Fantasy, contains what may be the most remarkable photographic document of the rock ‘n roll era. It’s the stage at the 1969 Altamont Speedway Free Festival, looking out at the crowd, several paces behind a singing Mick Jagger. While a Hell’s Angels member stares at the crowd, a multitude of faces spill against and over the small stage strewn with red rose petals (the origin of the title of Wings’ Red Rose Speedway album?). The fans’ faces run the gamut, from exultant to fearful, numbed, blasé, concerned. One bespectacled fellow several rows back is surreptitiously recording the concert with a microphone hidden in his jacket. Without sound or music, the scene looks like a vision from Dante. What Albert and David Maysles accomplished, with Charlotte Zwerin, was to film 90 minutes of the before, during, and after of this event. All the static figures in the photo, including the bootlegger, are suddenly alive and real.
It’s become a cliché that the Altamont Festival was the end of the hippie era, but what else can you call an event in which fans — and even band members — were methodically beaten by drunk, out-of-control Hells Angels? (Jefferson Airplane’s guitarist Marty Balin was punched in the head and knocked out by an Angel.) The tone for the ill-conceived venture was set when Mick Jagger got off the helicopter and was immediately punched in the face by an unknown assailant irrationally shouting, “I hate you, I hate you!” It could only go downhill.
Gimme Shelter doesn’t start there, though. Unlike many documentaries, Gimme Shelter is constructed and shown without voice-overs, explanations, or context. That may sound like a detriment, but what’s on the screen says it all. Mixed with footage of the Rolling Stones performing an earlier, more successful gig in Madison Square Garden, the doc shows members of the group studying playback reels of the Altamont disaster, then footage of the preparations for the show (which included Ike and Tina Turner, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; The Grateful Dead were intended to perform, but smartly left soon after they arrived). The Stones had worked before with British Hells Angels — a relationship that didn’t prepare the group or their managers for the rowdy and violent nature of the West Coast gangs, who were asked to protect the stage at Altamont, and were “paid” with cases of beer, some of which was thrown at audience members, in one case causing a skull fracture.
By the time the Stones arrived on stage, night had set in, the crowd (a substantial percentage on hallucinogens) was squeezed and unruly and the Angels’ beatings had continued, with sawed-off pool cues and motorcycle chains. It’s fittingly during the songs “Sympathy for the Devil” and the mean-spirited “Under My Thumb” that a drugged-out black audience member, armed with a gun, is stabbed to death by an Angel (the Maysles capture it on film). Meanwhile, Jagger is feebly, confusedly pleading with the crowd for peace and non-violence. He’s out of his element, and at the whims of a maelstrom out of his control. But then, everyone near the stage is.
Afterwards, concertgoers are seen leaving the area at night in starkly lit compositions that remind one of George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. As Albert Maysles described in an additional commentary, many audience goers stuck around after the show and the beatings continued throughout the evening.
The Criterion Collection‘s reconstruction of the film is a revelation. Unlike the original release print (a 16mm film blown up to 35mm), the DVD utilizes the original 16mm print, looking better than it did in theaters. In addition, the sound has been remixed and restored to stereo, as opposed to the original 35mm mono mix. The DVD is packed with extras: 89 minutes of a 1969 call-in radio show about the concert, voice commentary by the living directors of the film, backstage footage, recording studio footage and more, all important.
Michael R. Neno, 2015 Mar 19