Word: altamonte
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WHAT'S most refreshing about the Maysles' naivete is its sustained self-serving obtuseness. Of course Altamont was a complex event, and it is charitable of the Maysles to help us deal with that complexity by ignoring a number of its main actors, the better to appreciate the intricacies of the remainder. I'm sure. But once you've excised John Jaymes of Young American Enterprises, Sam Cutler, the Dead with their bright ideas, once you've reduced Belli to a harmless comic figure, and the Stones to unwitting spectators of their own spectacle, who's loft but the Angels...
...Like the Altamont myth on which it feeds, Gimme Shelter is the product of slick, tabloid sensibilities, which is not to say that the filmmakers may not be sincere. But what remonstrance is possible to someone capable of saying, as Albert did, that "I think we would have been disappointed if everything had stopped just at Madison Square Garden." It not for the Angels, and if not for Meredith Hunter, described to me by David Maysles as being dressed in a "nigger zoot suit, straight out of the nineteen-fifties, you wouldn't believe...
That can mean only one thing: the return of Satan's Jesters, otherwise known as the Rolling Stones. Just in time, too, to keep rock from losing its evil leer for good. After a fairly quiescent 18 months-the Altamont tragedy sobered a lot of people, the Stones included; four deaths will do that-Mick Jagger and his fellows are back with a new U.S. distributor (Atlantic) and their own label, Rolling Stones Records...
...bike culture burgeoned, the Angels' legend became as grimy as their beards, Levi's and leather vests. In 1965 they tore up an Oakland peace rally. Four years later came Altamont. Commissioned to protect Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones at a rock concert held at the California speedway, the Angels waded into the crowd with pool cues, leaving an 18-year-old black, Meredith Hunter, dead in their wake. (The Angel who killed him was acquitted on the ground of self-defense.) It all bolstered the legend that the Angels were the toughest, meanest cyclists around...
...subculture itself has been on that same trip, suicide. It has gone from Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock to Altamont, Hendrix, and Joplin. The music of the middle-and late-sixties is not being made any more. The concept of being brothers with the Panthers and the Vietnamese dragged people into having to care about politics, or not caring at all. And neither option was compatible with the carefree days of mind-expansion...