Day 97: Gimme Shelter (1970)

Sometimes, in the rarest of occasions, filmmakers are just at the right place at the right time. For documentary masters the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin, the place would be the “Altamont Speedway Free Festival” and the time would be 1969- the beginning of the end for the hippie counter culture.

The last year of the 1960′s had been of one of both highs and lows for the world at large. The Beatles had played their last concert atop the Apple records studio on a cold January morning, Buzz Aldrin took “one giant leap for mankind” on the moon in July, Woodstock promoted peace and music in August and, by December, the first United States lottery draft was enacted since World War Two for Vietnam. The world was spinning fast and “The Rolling Stones,” one of, if not the most, popular band of the time, felt like spinning it faster.

As David Maysles, Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin filmed the Stones’ infamous U.S. tour, the band came up with the idea of organizing and headlining a free concert in California that they hoped would gone on to be considered something along the lines of a west coast Woodstock. From its inception, the idea was marred by difficulty, including both the San Jose State practice field and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park turning down the opportunity to host the event for both scheduling and legal reasons. Finally finding a home at Altamont Raceway two days before the concert was to occur, people from all over the country flooded the area to such an extreme that security, provided by the ”Hell’s Angels,” who were told all they had to do was keep people from the stage and drink beer, found themselves utterly outnumbered.

300,000 strong, the youth culture, who had all turned on, tuned in, and dropped out to a point far past self-destruction, created immediate chaos for the festival and were getting high on every drug imaginable while growing increasingly hostile and violent by the second. Literally standing on the stage, the crow was uncontrollable and their thirst for the Rolling Stones could not seem to be quenched by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, who went on to play but were constantly interupted by fights going on amongst the crowd. It got so bad that one of the band’s members was hit in the face, not by a fan, but by a Hell’s Angel’s security guard, causing a yelling match between the band and the biker in front of everyone.

Finally, after making the crazed masses wait for hours on end, the Rolling Stones came to the stage and the violence and pandemonium grew worse than ever, culminating in Meredith Hunter, an eighteen year-old African American, pulling a gun on a Hell’s Angel and being stabbed and kicked to death by the group’s members. It is this incident that makes up most of ”Gimmie Shelter,” as both the Stones and the filmmakers try to figure out how and why the entire festival, and a whole generation for that matter, went so sour so fast.

To best do this, the Maysles and Zwerin look at the festival and it’s tragic events like a post-mortem, picking it apart to best find the cause of its demise. From start to finish, the film occasionally cuts to an editing room as the Rolling Stones, primarily Mick Jagger, grimly watch footage of the festival and then, of course, the murder, which they rewind and watch multiple times as if trying to come to grips with the part they played in the fiasco.

Though tension is easily brought to the film simply by the actions of all at the festival, the filmmakers find a way to give it an edge by cutting back and forth between the festival’s music and the ever pressing of the crowds. As the music crescendos so does the tension and we watch a strange mix of hostility and drugged up hysteria come together and explode. Even if we didn’t know of the famous Altamont murder, we know very quickly that the film won’t resolve peacfully or quietly. There is just too much rage for the this wave of sex, drugs, and rock and roll not to crest and fall.

Though “Gimme Shelter” is one of the greatest music documentaries ever made, it rises far above that and has become pure evidence of a time long past, a people quickly stereotyped, and a movement that nailed its own coffin at Altamont.

To learn more about “Gimme Shelter,” check out Criterion’s page here.

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