Apocalypse '69

By JAY COCKS

We all need someone we can bleed on

And if you want it, well, you can bleed on me

--Rolling Stones tune

The Age of Aquarius ended with the flash of a knife early last December on a tumble-down raceway near Altamont, Calif. The Hell's Angels' motorcycle club had been hired to guard the stage at a free concert given by the Rolling Stones. From the very beginning of the day, there were bad vibrations all around. The audience was tense and anxious, the Angels, armed with weighted pool cues and other implements of destruction, tough and all too willing to fight. Several minor skirmishes broke out during the afternoon, and a member of the Jefferson Airplane was decked by an Angel when he attempted to intervene in a struggle right in front of the stage.

By the time the Stones appeared, several heads had been busted and the crowd was in a frightened, surly mood. Even Mick Jagger, rock's definitive superstar, could not get them to cool down and listen to the music. The crowd pushed closer and closer to the stage, and the Angels just as angrily pushed them back. Suddenly, someone pulled a gun. The Angels went after him, knifed him down and did him in. Those close enough to the incident were appalled. Those who were not, quickly caught the mood of tragedy and left the concert silent and shaken. It was hard to believe that Woodstock had taken place back East just four months before.

After Hysteria. The Maysles brothers, a pair of experienced makers of documentary films, had been following the Stones around the country making a film of their tour. At the time of the killing, their cameras were both close enough to get the beginning of the murder on film, and far enough removed from the whole rock and youth scene to put the event into some perspective. The result is a strong, remorseless but sensationalized documentary called Gimme Shelter, in which the Maysles and their skillful co-director Charlotte Zwerin attempt to give both a narrative and journalistic structure to the Stones' barnstorming tour.

They begin the film after the initial Altamont hysteria has died down, with the Stones (mostly Jagger) watching the assembled footage on an editing machine. As the film tour progresses, interspersed with scenes of the preparations for the free concert, there are occasional cuts back to the Stones reacting to what they see.

The Knife. The footage of the murder at the concert eventually appears. "Can you run that for me again?" Jagger is heard asking offscreen, and the film makers are happy to oblige. They not only run it over, they run it in slow motion and freeze frames, while Dave Maysles points out to Jagger (and thus to the audience) all the gruesome details: "There. You can see the gun against the girl's crocheted dress. And there's the knife. Here he comes with the knife." This technique surely succeeds in pinpointing the feeling of desperate horror at Altamont, but it does so even as it exploits the scene and sensationalizes it.

Without the tragic murder, Gimme Shelter would be another not particularly revealing cinema verite essay about the personalities that shape pop culture. Most of the footage of the Stones seems to be pedestrianly photographed concert material, which looks pallid beside the splendors of Woodstock. The film's best moments come in the long sequence that reconstructs the stoned, increasingly tense atmosphere at Altamont. The Maysles and Zwerin (also responsible for last year's Salesman) seem to imply that the killing was a spontaneous and inevitable result of the freakiness not just of the audience but of the whole rock culture. This is a somewhat debatable premise, to say the least, but what the film makers have unarguably done in these scenes is to give brilliant shape and form to a nightmare. Jay Cocks

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