Gimme Shelter

Comentarios: victor_m@cimat.mx

En diciembre de 1969 los Rolling Stones cerraron una gira por los
Estados Unidos con un concierto gratuito en Altamont, San Francisco
ante 300 000 personas. Hubo cuatro partos, cuatro muertos y una gran
cantidad de horribles peleas reportadas.
Lo anterior se escucha decir por la radio en una escena de esta
cinta documental, ante un atónito Mick Jagger que trata aún de
entender que fue lo que sucedió la noche de ese concierto que terminó
en tragedia.
La historia de estos sucesos es narrada en dos partes. La primera
muestra algunas interpretaciones de los Rolling Stones en el Madison
Square Garden, mezcladas con escenas de los integrantes del grupo
analizando el material grabado y oyendo noticias de la tragedia. Se
muestra también, en flash backs, las preparaciones previas al
concierto masivo de Altamont.
La segunda parte muestra el material grabado por los hermanos
Maysles y Charlotte Swerin justo en el momento en que se desarrollaban
los trágicos hechos.
Inspirados en el sucedo Woodstock, ocurrido solo unos meses antes,
los Rolling Stones y su abogado se empeñan por todos los medios de
llevar a cabo este concierto. Los inconvenientes se presentan desde el
inicio. El lugar pensado originalmente para el evento tiene que ser
cambiado. El nuevo lugar hallado (unos terrenos sobre la autopista de
Altamont) es insuficiente para la cantidad de autos que se esperan
recibir. Luego, el montaje apresurado del escenario, el encargo de la
seguridad del concierto a un grupo de motociclistas llamados Hell's
Angels, los ríos de gente que poco a poco van llegando, jóvenes
drogados y ébrios por doquier. Al llegar a este punto, todo se
convierte en una crónica de una tragedia anunciada.
Los Hell's Angels, ebrios y drogados al igual que muchos de los
asistentes, son obviamente incapaces de mantener el orden, y al
contrario, son ellos quienes suscitan enfrentamientos que terminan en
la muerte trágica de un joven de color de 18 años. Luego se llegaría a
conocer (en el material adicional de la edición en DVD de la cinta)
que la razón de haber pedido a este grupo de motociclistas la
seguridad del concierto fue las experiencias previas de los Rolling al
contar con los Hell's Angels ingleses (es un grupo a nivel mundial) en
sus conciertos en Inglaterra, sin incidentes que lamentar. Lo que no
se imaginaban es que los Hell's Angels californianos de aquellos años
tenían marcadas tendencias hacia la violencia, la prepotencia y la
provocación, algo diametralmente opuesto a su versión inglesa.
Suenan los acordes de Simpatia por el Diablo cuando los Rolling
Stones inician su actuación, que tienen que suspender minutos después
ante las peleas del público con los motociclistas. Tratando de calmar
a la gente, Mick Jagger ironiza diciendo que siempre que tocan esa
canción sucede algo malo. Las peleas sin embargo no paran, obligando a
suspender el concierto y a que los músicos salgan apresuradamente en
helicóptero.
Ya el hecho de contener sucesos como los descritos antes hace de
Gimme Shelter una cinta con un caracter documental sumamente
interesante, que la aleja automáticamente del simple testimonio de una
presentación de los Rolling Stones, que además abundan hoy en día.
Pero aún mas, lo que resalta en esta película es todo aquello que
capturan las cámaras de sus directores, la asombrosa capacidad para
captar aquellos hechos esenciales, ese sentido de la oportunidad (por
no tener un nombre mejor que ponerle) al capturar una imagen precisa,
sugerente y contundente, que todo documentalista debiera poseer.
Dos ejemplos de lo anterior. La imagen de un miembro de los Hell's
Angels mirando despectiva y atónitamente, con toda la extrañeza, a un
Mick Jagger volcado en sus bailes y gesticulaciones habituales, o la
imagen del joven drogado que camina en el escenario totalmente ausente
de la realidad, entre un Hell Angel distraido y Mick Jagger absorto en
su interpretación. Solo la cámara hace evidente este hecho fugaz
(rápidamente es bajado violentamente del escenario) que sin embargo es
bastante revelador del ambiente que flotaba en el concierto de los
Stones, un ambiente de hostilidad y tensión.
Ciertamente, hay material intrascendente, que muestra a los Rolling
Stones en sus cuartos de hotel u oyendo la grabación de una canción
nueva, pero es lo menos, y no opaca en absoluto la calidad y
trascendencia de esta cinta, un documento importante de la tragedia
que empañó la ilusión de la llamada Love Generation. Totalmente
recomendable.

Gimme Shelter (EU, 1970)

Dirigida por David y Albert Maysles y Charlotte Swerin
Con: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Mick
Taylor.
The true adventures of Altamont. Una crónica de Stanley Booth, quien
acompañara a los Rolling Stones en su gira por los Estados Unidos en
1969, mientras escribía un libro sobre ellos. Tomado del Booklet de la
edición de The Criterion Collection de la película.

Una nota interesante. Los Rolling Stones dejaron de interpretar

Sympathy For The Devil durante seis años a raíz de los hechos trágicos
de Altamont.

The True Adventures of Altamont

- Stanley Booth

The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be

ready, are we ready?”

We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter
end of the ’60s. I remember that rainy day so well, when the opening
scene of Gimme ShelterGet Yer Ya-Ya’s Out. The Maysles brothers—David
and Al—and I rode in a rented car. Mick Jagger—with Charlie, I think—
came in his Bentley.

If he chooses to, Mick can make almost anyone feel uncomfortable, but
on that day his spotless white car made me uncomfortable. I’d been
knocking about the U.S.A. with him for months, and this sudden and
unaccustomed display of wealth was off-putting. (Keith Richards—who
was not with us that day, in fact, none of the other Stones came along
—owned a Bentley too, named the Blue Lena, but it had so many bangs
and bruises that it was not intimidating.) Mick took my long red wool
scarf from around my neck, wrapped it around Charlie’s, clapped his
Uncle Sam hat on Charlie’s head, and we, with the complacent burro,
were off.

Almost immediately the scene shifts to New York City, where Mick tells
the crowd, “Welcome to the breakfast show.” Some of the performances
on that tour were incredibly late. The Stones had yet to learn the
technique of micro-managing their shows, thereby decreasing
spontaneity while vastly increasing revenues. The shows in 1969
weren’t as big as later ones, and they didn’t make as much money, but
they seemed much more significant, because we believed then that what
the Stones were doing made a difference.

To understand the context in which Gimme Shelter must be viewed, you’d

have to start over somewhere else. It would have to be someplace that
existed long ago and far away, in a realm where you and a precious few
other weirdos group together as often as possible to listen as
intently as you can to artists with names that are pictures, visions,
mysteries: Muddy Waters, “Big Mama” Thornton, Bo Diddley, Memphis
Minnie, Howlin’ Wolf. These and others such as Jimmy Reed, Etta James,
John Lee Hooker, Bessie Smith, Slim Harpo, Guitar Slim, Ruth Brown,
Lightnin’ Hopkins, Thunder Smith. One of them was named Lonesome
Sundown. Another called himself Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-
Law, the High Sheriff of Hell. Artists, yes, but—if you could have
been around to be a member of this wayward cult—you would know in your
heart that these anointed ones were also avatars and prophets.

“All the boys in my band is bad,” Muddy Waters once said. “Little
Walter got a bullet in he leg right now.” It’s not for no reason the
blues got the reputation of being the Devil’s music. “I’m gonna cut
yo’ head four different ways, that’s long, short, deep, and wide,”
Willie McTell recorded in Atlanta in 1950. That same year in New
Orleans, Archibald (Leon T. Gross) recorded the lines, “Stack-A-Lee
shot Billy/He shot that po’ boy so fast/that the bullet went through
Billy/and broke the bartender’s glass.” In New York, twenty years
before, Bessie Smith sang, “I’m goin’ back to Black Mountain/Me and my
razor and gun/I’m gonna cut him if he stand still/and shoot him if he
run.” Maybe there is an essential connection between the blues and—
evil?

The Rolling Stones—along with many of their contemporaries, some of

them in Gimme Shelter—worshipped at the altar of the blues. The
Rolling Stones’ audiences in 1969 did not necessarily worship at that
altar. But by stopping in mid-show and turning off the electricity—as
they did on that tour—to sing a song by Fred McDowell and another by
Robert Johnson, the Stones showed where their hearts were: “You may be
high/You may be low/You may be rich/You may be po’/But when the Lord
gets ready/You got to move.”

was filmed. We drove up to Birmingham—not Birmingham,

Alabama. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to
photograph Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts on a donkey
for the cover of the live album from the 1969 tour,
I had met the Rolling Stones in September of 1968. That in itself had
required a considerable journey, but I was not the only, or even the
first, one to make it. Gram Parsons, another Waycross, Georgia boy,
had preceded me there. He had joined a successful folk-rock band
called the Byrds and, after meeting the Stones, left the Byrds to form
a band called the Flying Burrito Brothers.

The Maysles brothers didn’t join the Stones until the band reached New
York and the tour was nearly over. Nevertheless, they managed to re-
create a facsimile of what it was like to hear the band that winter.
Gimme Shelter is an amazing work of art—Albert Maysles is one of the
greatest cinematographers, and Charlotte Zwerin is an editor of
genius. That such a powerful, unforgettable film could have been put
together from the brief time the filmmakers were with the Stones is
remarkable.

One fundamental problem in putting together Gimme Shelter was that it

had to present the songs the Stones did on that tour without too much
distortion of order or repetition. Under different circumstances, this
wouldn’t be important. Whether the Who did “My Generation” before or
after “Substitute” in their documentary film The Kids Are Alright
wouldn’t much matter. But at Altamont, Death came to the party,
changing its significance. It matters that the impression the film
gives—Meredith Hunter pulled a gun, got offed, and everybody split—is
not what happened at all.

The violence at Altamont, being completely unexpected, came afterwards

to seem inevitable. The assassinations of the ’60s had aged us, we who
were as the ’70s dawned still under thirty— but they had been random,
isolated events that didn’t involve the rock and roll generation.
Altamont was nothing we could shrug off, and somehow we all lacked the
will to rise above it.

The Stones had given another free concert that year, at Hyde Park in
London on July 5th, two days after Brian Jones, who first came up with
the idea for a rhythm and blues band called the Rolling Stones,
drowned in his swimming pool. At that concert the English Hell’s
Angels, harmless children compared to the California Angels, acted as
security. It was a warm summer day, sad because of Brian’s death, and
the English are famously civilized. The Stones probably didn’t need
security at all. Perhaps their asking the Angels to work on the show
was a friendly gesture to fellow outsiders. They did things like that
in those days. Not often, but once in a while they did. We were all
great moralists then, even as we raced headlong after immorality.

The Stones started as a band in 1962, released their first record in

1963, and soon were more successful than they ever expected to be. By
1969, they had toured the U.S. four times, most of them had been to
jail, and one of them was about to be dead. The year before, when I
met them, I also met their London publicist, a Churchillian English
bulldog named Les Perrin, who’d worked with such performers as Louis
Armstrong and Frank Sinatra. Les, taking a fatherly shine to me,
suggested I might want to write a book about the Stones, but I was far
too high-minded in them days to want to write a whole book about a
young white rock and roll band.

Then Brian died, profoundly altering the story. It became a peculiar,

and to me most absorbing, murder mystery. I also had a kind of hunch,
a sense that something more was going to happen that year. Altamont
proved me right.

1969 was the year of free rock festivals, the high point of that
movement. The Stones’ Hyde Park appearance was followed the next month
by Woodstock, the best-known festival of them all. No mention is made
in Gimme Shelter of the SanFrancisco Chronicle column by critic Ralph
Gleason accusing the Stones of charging exorbitant ticket prices (as
much as $15, imagine) and having contempt for their audience. That
piece came out before the Maysles brothers arrived on the scene, but
it was one more thing to spur Mick and Keith in the direction of doing
another free festival. Their hearts were in the right place and they
didn’t mind going out of their way to demonstrate that fact. Witness
their flying through a snowstorm to Auburn, Alabama, to appear in an
auditorium filled with white students, scrubbed and uncomprehending.

The tour had been different from any of their previous ones. Up until
then their performances in the U.S. had been brief, incandescent
explosions of desecration, attended almost exclusively by shrieking
adolescent girls. On the 1969 tour they played longer sets than they’d
done since playing English clubs, and the American fans—people their
own age, many of them—listened.

At their first press conference, at the Beverly Wilshire, Mick had

temporized regarding a free festival. “I’m not committing meself,” he
said. In New York, at a press conference in the Rainbow Room on the
69th floor of Rockefeller Center, he made a commitment to have one in
Northern California at the end of the tour. Of the festival movement,
Mick said, “It’s creating a sort of microcosmic society which sets an
example for the rest of America as to how one can behave in large
gatherings.” Altamont set an example, all right. As did Vietnam.

The film speaks for itself, but there are a few points I can’t help
attempting to clarify. Anyone who’s heard of Altamont knows for
certain the Stones hired the Hell’s Angels as security for the event.
It reminds one of Mark Twain’s saying that the world’s troubles are
caused not so much by what people don’t know as what they do know that
ain’t so. I was with the Stones before, during, and after Altamont,
and none of them hired any Angels.
Mick, Keith, and I had ridden out to the site the night before, just
to see what it was like. Keith stayed there, in a small trailer,
hosted by Grateful Dead associate Rock Scully, while Mick and I went
back to the Huntington Hotel for a few hours’ sleep. The next morning
all the remaining Stones—except Bill Wyman, the bass player, who
couldn’t be bothered to wake up—rode out to Altamont on a helicopter.

The first thing that happened when we landed, as the film shows, was
this: a kid ran up to Mick, said “I hate you,” and hit him in the
face. Somebody grabbed the kid and Mick was spirited off, leaving the
rest of us to make our way as best we could through, over, and across
hundreds of thousands of bodies to the trailer backstage. As we tried
to avoid stepping on people we could hear the Flying Burrito Brothers
playing “Bony Moronie.”

We beat Gram to the trailer, but not by much. He came in wearing an

outfit from Nudie the Rodeo Tailor with rhinestoned Thunderbirds and
dancing braves. The trailer was small, crowded, and filled with all
sorts of vile and reprehensible smoke. Keith, Gram, and I sat on a
bunk in a corner, singing Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams songs.
Meanwhile the day drew on: Marty Balin, among others, got knocked out
by various Angels—Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas came into
the trailer bearing tales of how the Angels were fighting with
civilians, women, and each other, bouncing full cans of beer off each
other’s heads—and we waited for the bass player. Those long wands you
see the Angels wielding in the film are pool cues loaded on the fat
end with lead weights. They came with them, obviously intending to
need them.

Maybe, it occurs to me now, thirty years too late, Sam Cutler never
saw The Wild Ones. Sam was a Cockney, and had worked with bands in
England, Cream among others. He fancied himself a poet and had
initiated a correspondence with the late Sir Alec Guinness in which
Sir Alec was said to have actually taken part. There was, that is, or
there had been, another side to Sam. But the American tour was hard on
him. The groupies, of whom he availed himself heartily, took their
toll on his energy, and then there were the hours, and the miles, and
the chemicals. Handing me a 35mm film can and a gold spoon, he
observed, “Cor—tomorrow’s the last day of the tour.” We were on
another airplane, heading to New York. Sam looked thoughtful. “I’ve
lost 21 pounds in America,” he said.

The last official gig of the tour was the Miami Pop Festival. After
that the Stones went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for a recording
session. Sam, along with the Stones’ secretary Jo Bergman and tour
manager Ronnie Schneider, went to San Francisco to start putting the
free concert together. I can see the Angels arriving at Altamont like
an invading army (which is essentially what they were) and Sam, no
doubt abetted by Rock Scully (who’d told the Stones in Oakland weeks
before that “the Angels are some righteous dudes. They carry
themselves with honor and dignity”), attempting to placate them with
beer, permitting them to sit on the stage, doing anything to keep them
from bursting into violence. The Neville Chamberlain approach, a
failure here once again. I don’t know what really happened, because we
weren’t there when the Angels arrived, but capitulation on the part of
Cutler and Scully would be my guess regarding how the Angels became
“security” at Altamont.

In the film, Oakland Angels president Sonny Barger denies acting as

security. “I ain’t no cop, I ain’t never gonna pretend to be no cop,”
he says. To hear Sonny tell it, the Angels were only defending
themselves from dangerous hippies. Rolling Stone, that guardian of
public morality, implied that the Stones waited until darkness to go
onstage in order to heighten the crowd’s anticipation. In fact, they
had intended to go on at sundown. In any case, as soon as Wyman
managed to arrive, the Stones went on. He took a long time arriving.

I was the first onstage, because Keith asked me to take his acoustic
guitar out there. Led through the crowd by a greasy little Angel, I
did so. Stu—Ian Stewart, the Stones’ late pianist and roadie—took it
from me and put it on its stand beside Keith’s amp. I stepped back to
look around and realized I was in the midst of a swarm, a hive, of
Hell’s Angels. They were everywhere on and around the stage. As this
dawned on me, a great big Angel picked up little old me by my upper
arms and lifted me to his eye level. I couldn’t see his eyes because
of his lank, oily hair that hung down to his cheeks, but I knew they
were in there somewhere, mad, swirling. “Off the stage,” he said.

I still don’t know what I told him, but he put me down and I took up
my usual station behind Keith’s amp. Soon the Stones took the stage.
With them were the security guys who’d been with us on the tour. Off-
duty New York City detectives acquired by the mysterious John Jaymes—
God knows what his real name was—they were professionals who, as their
eyes revealed, didn’t like being there at all. (Jaymes is the large
mutton-chopped young man you see in Mel Belli’s office. He turned out
to be quite a study, having told the Stones he worked for Dodge and
Dodge he worked for the Stones. Dodge provided more cars than the
Stones needed and, in the end, got nothing out of it, not even
advertising, because of Altamont.)

The Stones opened with “Jumping Jack Flash.” Chuck Berry’s “Oh Carol”
followed, then “Sympathy for the Devil.” As Mick sang, “I was around
when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain,” a motorcycle near
the right side of the stage suffered a small explosion. Oily blue-
white smoke swirled up, and a space opened almost instantly, the
people moving away from the trouble. You could see violent movement in
the darkness, but no details.

The song started again, but before it ended there was another outbreak
of violence, this time nearer the stage, where I could see. An
electric-haired boy who was dancing near some Angels obviously pissed
them off by having too good a time, and they started laying into him
and anyone they could reach with their lead-weighted pool cues. That’s
when Mick asked, “Who’s fighting and what for?”

I decided then to join David and Al atop a panel truck that was backed
against the stage. At least that vantage point provided a bit of
elevation. The Stones, returning to their roots, played the Elmore
James-Jimmy Reed classic, “The Sun Is Shining,” and things quieted
down, but not for long. The next song, “Stray Cat Blues,” was marred
by more violence. “Love in Vain”—which nearly became the title of the
film—came next. After it ended Mick asked everyone to sit down,
something I’d never heard him do. He was always telling the crowds to
“Get up and shake your arses,” but now he was learning caution the
hard way.

The next tune was “Under My Thumb.” Mick had sung only the first line
when there was a sudden movement in the crowd at stage left. A tall
black man wearing a black hat, black shirt, and iridescent green suit
was waving a nickel-plated revolver. The gun waved in the lights for a
second, two, and then he was hit, so hard, by so many Angels, that I
didn’t see the first one as he jumped. I saw him as he came down,
burying a knife in the man’s back. The attack carried the victim
behind a stack of speakers, and I never saw him again. His name, we
later learned, was Meredith Hunter, and he was 18 years old. See the
Rolling Stones and die.

What Gimme Shelter, fine as it is, does not show is what happened
next. We didn’t know whether Hunter had been killed, wounded, or what,
but the mood seemed to change; it was as if the atmosphere had been
purged. The Stones did “Under My Thumb” with no interruptions; then,
at Mick Taylor’s request, “Brown Sugar,” for the first time on any
stage. (They’d just written and recorded it in Muscle Shoals a few
days before.) Except for a brief problem with a naked fat girl who
tried to climb onstage during “Live with Me,” there were no more
violent incidents. The Stones did a half dozen more songs, playing as
well or better than I’d ever heard them—playing, under the
circumstances, like heroes.

Then we ran for our lives. Stu handed me Keith’s guitar and told me
the station wagons to take us to the helicopter would be at the top of
the hill, straight back and up to the left. All of us, the Stones, Jo,
Ronnie, Michelle, Gram, and I, stumbled through the blackness over the
dead grass and dusty clay. There was a hurricane fence at the top of
the hill, but we went through a hole in it. There were no station
wagons there, just a car and an ambulance. We piled into them and they
took us to the helicopter. Gram and I were the last on board; the last
thing you see in the film before the ’copter door closes is the seat
of my Levi’s.