‘Gimme Shelter’ Remains Gripping 50 Years After The Bloody Conclusion To Altamont

50 years ago today, on Saturday, December 6, 1969, The Rolling Stones headlined a free concert on a barren hillside in Northern California. Imagined as “Woodstock West,” it was marred by numerous beatings and one murder. Amazingly, cameras were there to capture it all, the footage featured in the 1970 film Gimme Shelter, which is available for rent on a variety of streaming services, and remains one of the most powerful rock documentaries ever made.

Despite the violence ahead, the film begins triumphantly, with road manager Sam Cutler’s famous introduction, “Everybody seems to be ready…the greatest rock n’ roll band in the world…THE ROLLING STONES!” Shot tight, the 5 tiny Englishman on stage fill the whole screen. They are impossibly raw and almost completely out of tune, teetering somewhere between awful and awesome. When the lights go up, we see they’re playing to a jam packed Madison Square Garden.

Cut to the band watching the performances at a film editing suite. The mood is soon dimmed by radio reports of the bloody events of their California concert, which speak of “four births, four deaths and an awful lot of scuffles,” as the band played to 300,000. Directed by noted documentarians Albert and David Maysles, along with their longtime editor Charlotte Zwerin, Gimme Shelter is presented in real time, but flips between before and after the catastrophe, building tension throughout the film.

The concerts were part of The Rolling Stones historic 1969 U.S. tour, their first in three years. It was among the first rock tours comprised solely of large-scale sports arenas and featured groundbreaking improvements in live sound. The Madison Square Garden performances were filmed over two nights on Thanksgiving weekend and would make up the bulk of the 1970 live album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s out.

Between the Garden shows and fascinating footage of them recording at Alabama’s storied Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, The Stones announce a free concert in San Francisco at the end of their tour. “It’s creating a sort of microcosmic society, which sets an example to the rest of America as to how one can behave in large gatherings,” singer Mick Jagger says. He’ll pay dearly for such hubris.

Featuring the cream of the San Francisco hippy bands, the concert couldn’t find a home inside the city and was moved to the Altamont Speedway, 60 miles east. The Hells Angels Oakland and Frisco chapters would provide “security,” as they had at several free Bay Area concerts in the past. However, what they were promised and expected to do remains disputed to this day. “I didn’t go there to police nothin’…I ain’t no cop,” Hells Angels Oakland Chapter President Sonny Barger says in a radio interview. “They told me if I could sit on the stage so nobody would climb over me, I could drink beer until the show was over and that’s what I went there to do.”

When we get to Altamont, the scene is immediately unhinged. Jagger is punched in the face by a crazed concert-goer moments after arriving and hides in a camping trailer with the rest of the band until showtime. Meanwhile, numerous people are seen overdosing or losing their shit on drugs. “A guy’s freaking out,” someone tells Cutler. “So? Tough shit,” is his reply.

Beatings by pool cue wielding Hells Angels and their associates occur during performances by The Flying Burrito Brothers and Jefferson Airplane. When Airplane singer Marty Balin tries to intervene, he’s knocked out. The Grateful Dead arrive and immediately split after hearing about the violence.

When The Rolling Stones finally take the stage they look meek and impotent, surrounded by bikers twice their size and throngs of traumatized fans. One Hells Angel eyeballs Jagger in his red and black silk harlequin shirt like a hungry wolf looking at a plump chicken. Fights break out, the crowd scattering as a line of Angels advance. The band stop and start, trying to quell the violence, but to no avail. There’s a fascinating moment where a kid in the crowd tries to tell Jagger what’s going on, while a biker on the right watches for his reaction. Jagger begins dancing frantically, as if by surrendering to the music, it will all go away. It doesn’t.

A few songs later, another melee ends with the murder of 18-year-old Meredith Hunter, who is stabbed by one of the Hells Angels after pulling out a gun. Back in the editing booth, Jagger and David Maysles review the footage. Maysles asks if Jagger saw it happen from the stage. “You couldn’t see anything,” Jagger says. “It was another scuffle.”

Gimme Shelter ends with Hunter’s dead body being loaded into a helicopter. Another helicopter ferrets away The Rolling Stones moments later, literally fleeing the scene of a crime. The events at Altamont became part of the band’s myth, codifying their image as rock’s ultimate outlaws. The only outlaws there, however, were that small number who through brutal violence were able to terrorize a crowd of 300,000. When the fighting begins during the song “Sympathy For The Devil,” Mick Jagger says, “Something very funny happens when we start that number,” as if by singing about Satan, they’re conjuring his dark powers. But it wasn’t gods or devils who created the nightmare of Altamont, just men.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC. 

Where to stream Gimme Shelter