A detailed narrative that gets into the detail of the events that culminated in the events that took place at Altamont speedway in 1969.

The whole tale is deeply thought-provoking on many levels. Many levels of human behaviour are on display, from naivete and innocence all the way through to arrogance and greed.

This is an excellent book if you're interested in cultural history, the 1960s, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, the Hells Angels, or all five of those.

Selvin does a wonderful job of explaining how Altamont was a disaster waiting to happen from the moment the concert was conceived. Lots of naivete and poor planning. The Hells Angels got a raw deal as the easy target for blame, but in truth MANY people were to blame.

Selvin also makes a compelling argument that the Stones were never quite the same after Altamont; Jefferson Airplane crumbled in acrimony, and the Dead completely changed their philosophy towards music and fame after Altamont.

Overall, an engaging read; well researched and written.

Wow, what a ride. The story of the legendary concert that revealed the dark underbelly of the Sixties unfolds in this account.

The Rolling Stones were surround by crooks, con men and criminals. In retrospect, it's no wonder that it all fell apart at Altamont. Four dead, one on camera (interestingly, the legendary "peace and love" Woodstock four months earlier accounted for three deaths, but none as spectacular). The worst part, nobody was held accountable for Meredith Hunter's murder.

The author does two interesting things here - he places most of the blame on the Stones (an arrogant Mick Jagger, actually) and tries to absolve the Hells Angels. Honestly, there's enough blame to go around, and those groups are responsible - as are the Grateful Dead (for suggesting the Angels), the hangers-on, the dazed hippies and all the drugs and drink.

You also get the first sniff of the rock star excesses of the Seventies. The Lear jets, the on-staff drug connections, the all-too-available women, the leeches. It was late 1969 that the Stones tour commenced, but a new era had begun.

An interesting thing about this book is the impending sense of doom right from the start. Maybe it was the writing, or maybe it was just because I knew what was coming.

This was as much fun as I have had in a long while reading a "Rock Book" in ages, even though the material was information I already knew a lot about. Selvin is a homer to the San Francisco scene and pulls no punches going after the Rolling Stones, so you have to accept his bias. I highly recommend watching/re-watching Gimme Shelter after reading because he goes into real details about scenes/people from the movie that are just images in the film.

Three and a half stars. A combination of exhaustively researched, painstaking detail and occasional airing of personal grudges, held together with sloppy overwriting.

Selvin’s research of the events is ridiculously detailed, almost to the point of straining credulity—how much does he actually know about what certain minor characters were thinking when they got up that morning to go to Altamont?—but the range of background is what the story needs. I knew about the drowning but had no idea two people were killed inside the concert by a drugged driver. I’d always heard about “bad drugs” but was impressed to see someone talking about the many people given drinks spiked with speed as well as acid. The onstage-details during the concert and the ongoing violence throughout it are thorough and provide a very clear picture of events, while the description of the Stones’ talent onstage during the tragedy is a useful contrast I’d never heard before.

Unfortunately, the book’s narrative voice lacks discipline and reads like the I-told-you-so victory lap of a rock critic who’s been doing it for 46 years. The language is loose and far too adjective-heavy. Metaphors get mixed and tangled and no one seems in a hurry to clean this up ahead of going to press, so we get sentences like, “A great many bills came due that day, as the axioms of the Summer of Love were put to test and failed like a wet paper bag” or “Altamont was the coda. It was a stain that wouldn’t wash out of the fabric of the music.”

Selvin’s lingering contempt for 60s politicos emerges here and there with sudden expressions of disgust at scarcely described leftist wrongs he expects the reader to be on board with, which is annoying, but his real target is Mick Jagger and the Stones. Fair enough, but the problem is as he quotes Ralph Gleason saying, Altamont was so much bigger than one party’s fault. Trying to force the majority of the fault over into the Stones’ camp doesn’t work because the book effectively charts the many factors contributing to the ultimate chaos. Selvin criticizes Jagger (fairly) for staging Altamont to wrap the Stones’ tour up in a single forceful story that would be filmed and sold as a movie, but Selvin then moves toward the same simple blaming of the Stones to shape his book.

There are tiny errors throughout the book (Wallace Shawn was never the editor of the New Yorker, his father William Shawn was) that call into question the book’s broad ease with narrative facts. But Selvin’s narrative needs to prove Altamont broke something in the Stones, so much so that “as a unique and driving force in rock music, the band would no longer truly matter. [...] Whatever they lost at Altamont, they would never get back. The Stones would play out their days like tigers in the shade, challenging neither themselves nor the audience. Instead of a cultural force, the Stones settled for being caricatures i’d themselves, a raucous and colourful but ultimately meaningless side-show.”

This would be a throughly fair argument to make about the band in 1979, or even 1976. In order to make this argument about the Stones in 1970, Selvin has to argue that the only truly legendary songs on 1971’s Sticky Fingers were those recorded pre-Altamont in Muscle Shoals. That is a mighty stretch. But even more ridiculous is that Selvin sets himself up for having to imply that 1972’s Exile on Main Street was a minor album—rather than the epic double-record considered by many to be the Stones’ greatest work, and by some to be the greatest rock record of all time. You don’t have to agree with either conclusion (I’m firmly in camp Let It Bleed as my favourite Stones album) to recognize how facile and ridiculous Selvin’s simple framing of Altamont v. the Stones comes across.

Selvin knows how to tell a story… I did not realize the number of bands involved in the Altamont concert. What a scary out of control situation this turned out to be when the dust settled.

HOOboy. I knew Altamont was a dumpster fire, but I didn't know it was THAT much of one. Take the premise of 'Hey! Let's put on a show in the barn!' with all the good and positive (and blessedly naive) intentions that entails, and have absolutely EVERYTHING go catastrophically wrong. It's a lesson in what happens when one refuses to admit defeat and live another day, even when it's painfully obvious that defeat is the much better, safer and saner option.

Selvin holds back no punches. He doesn't try to find a single person at fault, when it's obvious that it belongs to nearly everyone involved; the blissful ignorance of the Stones, the shiftiness of the numerous questionable people behind the scenes, the lack of business sense of the speedway owner, the Grateful Dead for putting their faith in the half-baked and rushed idea, the drunken violence of the Hells Angels, and so on. So many decisions made (or shifted off to a flunky) that led to a disaster.

It's a hard read, but it sure as hell is a fascinating one.

Anyone having watched “Gimme Shelter” multiple times or having an interest in the history of the 60s—especially the music of the era—will find “Altamont” a dark, compulsively readable account of the infamous concert. “Altamont” expands, clarifies and ultimately overshadows the classic film of the event by exposing the real participants and their confused and often contradictory motives for the creation of this free concert.
While the book was enthralling, I do question several of the author’s final conclusions. Notably, in his attempt to emphasize how life-changing the event was for many of the participants (audience, musicians, Hell’s Angels) he makes a too pat assertion that the Stones never truly recaptured their musical mojo after their day at Altamont. In the immediate years following the concert The Rolling Stones released “Sticky Fingers” (my favorite Stones album) followed by “Exile On Main Street”—both historically considered all-time classics. Also, in an odd passage, the author astutely pins the lion’s share of the blame for the disastrous event, both planning and execution, on The Rolling Stones. He does this while also endowing Mick Jagger with a soothsayers’s level of prescience that could more easily (and more accurately) be attributed to incompetence and/or arrogance. It is ridiculous to speculate that Jagger both wanted the concert to be an anarchic bad trip or that he wanted to create the conditions where a murder could occur in order to give the documentary being filmed a “perfect ending”. The author is far more generous to The Grateful Dead despite the band vouching for the Hell’s Angels as a non-police solution for concert security.
Caveats aside, the book was a great read and is highly recommended.

Gets the job done; adds a lot of detail and context that the Maysles’ film cannot