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#579 - Slouching Towards Altamont (Patreon)

Published:
2024-12-04 15:20:18
Imported:
2026-06
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  • #579 - Slouching Towards Altamont.mp3
  • 579_-_Slouching_Towards... - audiogram.mp4
  • 579_-_Slouching_Towards... - audiogram.mp4

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Content

The story goes that the flower-power generation abruptly ended when the Rolling Stones held a free concert at the Altamont Speedway that went disastrously wrong. We revisited GIMME SHELTER (1970) to interrogate the myth.

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Comments

Blank

What a treat for a Wednesday morning. Love you guys

Blank

The lawyer in me suspects there must have been lawsuits against the stones after this event, and I wonder to what extent the anticipation or existence of litigation, or conversations with lawyers by the stones or by the film crew, may have factored into the footage or its presentation. For instance when Luke says the hiring structure was disputed by stones logistics people, I hear people trying to be careful about potential liability

Santiago Rodriguez

This is off topic but you guys have talked about video games and the movie Stalker previously. Did you know there's a Ukrainian videogame series based off of Stalker/Roadside Picnic? It's a really different adaption since it fills The Zone with an entire ecosystem of bandits and mutants along with physics breaking anomalies you have to fight and survive. A new one just came out and is interesting and weird.

Kranky

Would love you guys to cover Dave Chappelles Block Party concert film from 2004. Think there it would be catnip for this show

Orn Pauldorf

hard to think of a rock album that's more consistently good, beginning to end, than Exile on Main St... 'Sweet Black Angel' notwithstanding.

Oliver Crane

A surprisingly strong showing from the Michael and Us lads at this late date, maybe their best since Some G-Studio 60? My understanding was that the British version of the Hell’s Angels were a lot more chill, which made it sound like a better idea. And I think an additional issue was that the acid going around had tons of speed in it, and they decided not to warn the audience because it would freak out everyone who wasn’t already having a bad trip. Also I would highly recommend Stanley Booth’s book The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones, which follows a similar structure to Gimme Shelter of following them on the 1969 tour, interspersing scenes from the inevitable climax of Altamont, but he was genuinely in their inner circle and has very sharp opinions on their music and behavior.

Michael and Us
>>157283112

Yeah, I'm aware of it and have actually been getting served ads for the new one on the Xbox Store. Don't know much about those games, though my sense is they're supposed to be good? - L

Michael and Us
>>157280340

Oh yeah, that's definitely not bad speculation as to what's going on. Though I also think it's plausible that all this stuff was done informally through arbitrary conversations and such. There were huge bands in this era of rock but the industry itself wasn't yet the big, institutionalized business it had become by the late 70s. I remember Aubrey Powell telling me about shooting the cover for Wish You Were Here, for example, and he said "Oh yeah, we basically just lit a guy on fire and he was cool with it. There were no rules in those days" or something to that effect. So I think that chaotic informality things had in the late 60s and early 70s is probably part of this too. - L

Blank
>>157280340

Sounds like rather than Reaganism the response should have been more regulation 😝

Santiago Rodriguez
>>157283112

They're really good! They're massive ambitious immersive open world games but are incredibly janky and buggy because of it. Something the new one carries on the tradition of. They don't have the polish of a Rockstar game but have a weird heart that makes them endearing.

James Washburn

That song sounds better on accordion.

Leila Trottier-Evans

You should watch 'David Holzmans's diary its a late 60s film dealing with all of the questions you're addressing regarding cinema verite and I absolutely adored it

ChapoFan inParis

I saw the Stones at the SARS concert in 2003. I and everyone thought AC/DC was better. Also,it was the first time I saw Rush.

Matt

It’s pronounced “hāt.” As in “joan hated haight-ashbury”

piranhaplant

Was disappointed to find that Peter Fonda did not try to sell me a box set of CDs at the end of this episode.

Alex

In 2016 I took my dad to Desert Trip, a three day festival at Coachella, with Day One being Bob Dylan and the Stones, Day Two being Neil Young and Paul McCartney, and Day Three being The Who and Roger Waters. Dylan came out and just played through his set, not acknowledging the audience and not even having footage of him on the side screens for people further back down the stadium. An hour after he left the stage, a helicopter flew in behind it, five minutes later the Stones were out there performing. Keith at one point earnestly thanked Dylan for being their support act, which I don’t think is what the arrangement was. Anyway, the helicopter was flying back out before most of us had left the grounds. Waters the clear highlight of the three days. It was a week before the US election and he was borderline unable to be heard at points over the boos after he criticised Trump. Just a constant stream leaving throughout, their three day boomer reunion soured by someone who’d stayed a radical.

murt pie

Smithers! Have the Rolling Stones killed!

Matthew Hein

As you note, the “the hippies proved they couldn’t govern in California, so enjoy Reagan’s second term” narrative was prevalent in Gen X Oregon

Arid
>>157283112

The games are also much more heavily influenced by the Roadside Picnic novel than the movie. It's essentially the same atmosphere as roadside picnic, set in Chernobyl, with the lore of how the zone was created changed.

Savannakhet

You guys should do 'Withnail and I' sometime - quite a good 'end of the sixties' film.

Chris Sherman

Great episode, pairs well with Medium Cool for interrogating the implications of cinema verite. I highly recommend Flex Unger’s Why Are We Fighting edit of the Stones’ performance. I think Pynchon also gives a pretty interesting take on the “End of the 60s” in Inherent Vice, though he had the luxury of several decades to mull it over.

Zachary Smith

Another good episode, yada yada yada, you guys should do a Trailer Park Boys episode. I just watched Swearnet, and there’s a great line: “Everything is content.” I immediately thought of this pod.

Kieran Duffy

A scene in "Nobody Wants This" on Netflix features a character saying an argument should be recorded so they can put it on a podcast and a mention of "Vanderpump night". Will obviously ghost wrote this show.

Anthony

Seeing this episode in my feed made me finally go back and watch it. Now that the credits are rolling, I feel like I watched a completely different movie? I had a really bad time with this, and I love The Stones. Feel like the “end of the 60s” legend that this has is kinda made up to sell it or to turn the history into a story with a nice, clean ending? I also thought the cinema-verite of it all rings false given, like Will said, that the Maysles/Charlotte Zwerin clearly made choices structurally (like the framing device that doesn’t amount to much) and editorially (like even using out-of-sync footage in the performances). Those things by definition are “not how it happened,” and they show that the directors are editorializing to tell a story. But what story? To quote Chapo this week, what story is there to tell here? Hastily throwing together a mega concert is a bad idea?

piranhaplant
>>157456467

I think the standard reading of the framing device is that it captures The Stones--and rock n' roll writ large--at a turning point as they look back on "the excesses of the Sixties ™️" and decide to abandon their anti-establishment ways for a more comfortable, corporatized future.

Oliver Elliott
>>157280340

Concert promotion was surprisingly amateurish until Clear Channel consolidated the industry in the 90s. Basically a bunch of local assholes who mostly ripped the musicians off in shitty venues. One of the reason the criticisms of CC never really stuck is that they were generally actually better for the artists than what came before.

Oliver Elliott

One thing I don’t get about the narrative around this concert is that it’s not like the Rolling Stones were a canonical “hippy band.” It’s not like this happened at a Grateful Dead concert. It may be relevant that this happened in the Bay Area where I suspect the dominant aesthetic at the time was “hippy” whether or not one had any philosophical views that would match that.

Oliver Elliott
>>157300603

Somewhat OT but: why does Didion get such a pass from liberals or even leftists? She’s obviously a ridiculous reactionary, and an annoying snob to boot. She’s a great writer but what she writes is not only mostly wrong but often simplistic and stupid. Unlike a lot of people apparently, I don’t think you get a free pass for being able to put together a good sentence.

Oliver Elliott
>>157681700

Ah, I had forgotten that most of the other bands were pretty hippy oriented. It tends to get remembered as a “Rolling Stones concert” presumably because of this movie.

Savannakhet
>>157364050

I wonder if there's a Canadian Woolworth's... Australian Woolworth's is an upmarket supermarket. South African Woolworth's is a clothing and homeware department store. British Woolworth's was like, I dunno, a crap general bric-a-brac shop...

Meike Jourdain

An interesting movie to watch that takes place about a decade and a half after Altamont is Heavy Metal Parking lot- features talking head interviews with Judas Priest fans outside one of their concerts.