The Rolling Stones by Helmut Staubmann

Author:Helmut Staubmann [Staubmann, Helmut]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Gimme Shelter Revisited

Deconstructing Myths from 1969 and Altamont

Michael Skladany

The latter half of the 1960s brought forth the accession of rock music on a social and cultural scale that has, arguably, never been surpassed. A case in point was the Rolling Stones embarking on the first ever large arena tour of North America in November of 1969. The tour ended with a free concert held for 350,000 people at Altamont, California, on December 6, 1969. In many culturally laden ways the tour and Altamont free concert was a pivotal watershed for the Rolling Stones and by extension all of popular music. With the Beatles and Dylan sidelined, the Rolling Stones ascended to the focal center of a much more critically evolved rock consciousness (Norman 1984). The band was uniquely positioned to further advance their cultural standing as “The Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World.” As Gilmore (1998, 72) remarks, at this time the “Rolling Stones said as much about the shared social conditions of our lives as anyone else in rock and roll; in fact, they may have been pop’s last real unifying force.”

The Cultural Context of 1969 and Altamont

I argue that a broader cultural context is essential for a better understanding of the film Gimme Shelter (1970), the tour, and the Rolling Stones, specifically from the vantage point of the “new culture” of the late 1960s era. My focal point rests on the new culture that developed and crystalized in the San Francisco Bay area. The latter half of the 1960s in particular brought forth a number of large, innovative, California-based rock music festivals such as Big Sur, Mount Tamalpais, and Monterey Pop. Nowhere was this burgeoning movement more apparent than in San Francisco where countless free concerts and a psychedelic ballroom and dance scene gained community momentum and complemented the large festivals. These strands all notably coalesced, albeit briefly, with an emerging new culture centered in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park-Haight-Ashbury district (Perry 1984; Scully 1996). On the surface, the idea of the Rolling Stones headlining a celebratory Bay area “free concert” characterized by a spontaneous organizing of the event itself clearly fits the new cultural values of the late 1960s.

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