rolling stones - altamont

OK, so millions of words have probably been written about the Rolling Stones fateful gig at the Altamont Raceway in the dying days of the 1960s. The night of 6 December 1969 was cold and the assembled crowd was estimated at nearly 200,000 strong. For complex, and with hindsight, stupid reasons the Stones decided to use the local Hell's Angels as security, and it seems they were at least partly paid in wine, beer and narcotics. If anyone had been sober that day it would have been obvious that this was not a good combination...

 

I've come across an excellent matrix of two or possibly three audience recordings of the show, skilfully mixed together to recreate the whole gig. All the source tapes are very good, especially for 1969 recordings, and considering that this was late into the night, cold and dark, the tapers were probably hungry, tired and stoned, and also when you consider all the violence that was going down.

 

Only the first song, "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is muffled - you can hear Mick's vocals and Keith's guitar very clearly but the rest of the band seem to be absent. But when "Carol" gets going the sound dramatically improves and is a perfectly good listen from then on. The tapers appear to have been near the front, where the audience was squashed against a low stage with 200,000 other hippies behind them. And this places them right in the midst of all the violence. It makes for a frightening listen at times. "I wanna get out" mutters a scared, confused guy. "We got nowhere to go" is the equally scared sounding reply. When scuffles break out and halt "Sympathy For The Devil" you can hear various audience members screaming and shouting. The sheer confusion is actually quite disturbing to hear. Jagger tries to calm things: "Why. Are. We. Fighting? Brothers, sisters, who's fighting and what for?" It's clear what he's trying to do, but it's equally clear that his heartfelt words have little effect. 

 

Throughout the gig there's lots more of Jagger (and Richards: "look, if those cats don't cool it, we're splitting") exhorting the crowd to calm down, much more than I was familiar with from the Gimme Shelter movie. And also lots more from the Angels, who periodically grab the mic to angrily shout stuff like "Everyone sit down and shut up or you won't hear any more music" which really doesn't help. At one point Stones road manager Sam Cutler (who does all the intro announcements) comes back to the stage and orders everyone except the musicians off the stage, as by the middle of the set the stage was almost full of Angels, swigging beer and whacking anyone who came near with broken off pool cues. 

 

Then there's the horrendous bit halfway through "Under My Thumb" where the song grinds to a halt as Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death only yards from the stage. High on goodness knows what, he was waving a shiny pistol around, like the sort you'd see in cowboy films. Apparently it wasn't loaded, but a couple of equally high Angels simply took Hunter out, stabbing him five times and then stomping on him. The Stones couldn't see what exactly was happening, but it was clear very quickly that something very awful had happened. In the break Jagger sounds scared and extremely worried as he relays messages: "er, we need a Doctor. What's that, we need an ambulance down here? Oh… we need an ambulance... I really don't know what's happening." 

 

Later on the crowd seems to calm down a bit and Jagger nervously tries a few "Whooo, you're great, what a fantastic audience" type announcements. But you can clearly hear that his heart isn't in it and it's all false bonhomie, simply trying to cool things down. Oddly though, despite all the trouble, or perhaps because of the trouble, the Stones play superbly. The version of "Gimme Shelter" is incredible, arguably the most powerful I've ever heard, and songs like "Live With Me" and "Street Fighting Man" are shot through with genuine desperation and anger. 

 

It's not the best Stones recording by any means, though for an audience tape from 1969 it's pretty strong. But it's a valuable recording - on a par with something like Iggy and the Stooges' Metallic KO as a brutal slice of music history.