Word: altamont
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...SHORT history of rock and roll festivals is circumscribed by three singular events: the Monterey Festival, the Lake Bethel Festival, and a day-long concert at the Altamont Speedway. Each event's claim to singularity is by this time a matter of commonly received opinion: as our commentators have it. Monterey marked the apotheosis of the San Francisco-based flower culture, the Bethel concert (Woodstock) was the great coming together for, in its advertisement's words, three days of Love, Peace and Music, and Altamont the death of flower-power, the death of Love, the death of Rock, depending...
Both the festival at Altamont and the one at Bethel are events identified as places, or, as those not yet embarrassed about the whole charade will tell you, states of mind. The interrelationship between the two events is so directly drawn by so many people that one can't help but nurture some suspicions. The formal integrity seems extravagant-Woodstock's tacky dreams shimmer a little too loudly, while Altamont's function as some sociological reality principle is dramatically too neat. It seems like we've been treated to some show in which one character has been introduced only...
...throw up a scaffold, and invite hundreds of thousands of white middle-class kids to enjoy themselves. Michael Lang was instrumental in arranging both events, and in neither case did he worry himself with considerations such as food, water, shelter, transportation, safety, sanitary facilities, etc. Comparing the footage of Altamont in Gimme Shelter with that of Bethel in Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock , it's hard to see any difference in the crowds' composition or their activities; the former looks like any other mass concert to me, and it's photographed like Woodstock or Monterey for that matter: idyllic scenes with...
...unknown field and was run over the next morning by a tractor. Now no camera crew was present then, or when a girl died of a burst appendix before receiving medical attention, just as no photographer recorded the deaths of Mark Feiger and Richard Savlov, two kids killed at Altamont when a driver trying to find the freeway slammed his car into their campsite. No one saw some guy fall into an unlit, unfenced irrigation ditch near the Speed way either; he drowned. And of course for none of these fatalities was there upbeat musical accompaniment, nor were they...
...segments; there they were with gobs of stage performance footage, an exclusive on Meredith Hunter's murder, and no way to integrate the two. Then someone hit on the bright idea of showing the footage to the Stones, of filming their responses to themselves, to Tina Turner, to the Altamont arrangements, and of course to the stabbing itself. Throughout Gimme Shelter the Maysles cut from a filmed event to a shot of that same film running through a viewer, and then cut to one of the Stones' vacant faces, a vacancy, you understand, which is supposed to read as shock...