Gimme Shelter

I grew up with Boomer parents, and not just Boomers, but legitimate, tie-dyed-in-the-wool San Francisco hippies (Dad was 22 and Mom was 20 in 1969). As is the case with many Boomers, the "back in the day" was strong with them, so I was constantly hearing tales about growing up in the epicenter of the hippies and 60's music. Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury, the Fillmore West ... and then, spoken about with sadness and regret and darkness, Altamont. I was not unfamiliar with the events that happened there. I'd heard my dad's recollections, and read unbiased accounts. Over the years, I'd heard stories about how Gimme Shelter was this amazing documentary that gave people the most inside view of the murder that happened during the Stones' set and the lead-up to it, and how this was "the end of innocence" and how the Stones' dark, counterculture music reflected the times and the darkness that befell Altamont. I saw none of that. I saw a mediocre, haphazard concert documentary that, because of the events at Altamont, built itself around the moment in a rather mawkish, tasteless manner. Half the movie is the band going to a radio station or their hotel room or the studio, cut with full performances of songs from concerts on their 1969 tour. I did not need a dozen full songs in this documentary, and I sure as hell didn't need a dozen songs each performed looser than the last. It's tiresome, like someone took A Hard Day's Night and sucked out all the humor and skits, and just left the band going from place to place with music. When they finally get to Altamont, at least the movie coalesces into something, but even then, it drags things out. I know the intent is to set up how the Hell's Angels -- hired as security, armed with pool cues, and paid in beer -- were ill-suited to the job, and because of the hasty preparations, the entire scene was on the precipice of collapse before the first note was played. But I don't need every note of an entirely irrelevant Flying Burrito Brothers performance. And the whole "cut from real life as is" feeling is betrayed if you know that, in the editing process, events are played out of sequence or paired with unrelated moments (there's a scene of a topless woman trying and failing to get onstage with the Stones, but she did not do it during "Sympathy for the Devil", as the movie suggests). It's hard to trust the Altamont half of the movie as anything but a massaged narrative, focused more on the disaster and presenting everybody but the Angels in the best possible light. The Grateful Dead -- whose insistent recommendation was why the Angels were security in the first place -- are painted as intelligent and pragmatic, refusing to play because they could see the deterioration of the crowd; what they don't show is how the band was also in large part financially responsible for the festival, and threatened the promoters and owner of the venue with a lawsuit if they didn't get paid, despite bailing on the performance, but expecting the Stones to go on anyway (forever and ever, fuck Jerry Garcia). And there is absolutely no discussion of Meredith Hunter or what led to his death at the hands of a Hell's Angel; he is seen for the briefest of moments, you actually see the stabbing (gross), and you see his corpse taken away at the end. Marvelous. So, it's a wildly uneven movie in its construction, and somewhat dishonest in its delivery. But here's another problem. Documentaries are supposed to be a window into a topic. They should have an element of timelessness, that anybody at any point in the future could watch the movie and get everything they need to know on the topic. Gimme Shelter does not even try to do this. It is made with one audience in mind: Stones fans from 1970. If you don't fall into that demographic, this movie has no interest or intent in filling in the blanks. You don't get Meredith Hunter's name. You don't get how or why this was viewed as the end of the hippie subculture. There is no attempt at insight here, just naked exploitation of a moment. I got more out of reading the Wikipedia article about the movie than watching the movie itself. And I'm a Stones fan! If you weren't a Stones fan, or you didn't know anything about Altamont, God help you watching this and trying to understand anything whatsoever. There's no context, no juxtaposition with Woodstock, no exploration of who the Hell's Angels are, no thematic discussion. Just a bunch of concert footage and a riot in a crowd that resulting in someone dying. I don't know what I expected from this, but what I got is flat, empty, and pointless. It fails at everything it could be, and serves only to be a promotional vessel that ends on a sour note that's given all the gravitas of a kid saying "well, that sucked" to a bad episode of South Park.