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.