One of the greatest rock docs ever. The Stones at their peak, but also the dark side of the ‘60s music scene. The Altamont footage is just haunting, and you can feel the shift happening. A must-watch for rock fans.

Classic rock documentary that marks the end of the 60's. What's interesting is that this was meant to the a straight forward coverage of the Rolling Stones's American tour only for the Maysles to capture the chaos at Altamont, including the moment a Hell's Angel stabs a man to death on screen. Brutal and honest, the best kind of documentaries.

Excellent!!! Great acting. Made me cry

This look at The Rolling Stones and the infamous free concerts at Altamonte is the basis for the amazingly well made musical documentary. This is one of the best ever made, and even better if you like the music of The Rolling Stones. It is a look at music, culture, the 1960's and a really tragic incident which marred this great event. This is well made and features tons of great behind the scenes footage. It is a concert and so much more.

Four people died at Altamont Speedway in 1969 - two in a hit-and-run, one drowned after an LSD trip, and one stabbed in the confusion surrounding the event - each representative of the mishmash of countercultural subgroups that had developed (from your generic hippies to the Hell's Angels) and the general lack of identity that had invaded the movement as it simply got too large to stay cohesive. There was no longer a clear unifying force behind it all and as a result, some lashed out each other or simply found themselves spiraling out of control in self-destructive patterns. Jagger and the rest of the Stones move around the film as you would expect them to in their primes, in a trancelike daze from one gig to the next, enjoying the attention and the sex as they were heralded as the kings of rock and roll, right up until it all collapses in on itself like a black hole. The film leaves the group staring out at a crowd that they no longer understand, shaped by forces beyond their control, now intermittently violent and dangerous; their pleas with the crowd are fruitless, and they end up airlifted from the concert grounds. Pieces together fascinating bits of documentary footage to establish the freewheeling nature of the one of the greatest bands in the world, then using their own disillusionment to discuss the end of a cultural era - the bell that signaled the slow decline of the counterculture movement. One of the great concert documentaries. (4/5)

Jeez man The Stones were electric! So much energy especially from Jagger. He really is a showman. So crazy and hilarious seeing them so young and stoned. Very interesting to watch all the archival footage that was filmed during their rise to stardom and also the days leading up to the Altamont concert. So insane seeing all the planning and hype that went in to the concert. I mean this was like the biggest event of the century and even more so since it was free. Amazing seeing how deeply influenced they were by American blues. They would even go to hillbilly country parts of America like Alabama to record some of their earlier songs. So crazy seeing all the different kinds of people that showed up to the concert and seeing all the absolute wonderfully fucking beautiful chaos that was happening. The Hell's Angels definitely had an intimidating and menacing presence being there. Hell hath come on two wheels. I mean they were basically being bullies in a sense. The vibes were all off, all over the place with them being there. I feel like they should have hired personal guards that they knew instead of the Hell's Angels. I feel like the Angels were really quick to fly off the handle whenever someone acted up, always leading to punches and a scuffle. I do have to commend them though for stopping that black guy with the gun who could have potentially opened fire on the band, harming innocents in the process. The planning of everything seemed very spontaneous and haphazard. Really fucked up and sad to see how the mood of the whole event changes as soon as the Angels started beating on people. This was supposed to be the biggest event of the year that would bring people together one last time before the beginning of a new decade. What should of been a night filled with peace, love and rock & roll turned into a night of pandemonium and violence. Marking the beginning of the end of what once was the year of peace & love and bringing an end to the counterculture movement. The raw footage is incredible to watch. Especially during the last half of the documentary, it's impossible to look away as one gets entranced with the whole experience that's going on during the event. One of the rawest and honest music documentaries that exists. Very impactful and hard-hitting.

Dated by today's standard: I had to explain to my kids and their friends the tape editing machine as cgi didn't exist. Watched again after a 35 year hiatus with my daughter whom said "OMG what are they all on?" I said "those asses are now the Democratic Party running the west coast of America." A rock documentary with substance. I cannot fathom why anybody would hire thoe Hell's Angels for beer. Who was thinking or what were they on? It is a look on how Altmont came into being and along with Helter Skelter of Manson this became the dark post mortem being of the 60's. (West Coast) The Miracle Mets (will They ever win again after86), Man on the Moon, Woodstock are the light: (East Coast)

I felt dragged, at first nicely and then with growing strength, inside this dark historical concert, a concert by the way I was unaware of before starting the view. It's a dark and powerful time travel experience, where the music is just a (very good) soundtrack of what was happening back then. It's only rock and roll? I don't think so.

4/5 This starts out at a comatose pace, following the Rolling Stones during their 1970 North America tour. "Following" isn't the right word, since what they mostly do is just show Mick singing, and then show the band hanging around doing nothing in hotel rooms, or just listening to their own music, looking as bored as we feel. Then the story of the final 1970 appearance at Altamont Speedway starts up, and it's astounding from the start. The location right outside Livermore was volunteered by the Speedway owner just a couple days before the scheduled date, which was supposed to be in Golden Gate Park. We learn that people were already traveling west for the free show before any details were close to final. Not that many details were attended to. Like port-o-potties (there were none, for 300,000 people who had to make do). But someone made the crucial decision to "hire" Hell's Angels for security. The film doesn't make it clear how that happened, but you can read elsewhere that they were promised $500 worth of beer, which they drank at the site, to secure the stage and the generator. Past performance is no guarantee of future success, we've all heard. Hell's Angels had indeed provided security for Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead in the past, with no major carnage. But the stars were misaligned that fateful December day, or the crowd was just uglier due to inferior acid being sold, or it was the presence of relatively undisciplined San Jose Angels, all of these and more having been suggested as causative of the ensuing mayhem. The photography clearly shows that Mick had less room to maneuver onstage than my living room, with fans (and a stray dog at one point) climbing up, then being summarily and brutally removed by the Angels. There are several shots of really bad trips happening in the crowd. The most amusing moment is when The Dead learn that Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane had been attacked, and they decide to bug out without performing. The film is also quite meta, because it cuts away to Mick and company watching footage we just saw, on an editing machine, to see the famous stabbing that took place right by the stage, serendipitously caught on film. Incidentally, George Lucas appears in the credits as a camera guy. Utter chaos. I can't imagine a scene I'd want to avoid more than that. Dante's 8th circle was right outside my home town.

The Burrito Brothers!

A documentary of a special concert with candid interviews and performances. 1001 movies to see before you die.

This film has become a historic testament of the rock music industry as it continued to evolve in 1969, by following one of its leading bands, The Rolling Stones. Although not originally intended to be, the film is a snapshot in time of the rock and roll industry as it morphs from arena venues to festival scale, and documenting all the chaos and naivety around managing the safety and security of such massive productions. This was at the outset of the largest gatherings for music in the history of the world, and as such, the industry learned from grave mistakes as those depicted in this film at the Altamont festival. The Rolling Stones are arguably at their peak during this footage and it is fascinating to watch them just before they entered the era of the caricatures we know them as today. A must for any Rolling Stones fan, as well as classic rock aficionados.

The second Merry Clayton screamed about rape and murder being just a shot away in The Rolling Stones's "Gimme Shelter" did the 1960s really feel like they were abruptly coming to an end. With the free love generating the counterculture movement slowly disintegrating into disillusionment following frustrating years of war and political turmoil (oft said to have been made worse by the Manson family murders of the same year), America was headed in a direction more pessimistic, more wary, than it had ever crept toward. 1970's "Gimme Shelter," a documentary chronicling the final few weeks of the Stones's 1969 US Tour (and, more infamously, their cataclysmic Altamont Free Concert that resulted in the deaths of four people), is a powerful inside look into the crumbling in of the hopeful days of the 60s - here do we see a band who once thrived on carefree fun suffering from plights of ennui, and here do we see audiences who'd rather cause a commotion than be the people they once were when America finally seemed to be a promising place in which to live. It wasn't initially planned to be the cultural summarizer that it has grown to become over the years. Originally were directors Charlotte Zwerin and Albert and David Maysles hired by the band to document their antics a la Dylan's "Don't Look Back" (1967) or Elvis's "That's the Way It Is" (1970), with "Gimme Shelter" planned to be used as an advertising tool of sorts. (They had already flirted with documentary filmmaking through 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil," which was directed by Jean-Luc Godard and shined a light on the iconic song's recording.) But from the start is it clear that something is amiss, that tension is thickly spread and urgently needs to be broken. From the footage of the stretch of '69 shows does everything seem perfectly fine, cameos from Ike and Tina Turner, for instance, reassuring us that all in store is a conventional tour we'd perhaps wish we'd been able to attend. But when the planning for the free show is underway - the size of the area is massive, and the Hells Angels are hired for security - we can feel an inexplicable, but very much there, foreboding that almost promises future artistic dystopia. From the assault on one of opening band Jefferson Airplane's members within the first few minutes into the show to the brief but chilling flash of a knife during the Stones's first song does it become clear that "Gimme Shelter" is hardly a rollicking rockumentary a la "Stop Making Sense" (1984) or "Truth or Dare" (1991) but a cultural artifact hardly about its focal musicians at all. It's about the almost startlingly quick shift in the collective mood of a society switching decades and switching ideals - the documentary is merely a small scale exemplification of the widespread phenomenon. In watching was I taken aback - "Gimme Shelter," purposely filmed without documentary staples (like talking heads, romanticized voiceovers, and cobbled together sequencing), is so in the moment, so perturbingly real that I found myself feeling as though I were definitively part of the year in which the movie was filmed, able to empathize both with the reality of the general population and with the reality of the prosperous Stones. In watching could I feel the disaffection of the crowd, the horror of musicians inadvertently responsible for bringing together uncontrollable chaos. "Gimme Shelter" is so mightily effective because it's more than just a concert movie; it's also an unaffected record lucky to have been filmed. One wishes it were longer - it's more eye-opening than any fictional account of its decade.

Record of the time and very innovative, the emotioneless expressions of the members of the Stones were the best part. Great editing.

Great capture of rock's darkest day. A documentary on the Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour and the tragic events that concluded it. We see footage of their concerts and of them making the Sticky Fingers album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. However, the main focus of the film is on one concert - Altamont Speedway, outside San Francisco, 6 December 1969. A free concert, it is the Stones' idea and it was meant to be the Woodstock of the West (Woodstock having occurred four months earlier). Other bands performing included Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, Crosby Stills Nash and Young and Santana. However, it is far from being the peace and love of Woodstock. Part of the problem is that the Stones hired the Hells Angels as security. The other problem was that a large portion of the crowd were high on drugs. Friction ensues. During the Stones' set, Meredith Hunter, high on methamphetamine and armed with a gun, makes a lunge for the stage and is stabbed to death by the Hells Angels. The peace and love era of the 60s was over. A very well made documentary, especially considering the limited material the producers had to work with. We don't just see the concert footage but also the Stones and the film makers sitting in the studio going through the footage. We see their thoughts and reactions to what occurred. Some of this feels contrived or staged but for the most part it provides a narrative to what happened. Otherwise we would just have concert footage with no explanation of what to expect or what was going on. The fact that the Meredith Hunter incident is mentioned early on in the film helps the tension in the movie. You know something is going to happen, but you don't know when. You see the friction preceding the incident and there's now an inevitability to it all. It plays out like a thriller, ultimately. The camera work at the concert contributes too. The roughness of the shots adds an edginess and feeling of anarchy to the proceedings. The footage preceding the Altamont concert is quite interesting too. We see some Stones concert footage from other concerts, and get complete songs from these concerts. These are probably the only enjoyable live music moments from the movie, as the Altamont songs are too soaked in tension and the threat of violence to fully enjoy. The Sticky Fingers footage is great too, seeing a classic album being formed. In the movie it only lasts a few minutes but it deserves a documentary of its own. The highlight was seeing Jagger and Richards listening to an early take of Brown Sugar. Quite illuminating to see artists' views of their own work. Overall, one of music's most infamous incidents, quite accurately captured.

Seeing Mick "tremble dancing" when the most psychotic HA security dude was staring him down reminded me of an episode on Boardwalk Empire when Chalky White and a partner sweated "Eddie Cantor" down to give Knuckie's main squeeze a leading role. They made him tap dance and he was sweating bullets....Of course Keith Richards kept on jammin' even as Jagger was shutting down the band after the horrible incident was recorded on film...e docu.

The filmmakers are able to use real footage in a way that steers clear of the type of pseudo-reality that "reality" shows and some soft documentaries have moved to and instead, creates a striking narrative structure and provides a candid look at the night in which a concert gone wrong destroyed the counterculture dream. Also featured is some great footage of Rolling Stones concerts and some great music, of course!

I did not view Gimme Shelter as a Rolling Stones fan. I am not a fan of the band, and think they are actually the most overrated and overhyped band that ever walked the face of this earth. But I did enjoy this documentary. The film is less about a Stones concert and more about what happened during the concert and also showcases the end of an era. The hippie peace and love movement was slowly coming to an end during this period, and the murder during this show by the Hells Angels pretty much put the nail in the coffin. What I came away thinking about this documentary is. The Rolling Stones cheaped out hiring the Hells Angels for security at the show. Most likely in exchange for some drugs and partying and what resulted is typical animalistic behavior by the infamous biker gang. To have absolutely no respect for human life by not only killing someone, but killing them in front of thousands of people in the middle of concert really is something. A great documentary.

With great music, imagery, and filmmaking, this is an astounding documentary! The film truly captures the intensity and horror that went on during this greatly tragic concert. It gets so intense, that it should be classified as both a concert film and a THRILLER! One of the best documentaries of all time!

Like other DVD from our collection, we find this one in a bargain. An extraordinary documental about the disastrous Altamont Free Concert given by The Rolling Stones at the end of their USA 1969 tour. Special mention to the fragments of Tina Turner presentation for her sensual singing "I've been loving you too long"