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(More customer reviews)Many people identify this as the greatest rock documentary ever made. I'm not sure it quite deserves that label (my vote would go for the older T.A.M.I. film, which has not yet been made available on DVD), but it is certainly the most interesting and frightening. Clearly it started off as a documentary of the Stones 1969 tour of the United States (which I believe was their first U.S. tour following the death of Brian Jones and his being replaced by Mick Taylor), but everything changed once Altamount happened. The death of Meredith Hunter at the hands of a member of the Hell's Angels, who had been employed to maintain security at the free concert the Stones gave in San Francisco, takes over the film, changing it from a documentary about the Stones on tour to a murder that took place at a Stones concert.
Until about half way through the documentary, the film is still primarily a documentary about the Stones. But once the cameras get to Altamount, the crew (which included as a cameraman young filmmaker George Lucas, though none of Lucas's film was included in the film due to a camera jam) catches the increasingly nasty atmosphere at the concert, with fans ascending the stage, fighting with the Hell's Angels, fighting with each other. The Grateful Dead, scheduled to play, declined to do so when they heard that Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane had been beaten up onstage by the Angel's (we see a brief shot of Jerry Garcia reacting incredulously to the news of the violence). By the end of the film, the viewer is left with a completely sickened feeling of the stupidity of everything he or she has just seen.
The violence completely obscures the fact that the Stones were at the time precisely what the announcer at the beginning of the film announces: the world's greatest rock and roll band. The performances, especially the earlier ones in the film, but also in the raw tape of songs like "Brown Sugar," are stunningly good, and it is especially apparent the new great guitar edge that Mick Taylor has brought to the band (Jones brought an across the board brilliance, and could add everything from slide guitar to upright piano to sitar to the mix, but was probably not quite Taylor's equal as a guitarist, and Taylor also brought a new reliability that contrasted with Jones's increasingly erratic behavior in his last year with the band). On the other hand, in the film the band largely disappears at time. Apart from Mick Jagger, the Stones are not always a palpable presence in their own film.
Historicism could be defined with focusing on the meaning of history rather than the objective telling of the events of history, or recounting the events for the sake of getting to their supposed underlying meaning. Sometimes it even involves projecting onto events meaning they would not otherwise have. Altamount is easily one of the most historicized moments in the history of both the sixties and rock and roll. Altamount is rarely treated as an isolated tragedy, but is more frequently regarded as a turning point in history, as if it were when the sixties came crashing to an end (something that I feel can more rightfully be ascribed to Kent State). I don't personally understand this need to project some story of apocalyptic closure to the decade. I'll merely state that I don't think that we should see anything more in Altamount than a tragedy that ought otherwise to have been prevented. It should it not be baptized as, nor was it, a defining moment in history.
One frustration I had with the film is that far too often the camera isn't focused on what was happening. There is a tendency for the film to merely drift at times. For instance, while the Flying Burrito Brothers, there are only a couple of incredibly brief shots of Gram Parsons's back. We can hear him singing the song, but we never see him actually singing it. Earlier, when performing the great Robert Johnson song "Love in Vain" (featuring some of the most powerfully poetic images ever written by an illiterate individual), the camera completely abandons a real-time observation of the performance, and lapses into a near fantasy-like viewing of Mick Jagger swirling about the stage in slow motion.
Anyone who loves this film, or merely enjoys it, should definitely read the Stanley Booth book THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF THE ROLLING STONES, which covers the precise same events as the film, but in much greater detail and with more insight both into the events surrounding Altamount and into the members of the band. It is one of the great classics of rock journalism.
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The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter - Criterion Collection (1970)Called "the greatest rock film ever made," this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour. When 300,000 members of the Love Generation collided with a few dozen Hell's Angels at San Francisco's Altamont Speedway, direct cinema pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin immortalized on film the bloody slash that transformed a decade's dreams into disillusionment.
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