The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter
One killing ended the 60s dream. The man who filmed it speaks about the chilling moment.
By Mick Brown
Published: 4:29PM BST 04 Sep 2009
Thanks Gazza, it will be soon then. See the end of an era can make one thoughtfull.
'The end of the dreams and the liars. This is the end my beautiful friend
this is the end' And it was been,and started a new begin for them.
Because all was changed for Mick and the others. They becomed so
From sneer to pleading: Mick Jagger in Albert Maysles's documentary 'Gimme Shelter', now on DVD There is a moment that every documentary maker wishes for, says Albert Maysles, one that Orson Welles once described as “the divine accident”. It’s the moment that cannot be legislated for, when the elements of patience, preparation and simple serendipity come into play. Divine – or perhaps in this case, demonic.
For Maysles, shooting the film Gimme Shelter, that moment came at the Altamont Festival near San Francisco in December 1969, shortly after the Rolling Stones had begun to sing Under My Thumb. Trained on the audience in front of the stage, the camera suddenly catches a young black man, dressed in a green suit, gesticulating wildly. The crowd part and with equal suddenness, a clutch of Hell’s Angels appear in the frame, one of them holding a knife that he plunges repeatedly into the man in the green suit.
The shot rolls again, this time in slow-motion, freezing to reveal that man in the green suit is actually holding a gun.
The killing of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Festival has come to assume an almost symbolic importance as the moment when the Edenic dream of the Sixties came to an end. And in capturing that moment, Gimme Shelter, which is being released on DVD, made the unintended leap from being a straightforward documentary about a rock-and-roll band into one of the defining historical documents of the era.
Even before Gimme Shelter, Maysles, now 82, had a distinguished reputation as one of the pioneers of the cinéma-vérité, or “direct documentary”, movement that emerged in the late Fifties, characterised by the development of lightweight, hand-held cameras that afforded an unobtrusive, non-interventionist approach to film-making. With his younger brother and partner David, Maysles had already made a film about the Beatles’ first tour of America in 1964, and intimate portraits of Marlon Brando and Truman Capote.
Somewhat incredibly, perhaps, he claims that he had never heard of the Rolling Stones until receiving an invitation to meet them in New York, as they were about to embark on a North American tour. “I was more interested in classical music.”
The 1969 tour was critical for the Stones; it was the first time they had performed in America for three years, and their first tour following the death of Brian Jones. They were, by common consent, “the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world” and wherever they played excitement was at fever pitch.
Watching the footage of Altamont 40 years on, it is apparent how quickly the idyllic dream of Woodstock, a few months earlier, had evaporated. By comparison, Altamont looks like some strange anthropological experiment gone horribly awry – the medieval battlefield; the Hell’s Angels, misguidedly taken on as “security”, gunning motorcycles through the crowd like the barbarian hordes, threatening with pool cues.
“The atmosphere was very bad,” Maysles remembers. “You can see that from the expressions of the people I was filming in the front row – crying and looking very fearful. But none of that really got me scared, because I was so turned on to the necessity of really getting everything in shot and getting it just right. That kind of made me immune.”
In the mythology of the Stones, Altamont has come to be seen as the moment when Jagger’s ongoing flirtation with darkness finally reaped the whirlwind. Staring into the face of authentic violence, Jagger seems to metamorphose into a small, frightened creature, his habitual cocksure sneer reduced to a pathetic pleading.
“People! Why are we fighting? Come on…” “Either those cats cool it, or we don’t play,” chips in Keith Richards. A few minutes later, Hunter is stabbed to death.
Jagger’s response to the incident can be measured as he watches the footage being replayed in the cutting-room. “It’s so horrible,” he says. His expression is perhaps best described as “thoughtful”.
“It’s a strange thing,’’ says Maysles. “Some critics have seen that moment as him not caring. Which is crazy. I think he was very strongly moved by it.” So much so that for six months Jagger refused to agree to the film being released. “I think he felt chastened,” Maysles says. It was only when Donald Cammell, a mutual friend who a year earlier had directed Jagger in the film Performance, intervened that he finally gave his approval.
After shooting Gimme Shelter, Maysles went on to make acclaimed films about the artist Christo, Muhammad Ali and the extraordinary Grey Gardens (1976), about the eccentric mother and daughter “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale, living in a decrepit mansion in the Hamptons. Yet it is Gimme Shelter that will surely be seen as his defining work.
“Looking back, what strikes me now is how very young [the Stones] were – all in their twenties and, my God, so talented,” he says. “It takes a damn good talent and really interesting personalities to keep people coming back to that film – and I can’t think that I’ve ever met anybody who having seen it once doesn’t want to see it again.”
The Rolling Stones 'Gimme Shelter’ is released on DVD by Warner Home Video on Sept 21
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/6127459/The-Rolling-... 
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New 'Gimme Shelter' DVD re-release - The Extras (Read 2,289 times)
