FROM MY FILMLEAF COVERAGE OF THE ALBERT MAYSLES MEMORIAL FILM FESTIVAL (May 8-14, 2015, SAN FRANCISCO)


MICK JAGGER AT ALTAMONT IN GIMME SHELTER

The Maysles chronicle a rock concert that went terribly wrong

Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones' disastrous free concert in California in 1969, is one of the Meysles brothers' three most famous documentaries, the other two being their debut, Salesman, about four working class Irish Catholics hawking expensive Bibles to poor people in Opa-lacka, Florida, and their inimitable portrait of the two eccentric Bouvier Beale ladies in their crumbling East Hampton mansion, Grey Gardens . All three were made within only seven years of each other. And yet they are worlds apart.

The Stones film is directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, and edited by Ellen Gifford, Robert Farren, Joanne Burke, and Kent McKenney. It comes after the Maysles 28-minute Madison Square Garden Stones concert film called Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out and uses some footage from that film in its first part, including a scene of the stones on a highway posing with a donkey -- along with sequences of San Francisco celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli in his colorful office conducting conference calls to set up the venue for the concert. The conceit, and a telling one, is to edit the key segment of Gimme Shelter as a long flashback. The footage of the disastrous event is thus framed by shots of the Stones, Mick Jagger in the foreground with his face glued to a screen, watching the Maysles' concert-and-fighting footage on monitors and reacting. At the end there is a freeze-frame of Mick's solemn expression as they walk out of the screening room; David Maysles is behind them with his headphones on as usual.

After this, as a quiet coda, we are returned to the concert film to see the youthful crowd walking away in the bright sunny morning, looking fine, suggesting that for some, Altamont was not, after all, a nightmare. But earlier as we watch the footage the Stones are watching, we have seen many people writhing and naked and some clearly going through bad drug trips. And we have seen scuffling, beating with pool cues, and the stabbing. In this setting, the Rolling Stones don't look or sound very good. In the screening room, we see Mick shown in slo-mo and freeze-frame how Meredith Hunter, the 18-ear-old black art student in the green suit, got stabbed o death by a big Hells Angel. And we see Mick and the other musicians struggling to perform while the unruly masses press upon the musicians, as Hells Angels brutally beat them back.

Why, we wonder, was Woodstock, a much more complex event with many performers, a festival of peace and love, while this California free concert was a nightmare of disorder and fighting up close to the stage? There are two apparent answers from the film: haste, and Hells Angels.

The film follows the Maysles' Direct Cinema approach so nothing is explained that the footage does not itself make clear. But we hear early on a news report that there were four births and four deaths at the concert. There were many injuries as well. As for the matter of haste, it becomes clear that Altamont Speedway wasn't the first venue for the Stones' free concert. According to a Wikipedia article, San Jose State practice field was originally proposed, then Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, then Sears Point racetrack, and all were scratched, the latter at the last minute. Time was running out and, with Melvin Belli doing the maneuvering, Altamont was chosen as a last-minute measure. Woodstock's Bethel, NY venue was a last minute move from Wallkill, NY. But Woodstock had been months in the preparation, Altamont was not, and became a much worse failure of preparation, without toilets or medical tents, or parking, and with a generally more violent atmosphere. And the terrain where the stage had to be set up was wrong for a big concert. Instead of being at the top of a rise as Sears Point would have been, the stage was lower than the audience at Altamont, causing the audience to flow down onto it. This appears to be why the Hells Angels were asked to provide security, something Jefferson Airplane had done, but another huge miscalculation, because the bikers seemed bent on mayhem.

At Altamont the acts were Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with the Rolling Stones the final act. We get more of a view of Jefferson Airplane -- and the fighting and hassles are already causing the musicians to interrupt their performance, as the Hells Angels knock out Marty Balin of The Jefferson Airplane.

Gimme Shelter is not much of a concert film, or even much of a film about a collective event. As either, it pales in comparison with Michael Wadleigh's festive and engrossing Woodstock. But it's a remarkable film, and as coverage of a dangerous situation that was to be a kind of ugly landmark, the Mayesles' film is bold and intense stuff. Sadly, it is ultimately more memorable than Wadleigh's colorful chronicle as an event film. It vividly illustrates how unwise it could be to pack an estimated 300,000 people into spaces that are not designed for such a purpose, and how dangerous it is to mix youth, drugs, and alcohol in an environment without adequate organization or control. Altamont was greeted as the end of the flower child era of peace and love. Though this was premature, the Haight Ashbury section of San Francisco did go rather quickly downhill after the 1967 Summer of Love. Altamont took place in the wintertime. Rock has its dark side, and it should be noted that the Stones' opening number at Altamont was "Sympathy for the Devil."

In addition to its footage at the start from Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out of the Stones performing in Madison Square Garden and out on a highway with a donkey, Gimme Shelter also shows them in a recording studio in the South. This feels like filler, and recycling, but perhaps it is necessary to provide a framework and easy slowly into the main action.

Gimme Shelter is not a pleasant film to watch -- still disturbing after all these years, and particularly painful for anyone who ever wanted to believe that Berkeley and San Francisco were the home of the Flower Generation. Did the Oakland chapter of Hells Angels like the Rolling Stones? It doesn't look like it. The Maysles are just telling it like it is. Five years earlier they had made a very different British invasion film, the lighthearted What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964), recording cooing, screaming girls and relaxed and intimate scenes from the first visit of the Fab Four, with John, George, Paul and Ringo looking surprisingly young and sweet. With remarkable access and foresight in both cases, the Maysles skillfully recorded the most famous representatives of the two opposite sides of the rock music coin. Gimme Shelter records an event that was taken as the decisive sign that the hippie period had turned sour and big outdoor rock had shown its ugly, violent side.

Gimme Shelter, 91 mins., debuted in the US 6 December 1970, on the one-year anniversary of the Altamont concert. Screened for this review on the Criterion Collection DVD, with commentary by Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin and the KSAN discussion radio post mortem, on the occasion of the Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival organized by David L. Brown at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco, May 8 - 14, 2015.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.