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.