Gimme Shelter + Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!

"We blew it," Peter Fonda, as Captain America, pessimistically proclaimed in the summer of ’69’s epochal Easy Rider. “We blew it at Altamont,” Rolling Stone magazine, picking up the theme, would declare in 1970, reviewing the Maysles brothers’ historic documentary Gimme Shelter, a chronicle of the notorious 1969 free concert headlined by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway in northern California. Coming just four months after the legendary love-in at Woodstock, Altamont, attended by some 300,000 people, has often stood in the public imagination as Woodstock’s dark inverse — the day the peace-and-love Sixties crashed and burned and died. The Maysles, with co-director Charlotte Zwerin, set out to capture, behind the scenes and on stage, the Stones’ 1969 U.S. tour. They ended up with a chilling record of a countercultural disaster, as members of the Hells Angels, plied with free beer to provide security at Altamont, turned dangerously aggressive, assaulting members of the audience and one performer (Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane). The violence culminated in the stabbing death of a young fan. This harrowing film documents all the mayhem, but also captures the Stones at a musical peak, with Jagger at the pinnacle of his pansexual charm. Colour, 35mm. 90 mins.

Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!
USA 1969-2009. Directors: Bradley Kaplan, Ian Markiewicz, Albert Maysles

RARE CONCERT AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES FOOTAGE! ► This extraordinary footage from the Rolling Stones’ 1969 U.S. tour, shot during the making of the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter documentary, includes five songs performed at Madison Square Gardens as well as backstage scenes. The material was screened at last fall’s New York Film Festival prior to its release as part of part of the Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert – 40th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set. “Intoxicating . . . 27 minutes of pure pleasure . . . This irresistible time capsule captures the band before they were a brand” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times). Colour, DVD. 27 mins. Courtesy of ABKCO Music: www.abkco.com