David Maysles showed Jagger the arc of Passaro’s knife, and pointed out Hunter’s gun, seen against the white expanse of Patti Bredehoft’s crocheted dress. We watched Jagger watching, and then we watched him get up, stretch, and bid the filmmakers farewell: “See you all.” The moment, when placed near the close of Gimme Shelter, ended with a freeze-frame of Jagger’s quasi-diabolical face. Jagger was being silently upbraided for his emotionlessness, his perverse calm in the face of death. But the stipulations of direct cinema had prevented him from having a forum in which to share his feelings.
Jagger’s response to Hunter’s death had undoubtedly been lacking in expressions of generosity or care, but it seemed somewhat unfair to expect him to emote on cue without even the prompt of a question or conversational gambit. Zwerin’s decision to place Altamont within the frame of the Stones’ watching their own catastrophe was undoubtedly proven wise, but it was a bridge too far to accuse the band of callousness when the film itself prevented them from doing much in the way of speaking. The Rolling Stones had treated their fans poorly, but the filmmakers had the perverse effect of raising sympathy for the devils themselves.
The new footage transformed their Altamont story from a document of a misbegotten day in the world of rock ’n’ roll to a disquisition on death, moral responsibility, and the fate of youth culture. Jagger’s risky calculation to cooperate with the film relied on the idea that even bad publicity was good publicity.
When Bank had a chance to view the footage they had shot, a week or two later, she instantly knew that Zwerin’s idea had been inspired. Watching Jagger watch himself, Bank felt her heart skip a beat. This would be the glue they needed. A mass of jumbled footage had now become a film. The experience of making the film had been a formative one for Bank, who felt that she had been granted the privilege of seeing a group of filmmakers work through an immensely complex series of problems while maintaining their devotion to the ideals of direct cinema. It was, she thought, the bedrock of her understanding of how a good documentary might be made.
The film’s ingenious organization allowed all the brilliant but nebulous footage that Zwerin had worried would sink the movie to silently pose the question of responsibility. Zwerin had abandoned the element of surprise by front-loading the film with hints of the killing itself, allowing its ghostly presence to hang over every moment of unknowing youthful exuberance, every chord, every smile, and every fistfight. And Jagger and Watts were threaded throughout the film, watching the footage we were watching ourselves in a form of silent commentary on the steady unraveling of Altamont. The film would never be the second coming of Woodstock because even its most joyous moments would be haunted by the death of Meredith Hunter.
The disparate bits of misaligned footage shot by the Maysles brothers and their crew—concert tours and press conferences and partying fans and rampaging bikers and drug burnouts and rock music, all capped by a tragic and unavoidable death—had been unified by Zwerin, who instinctively understood that the film required the presence of a spectator who might observe the wreckage of the counterculture’s high hopes.
Jagger had disappeared after the concert, content to hide out from the headlines and avoid the finger-pointing from across the Atlantic. But he, too, grasped—whether instinctually, or after the prodding of his advisers—that it would be better to be seen confronting the events at Altamont than be perceived as ducking them. After months of dithering by Jagger, filmmaker Donald Cammell, who had directed him in the film Performance, took on the task of convincing him to overcome his fears about potential embarrassment or damage to the band’s reputation. Mick Jagger, with the agreement of his bandmates, chose to do something riskier, and more interesting: he agreed to let the film be released as is.
With his appearance, Jagger metaphorically signed off on the Maysleses’ film, approving their investigation into the dark heart of the culture he had done so much to build. In so doing, he also subtly aligned himself with the investigators, and not the culprits.
12. “We Blew It”
The mythos of Altamont would stipulate that it had been an immediate turning point in the decade, in the story of music, in the story of the counterculture as a whole. Everything had changed on that day. The 1960s had come to an abrupt end—or so we were later told. But the actual coverage of the concert and its aftermath was sparse, confined primarily to regional or specialty publications. And of what little there was, much of it was misguided or flagrantly incorrect, on the order of the San Francisco Examiner’s “300,000 SAY IT WITH MUSIC.” The local television coverage was largely adulatory.
Rolling Stone, as the bible of the rock world, had devoted an entire issue to unraveling the story of Altamont, but few others had seriously explored the story of the concert, beyond bare-bones reporting about Meredith Hunter’s death. It would be the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin’s film, now given the title Gimme Shelter, after one of the Rolling Stones’ most famous (and gloomiest) songs, which would open the floodgates to reconsidering Altamont.
One day after the first anniversary of Altamont, Gimme Shelter premiered at the Plaza Theater in New York. Initially, Universal had purchased the rights to the film, seeing a Woodstock-sized hit in the offing. Then a financial dispute led to Universal pulling out of the project, and the far smaller Cinema 5 Distributing, owned by Donald Rugoff, taking over. Rugoff, who liked to screen films for college students before deciding whether to purchase them, had initially turned down Gimme Shelter, deeming it too downbeat. Then Baby Jane Holzer, an actress affiliated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, saw the film and convinced her husband Leonard Holzer to put up the money for the film. Rugoff reconsidered and agreed to distribute Gimme Shelter.
The critics were flummoxed about how best to analyze the film, or even how to describe it. Was this a documentary? A promotional film gone awry? Was it a fiction film, in which real-life characters were drafted against their will to play predetermined roles?
The emerging American New Wave of filmmakers was only just beginning to remake Hollywood in its image—The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde had been released just three years earlier—but there was a growing sense that its stylistic advances were rooted in the collective desire to seek out a gritty reality that its glamorous studio forebears had ignored. As Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols renovated the feature film, documentary filmmakers like D. A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman promised an unfiltered glimpse of real life in their work. Music lay at the heart of this new wave of nonfiction films, with Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, about Bob Dylan, and Monterey Pop joining the likes of Woodstock and Gimme Shelter. That so many of these documentaries featured larger-than-life celebrities, and that the stories they recorded were carefully planned routines executed by trained performers, were ironies built into the foundation of the new documentary, long before Gimme Shelter was ever conceived.
Gimme Shelter simultaneously continued and undid this trope. It was a concert documentary in which the music itself was essentially an afterthought, a film about musicians in which the musicians were transformed into the audience for the unplanned spectacle of a misbegotten day. Its most successful contemporary, Woodstock, had been a lifestyle film as much as a concert movie, forever distracted, and entertained, by its cavorting, gamboling, marijuana-smoking, acid-taking, nudist sprites. Gimme Shelter was equally interested in its audience, but was an anti-lifestyle film, a demonstration of all that might go wrong with the counterculture. Its musicians and its bright young things were both sidelined, literally shoved offstage by the callous, brutish, road-hardened bikers intent on seizing control. It was direct cinema in the truest sense, with the filmmakers surprised by the gap between what they believed their movie would be and what it actually was.
The final film, clocking in at a brisk ninety-one minutes, was a hybrid product, a zippy jaunt through the Stones’ American tour interspersed with the increasingly frantic preparations for the free San Francisco show. It was a crime film initially cloaked as a behind-
the-scenes celebrity profile, warning us obliquely of what might follow. “Everybody seems to be ready,” a voice (later revealed as Sam Cutler) observed portentously at the very start of the film. “Are you ready?”
The London shoot overseen by Zwerin had turned the film inside out, transforming a concert movie into an extended flashback that ran the bulk of the film. Jagger and Watts were observed as they listened to the KSAN broadcast, alternately rejuvenated and deflated by the parry and jab of the arguing voices. Sam Cutler’s ardent defense of the Hells Angels had Watts nodding his head and smiling, while Angel Sonny Barger’s referring to the bikers as “the biggest suckers for that idiot that I ever did see” made Jagger look up in surprise and frown.
The camera was fascinated by Jagger, constantly seeking him out, letting him fill the entire screen, with his bandmates relegated to walk-on roles. But Zwerin’s London shoot, and the subsequent frame it provided for the film, shrank the Rolling Stones from superstars to bystanders. Jagger smiled as he watched himself performing onstage, leaping and shouting with abandon, but the editing machine’s tiny screen, a frame within the frame, made even the biggest rock ’n’ roll band in the world feel more than a bit trivial. Jagger watches himself at the press conference, opining ribaldly to a roomful of journalists about his degree of satisfaction, and cocks his head skeptically: “Rubbish.” The film’s title, too, appears framed in the Steenbeck screen, a subtle reminder that everything we would see here had been crafted and organized by the filmmakers. Rock ’n’ roll, the Maysleses subtly hinted, was not just anarchy and joyous noise; it was a posture, an extended pretense that occasionally dismayed even its most ardent zealots.
The film appeared to take place at two distinct paces: the relaxed trot of the American-tour scenes, in which the Stones bantered with each other and dazzled a series of astounded audiences, and the disintegrating landscape of Altamont, at which disorder and calamity burst into an all-out sprint. Zwerin’s editing gave Albert’s camerawork the room necessary to breathe, to offer its own brand of subtle commentary. In one of the scenes filmed at Muscle Shoals, the Alabama studio where part of the Stones’ new album Sticky Fingers was being recorded, Keith Richards, his skin blotchy from one too many hard nights, taps his alligator-skin boots and sings along with their new song “Wild Horses,” transported by the music. David prodded his brother to move to a close-up of the boots, and then Albert whip-panned over to a frowning Jagger, clearly more distressed than elated by their latest single. One real-time juxtaposition spoke volumes about the relationship between the Stones’ two stars, and their divergent styles.
For a movie that professed to be the definitive record of the disastrous concert at Altamont, a surprising percentage of it focused on other matters. Half the film would pass before the cameras arrived at Altamont, and almost two-thirds before we caught our first glimpse of a marauding Hells Angel. The London frame changed the entire feel of the film, so that every shot of the Stones playing Madison Square Garden, or of Melvin Belli pontificating about concert parking, was fraught with foreboding. It introduced a healthy skepticism that might otherwise have been absent from the film, posing unspoken questions that lingered over the entirety of the Stones’ frayed celebration.
The question remained: had the Maysles brothers adequately taken the Stones to task for their failings? The direct-cinema style prevented them from definitively articulating how much of the blame they believed the Rolling Stones deserved. Were they wholly responsible? Partially responsible? Entirely blameless? Direct cinema also prevented the introduction of that which could not be filmed, so the question of the culpability of the Grateful Dead and their staff went mostly undiscussed in the film.
In its final version, Gimme Shelter documented the fraying of the counterculture, and of the fatal illusions of rock ’n’ roll. It was not, in the end, an unalloyed indictment of the Rolling Stones in particular, or a call to action against the killers of Meredith Hunter. It was, instead, a hybrid, continuing the backstage eavesdropping of the Maysleses’ films on Brando and the Beatles with a critique of the culture that had made them superstars. And Meredith Hunter was less a real figure here than a symbol—of bad planning, of generational hubris, of the Hells Angels’ viciousness. It spoke volumes that we never heard Meredith Hunter’s name in the film.
* * *
Prior to the film’s release, Leonard Berry profiled the filmmakers in a lengthy Los Angeles Times feature, mentioning that he himself had left Altamont early, finding it too hard to hear the music or enjoy himself. David Maysles agreed with Berry, obliquely referencing Joan Churchill’s LSD experience in describing the challenges his crew had faced in shooting the film. He complained that “I used to go home at night during the editing of this film and say, ‘How could we get such incompetent photographers?’ You should see the mess of stuff we have.” The presence of the Hells Angels, too, had affected the quality of the footage they assembled. Having the Angels in front of you at all times “can make for an awful shaky camera.”
He went on to note that the tragic arc of Altamont had imposed itself on the shape of the film: “We wouldn’t even have made the film if we didn’t have something that was interesting as a film. After Altamont (had there been no murder) we might have given over the footage or gone on to make a film about a world tour or something. But something happened that was very interesting, so interesting that it made it almost an obligation to do it.”
For David, the unexpected factor that transformed a concert film into a statement about an entire generation was violence. The horrors of Altamont mirrored, on a smaller scale, the bloodshed taking place in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. “It’s important to tell the truth about this in the same way that it’s important to tell the truth about My Lai and a lot of things that are going on,” he argued.
Albert hinted to Berry about the scrutiny their work had received from the Hells Angels, and the tense interactions the filmmakers had already had with the bikers intent on seeing, and potentially suppressing, their work, while refusing to share cinematographer Baird Bryant’s name with the reporter.
Albert understood, though, that contrary to the initial assumptions of all involved parties, it was increasingly possible that the Altamont footage would be exculpatory, not incriminating: “Actually, it could turn out that by giving his name the Hells Angels would just love him and send him flowers and candy because it’s the footage that shows not only the knifing but also the gun. So it may end up that that material may be of some help to the guy who committed the murder.” It was telling, however, that Albert still used the word “murder” to describe the interaction between Hunter and the Hells Angels. The gun might be enough to get Alan Passaro off the hook at his impending trial at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, due to start four days after the film’s release, but Albert still believed it to be murder nonetheless.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Zwerin was the most thoughtful on the subject of the film’s genesis, and on the ultimate structure it took. “The film to me is about looking at a thing,” she told Berry. “I don’t like to use the word but it’s a kind of ultimate voyeur experience. I felt that the Stones—being the center of the whole event, the moving force—would be the people who could really see it by seeing it again.” The film’s audiences would look at the fans hoping to look at the Rolling Stones, and then look at the Stones looking back at those fans.
What was the message of Gimme Shelter? Even the filmmakers themselves could not agree. Albert, reading from a paper clutched in his hands, suggested that “all that was wrong in America was there that day.” Charlotte demurred: “I don’t believe that.” And David gamely attempted to link the atmosphere of their film to that of America circa 1970: “The racial thing, violence, I think it’s all there.”
The release of Gimme Shelter was, first and foremost, a belated opportunity for its reviewers to revisit Altamont, and to take a second look at a story the media had mostly missed the first time around. There had been surprisingly
little coverage of the concert in the days and weeks after Altamont, and even less criticism of the events that had transpired. Gimme Shelter’s arrival offered up, with the benefit of a full year’s hindsight, a definitive judgment on the day’s failings. “For some obscure reasons, the terror of that Walpurgisnacht Rolling Stones rock concert on a California auto speedway has never had as much impact on the American consciousness as it deserves,” argued Newsday in its review of the film. “Gimme Shelter … puts the event in new perspective and suggests some sobering implications.”
Something about the film encouraged dramatic readings, asked audiences to see the footage of one Saturday in Alameda County as representative of the way we lived now. Its strengths and its flaws were the country’s, and its makers represented the body politic en masse. “Gimme Shelter is a stunning film,” opined the Hollywood Reporter, “one of the most persuasive pictures to date to reflect a reality that unspools with the force of fiction.” Gimme Shelter was, the Village Voice’s Molly Haskell believed, “a film of and by America.”
If the country was, as later chroniclers of the era like Rick Perlstein would argue, experiencing a sub rosa civil war between left and right, Altamont was a full dress rehearsal, with the ultrapatriotic, quasi-fascist Angels emerging triumphant over the well-intentioned but fatally disorganized liberal hippies, whose greater numbers were not matched by an equivalent ferocity of purpose.
Political and social meanings were everywhere, waiting to be drawn out from the tale of a failed utopia consumed by violence. Even William F. Buckley Jr., doyen of the conservative elite and not a man one readily associated with the likes of Keith Richards, saw fit to weigh in on Altamont, echoing the growing consensus that it had spelled an untimely end for the counterculture. Jagger was “fascinating because one simply does not know what it is that he does that is fascinating.” (Buckley also described Jagger and the Stones, hilariously enough, as “homely.”) At the end of the film, after Hunter is killed, “they crowd like sardines into the helicopter, and fly out of the lonely crowd, leaving behind them the corpse of Woodstock Nation.”
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 23
