Sympathy for the Devil (a.k.a. One Plus One)

[Note, in the wake of Jean-Luc Godard's final work of his "classic" period, Week End, I will continue to review works by the director, but I cannot promise that I can find all of his films, even with the benefit of torrents. I will watch what I can when I can get my hands on it, but forgive me if this series suddenly stretches out even further than it already has.]

Whenever an artist loses control of his or her work, one naturally sides with the wronged party, raging at the profit-driven system that relegates those who actually make the art to the sidelines to satisfy those who use art as a tax write-off. Sympathy for the Devil, originally titled One Plus One, may be the one film where, appropriately, we actually do sympathize with the enemy. If this is the final product, what on Earth were the producers working with, and could Jean-Luc Godard have made a more complete movie if he'd retained control?

As with his subsequent, Le Gai Savoir, Sympathy for the Devil was made in a time of tremendous sociopolitical upheaval around the world: during the course of recording the titular song, the band had to amend a mention of the Kennedy assassination to the plural in the way of Robert's death in June of 1968. May '68 had unleashed the pent-up sexual tension of French youth, and riots broke out across America for various reasons. In Vietnam, growing resentment, fear and hostility toward the Tet Offensive early in the year led to the My Lai Massacre (though the revelation of this event would not be revealed to the American people for another year). Everything was going to hell, and a fully radicalized Godard needed something to crystallize his revolutionary thoughts.

As youth spurred the protests in America and France, Godard decided that rock 'n' roll bad-boys the Rolling Stones would be the perfect catalyst to spread his Maoist message. At the time, this must have seemed a keen decision: if sexual frustration was openly fueling one social cataclysm and at least partially influenced some of the riots on the other side of the pond, who better to kick-off sexual freedom than the most nakedly sexual rock band on the scene?

By the 10-minute mark, however, I was already checking my watch. It is difficult to write about Sympathy for the Devil without lapsing either into a list of outrages or a strained grasp at straws to forgive some of its numerous issues. When I first started this long retrospective in an attempt to get a handle on Godard, I had an image of the artist in my head of a pretentious intellectual who valued his ideas over how he used them. Very quickly I realized I was mistaken, that even at his headiest, the director could combine the intellectual with the sensual; who else could make an essay film like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her into such an affecting portrait when most of its shots are plainly symbolic shots of industrial production? Even the brazenly radical La Chinoise had a wry twist that kept matters from becoming too serious. Sympathy for the Devil is the first film to conform entirely to that initial, reductive vision of Godard, a mash-up of intellectual images without a bedrock of emotion. Granted, this is the producer's edit, but most of the vignettes are themselves lifeless and not even Godard's editing genius could save all of them no matter what tricks he pulled.

For Godard is not content to sit in the studio with the Stones and watch them compose the titular track. Instead, he intersperses his footage of the band with various sketches demonstrating his radical stances, albeit in the vaguest terms possible. A voiceover reads what sounds like erotic fiction with political conviction. A bookstore sells comics, pin-up magazines and radical pamphlets where paying customers must give the proprietor the Nazi salute and slap two bound Maoists. Various vandals spray-paint messages onto walls and windows, and Black Panthers read militant texts while handing out rifles as if preparing for a race war.

Each of these vignettes certainly has a purpose when stacked against the slow progression of the Stones' greatest track from its beginnings as a loose acoustic outline. Just as the band is composing its most sinister, relevant song, so too are the battles lines being drawn around the UK and, by extension, the Western world. Those spray-painted messages are rarely completed before Godard cuts away and, even though the film came out after the tumultuous events of the year, the director sought to make a film about preparing for revolution.

Yet the fact that, despite the continuation of social unrest for years, the movie was dated upon release severely undermines its impact. It's interesting to see some of the crosswords the vandals make of their graffiti, such as writing "HILTON" and then using the 't' to draw "STALIN" vertically, insinuating that companies can be as dictatorial and ruthless as political tyrants. I also couldn't help but look upon the scenes with the Black Panthers, situated in a junkyard sitting among derelict cars, and not think of Detroit and the upcoming post-industrial fallout, even though the scene, as with everything else is filmed in the UK.

Such moments are fleeting, however, and Sympathy for the Devil quickly morphs into a mess. The Panthers bring in white women as one of the group reads from the texts of Eldridge Cleaver, specifically his rapacious ideas concerning white women. By the end of the film, several of the ladies have been shot and one hangs from a movie crane. Godard's second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, appears in a scene as "Eve Democracy," a woman who walks around as a film crew follows and responds to increasingly complex sociopolitical questions solely in the affirmative or negative. Godard links the pornographic bookstore with fascism, but wasn't the whole point of hitching his wagon to the Stones that they represented sexual anarchy?

Speaking of ideas that don't gel with what the Stones were about, the threatened violence of Godard's revolutionary skits is completely at odds with the titular song, a composition about the temptations and downfalls of evil behavior. The murderous Panthers do not even take their armed revolution to the streets, settling only for killing a few white women (thus conforming more to an alarmingly racist vision of militant blacks than a depiction of oppressed people finally fighting back). As I watched Godard abandon the dialectical method that allowed him to counterbalance his radicalism with more measured study, I thought of that aforementioned line from the Stones' magnum opus: "I shouted out, /'Who killed the Kennedys?'/When after all/It was you and me." I also considered just how terribly the band would blanch at violence just a year down the road when their free concert at Altamont would erupt into fighting and murder.

I don't know who this film could thoroughly please. Not Godard, certainly, forced to contend with the producer's take on his vision and also confronted with a band that clearly failed to meet the philosophical importance he'd placed on them -- it cannot be coincidence that the band are never actually interviewed or shown doing anything but rehearsing the tune. Not the Stones, who, as previously mentioned, do not do anything on-screen other than work out a single song and work as a group solely because of their roots-rock simplicity and suffer from the intellectual attention. Fans of either camps also have nothing to latch onto, from the Godard lovers who won't understand why the director is wasting his time with one of the thicker bands on the scene and not the Stones fans who have to put up with the director's meandering nonsense.

Godard objected to the use of the full song over the end credits, and it's easy to see why. Made during social upheaval, he wanted to make a movie about preparing for the coming revolution he perhaps thought inevitable. Pay attention to the beautiful tracking shots with which Godard captures the Stones in the studio: they get more complex each time, reflecting how the song comes together from an initial acoustic sketch through a more complex arrangement as keyboards and increasingly layered percussion stack on top of the sound in each session. The spray-painted messages are never fully completed before Godard cuts away. Clearly, the director wishes to visualize how revolutions start, as gestating ideas that must bud and bear fruit before the time is ripe for an uprising. Unfortunately, what the unfinished thoughts of Sympathy for the Devil primarily illustrate is that, for the first time in his career, Jean-Luc Godard went off half-cocked.

The Rolling Stones — Exile on Main St.

There are those who contend that Exile on Main St., the Rolling Stones' most-lauded album (albeit only in retrospect), works better as an idea than an album. I agree, but I also think that's what cements it as the band's masterpiece. To be sure, there's nothing on the album as good as "Gimme Shelter," "Sympathy for the Devil" or "Brown Sugar," to say nothing of the rest of the group's three better-constructed albums. What Exile does primarily is capture a feeling; it just so happens that this feeling contains the whole of rock 'n roll, from its attitude (the down 'n out rebel/aristocratic celebrity dichotomy) to its musical roots (R&B, rockabilly, C&W, soul and blues).

The band recorded the double island while hiding from tax collectors in the south of France in Keith Richards' luxurious villa, hardly the makings for a return to the humble origins of rock. But as fancy as their exile was, it was still exile, and the Stones were still at the time dealing with the ghost of Altamont (Sticky Fingers began this journey with its nightmarish tunes "Sister Morphine" and "Dead Flowers"). Freed from their old label and left to their own devices out in the Riviera, the Stones devolved to levels of bacchanalian excess impressive even for them; the legacy of Exile owes as much to the photographs of Dominique Tarlé, who documented their lascivious orgy in stark, black-and-white clarity.

Sorting out who even played on the album can be tricky, with producer Jimmy Miller filling in for Charlie Watts behind the kit on "Happy" and "Shine a Light" and damn near everyone but Bill Wyman playing bass throughout. Truth is, little of the album was definitively cut with the band's mobile in Nellcôte, but those images are so tied to the sound of the album and the shoddy disrepair with which the group cobbled together these cuts that we may as well just print the legend. After all, despite "Let's Spend the Night Together" and the Altamont debacle, it was Tarlé's visualization of Exile that serves as the modern bedrock of the cultural perception of the Rolling Stones as one gigantic, cocaine-snorting nostril sniffing its way up a Colombian Everest. Somewhat amusingly, those photos may be the reason for Exile's reputation over the actual album, which contains only a few tunes ready for easy radio play, an anomaly for a band now synonymous with classic rock, who enjoy more than a baker's dozen of tracks that receive consistent airplay today. How could their "best" album seemingly contain no hits?

No one thinks this at first, of course, not in the face of the one-two punch of "Rocks Off" and "Rip This Joint." Even the newly remastered edition, a powerhouse update that brings out the bass and scrubs the tracks without cleaning them, the murkiness of the Stones' intriguingly sloppy, incoherent and flailing rockers remains fortunately intact. "Rocks Off," dominated mainly by Jim Price and Bobby Keys' brass as vocals and other instruments fade in and out of fuzzy distortion, sets the tone for an album whose tone is anything but assuredly set, the raucousness of the trumpets belying its desperate lyrics recounting Richards' need to get high just to numb himself from the world. Yeah, these guys are partying hard, but the comedown in just on the horizon, and they cannot outrun it. Even the haphazard production values capture this dichotomy, both the result of all them being too smacked up and distracted to put in hard work even as the fuzziness reflects a certain fatigue.

"Rip This Joint," meanwhile, establishes the aesthetic of this loose and disjointed album, ironically in its tautest number. Just under two and a half minutes, "Rip This Joint" runs the gamut of American rock and its roots, running through country, R&B, even New Orleans jazz. Its exaggerated speed, far faster than anything recorded by Holly or Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis, serves to literalize the exuberance of early rock 'n' roll and its effect on youth. Hell, it even points to future movements in the genre, prefiguring as it does hardcore punk in its incomprehensible wash of guitars.

Both of these opening numbers are tight enough to hook the listener, yet loose and ramshackle enough to prepare him or her for what's about to come. The one-two punch gives way to a loose collection of sounds and snatches of lyrics sufficiently hopeful and despairing to make the case for this album, by a bunch of nouveau riche Brits lounging in a stew of heroin and nubile, willing flesh, standing as perhaps the singular collection of the American songbook. In those opening numbers is the sound of musical independence, the Stones' escape from taxation and their old label lining up to the country's true birth, and both contain the undercurrent of uncertainty and fear that such shifts engender even in the most committed radicals. As the album moves into "Shake Your Hips" and "Casino Boogie," this doubt rises fully to the surface, as the old party mood fades into a perfunctory motion, the revolutionary fervor having cooled into the realization of the burden that comes with freedom.

Oh, but let us move away from this fleeting and tenuous connection, as are far too self-absorbed to belabor something as grand as a historical connection. The lyrics of Exile on Main St. in nearly every case refer to the band, even when they filter a song's perspective through an imaginary protagonist. Exile simply happens to be more resonant than even the sharpshooter accuracy of Jagger and Richards on their previous handful of albums because the band scrambles together the issues weighing on them. "Torn and Frayed," a country-soul mash-up that comes so close to the level of pioneering country/rock crossover artist Gram Parsons that you wonder if Parsons (who visited the band during recording) felt a bit of pressure, could be about either Brian Jones, the Stones' original lead guitarist who'd died of an overdose in 1969, or Keith Richards, who seemed at the time to be heading to an early grave of his own. The unnamed guitarist's state of being, synecdochically defined by his almost Dickensian "torn and frayed" coat, crumbles, but no one cares. "Well his coat is torn and frayed/It`s seen much better days./Just as long as the guitar plays/Let it steal your heart away," Jagger sings as if preparing himself to replace Keith's cold, vomit-choked corpse in a year or two. "Shine a Light," influenced more by the gospel roots of American music, serves as a more touching tribute to Jones. Originally written before Jones' death but with the band's knowledge of his growing addiction, the later-refashioned "Shine a Light" plays both in the moment and in retrospect, describing the band's reaction as their friend drifted away with the added pain of knowing the ultimate result.

What I noticed with Exile after my first listens years ago is that its supposed sprawling nature has been vastly overstated. At less than 70 minutes long, the Exile doesn't even make the most of its double-album format, which could have packed another 15 minutes worth of material (whcih, considering how only one song makes it to the five-minute mark, could have allowed for up to five more songs to make the cut). Furthermore, its pacing moves quite deliberately through its musical hodgepodge. Each side follows a loose structure of vibe and roots music explored, from the proto-R&B shuffles of the first side to the desperate soul of the third. Amazingly, the Stones, regarded to that point (and beyond) by detractors as blatant thieves of Afro-American style, sound not at all like copycats in the various modes of Exile; in every case, this band sounds as if they'd been born to play whatever is currently falling out of their poorly recorded instruments. Most of the band's previous forays into country, save the masterful "Wild Horses," typically showed a group about as far out of their comfort zone as they were peddling psychedelia in the Summer of Love via Their Satanic Majesties Request (more so, even, as that underrated album still hasn't had its fair shake despite its issues, especially in the much punchier mono edition floating out there in the ether). Give one listen to Side Two's "Torn and Frayed" or the moving "Sweet Virginia," however, and you'll hear a band that could have backed Gram Parsons any day.

Side Three showcases a band who made their reputation by posing as bad boys now becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Happy" presents Keith Richards on guitars and vocals and Jimmy Miller on drums as the invincible drug hound rallies from his stupor long enough to express pride of it before slipping back into his lethargic daze, and the excellent but sadly named "Turd on the Run" is a better soundtrack for getting into a drunken brawl than "Street Fighting Man." However, the third side also shows the group retreating slightly in the face of becoming what had previously been just an act. Both the murky, folksy, downright swampy "I Just Want to See His Face," which boasts one of Jagger's most distinct and affecting vocals performances ever, and "Let It Loose" draw deeply and, more importantly, convincingly from gospel and soul, imbuing the record with a genuine pleading not expected from the preening rockers. Not since the rampant fear of "Gimme Shelter" had the band sounded so fragile and unsure.

Nothing compares to "Ventilator Blues," however. Taking its name and mood from the sweltering, airless basement where the band recorded while at Richards' villa, "Ventilator Blues" captures the Rolling Stones at an emotional nadir, the uncomfortable heat of the location bringing out their bad side. Without referencing either Jones or Altamont, the song's lyrics describe a scene every bit as apocalyptic as that of "Gimme Shelter," only this cataclysm is insular and seedy, not spread out over a planet in trouble. In that sense, it captures why Altamont, which the Stones barely planned (as can be seen in the documentary Gimme Shelter), has become the symbol of the death of the counterculture, as it casts aside social concerns in favor of the entitled preoccupations that defined the Me Decade. However, as Mick spits out his double-tracked vocals like a man confessing to his priest that he's about to kill someone, Jagger finally becomes a true bluesman. Few would jump out of their seats to rush to Jagger's side and defend his vocal abilities, but people always sold him short. He didn't try to ape Delta bluesmen because he thought they were cool; he deeply loved Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and all the others. His raspy whine is merely the result of his coming to terms with the fact that, hard as he may try, he will always be a white Englishman. It's an aural compromise between the eternal flame of race music and the technical crunch of white noise -- incidentally a compromise that extends to the entire band on the album's most well-known track, the distorted reggae of "Tumbling Dice." But his singing on "Ventilator Blues," combined with the sinister, choked nature of the instrumentation, works as a better and more convincing blues tune than the group's cover of "Stop Breaking Down" by the King of the Delta Blues himself, Robert Johnson found on Side Four.

If the plaintive country of Side Two and the dangerous and desperate soul of Side Three wore you down, never fear, for the Stones end their excavation of America's musical roots with good ol' rocking blues on and above the level they mastered in the mid-'60s. "All Down the Line" and that Johnson cover are stomping numbers that get the blood pumping after the one-two-three punch of "Ventilator Blues," "I Just Want to See His Face" and "Let It Loose" froze it. The aforementioned "Shine a Light" brings the mood back down, but it's fitting for a benediction to come at the end. At last, the Stones sum up the experience of the album itself with "Soul Survivor," a mid-tempo number that releases the battered and bewildered listener back into the real world.

"Everybody needs a little help sometimes," Jagger sings on "Tumbling Dice," and the central contradiction among the album's many contrasts is how much that's true and false of the band at this stage in their career. Cobbled together with anyone who was on-hand to play, Exile on Main St. perversely sounds like a group effort despite how much of it owes to Bobby Miller and Bobby Keys (his sax makes everything better). Hell, Mick Taylor, Jones' replacement, who despite his his contribution to Sticky Fingers might as well have been a hired hand at the time, provides the most solid anchor for the band's loose experimentation. By far the most technically proficient musician to ever play for the band, Taylor played honest, emotional blues through the flair of a jazzbo. His fluidity powers a number of songs through what might otherwise have been stagnant, scattered jams, most notably on "Ventilator Blues," where his slick slide guitar riff earned him a rare joint credit with the Glimmer Twins. (Taylor's full talent was best on-display live, particularly in the widely-circulated bootleg of the band's 1973 show in Brussels on the Goats Head Soup tour, a show heavy on Exile material. The entire bootleg is essentially one long, invigorating guitar solo, and I suspect that the band never released the scorching album officially because it would have been the best advertisement in the world for Talyor's solo career when he suddenly and acrimoniously split from the band.) And yet, in the middle of it all are Jagger and Richards, still capable of pulling themselves away from their vices to write some of the best tunes of all time. No other record so convincingly runs through as many genres as Exile without forcing itself to cover genres too-disparate to allow consistent flow, something this album contains even with its clashing moods and styles.

Perhaps what makes the record most special, however, is that it shows the band caring more about the music than their image, something they rarely did before and have never done since. After Exile met with mixed reviews and Richards slipped further into his addiction, Jagger, the professionally minded one of the bunch, began to assert more control and threw the band at every fad that might lengthen the Stones' career. Not until 1981's Tattoo You would they put out a great record from start to finish that sounded like a band making music they believed in instead of cashing in on trends. I have not always, or even often, made it through Exile on Main St. in one sitting, yet whenever I have been away from the Rolling Stones for any length of time, for some reason it is always this album that brings me back to them. Of course, when I do listen to it, the reason becomes obvious: the band most routinely singled out as bourgeois poseurs, even above Led Zeppelin, managed to make the rock record about rock, in all its contradictions and contrasts.


The remastered deluxe edition of the album is by far the best edition of the album to date, cleaning up the shoddy production while retaining its intentionally muddiness. What's a particular treat, however (and especially for those who've triple-dipped by now), is a bonus disc of alternate takes, as well as archived tracks partially re-recorded by the band, including work from departed Stones Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor. You can understand why these didn't make the final cut, but the "new" tracks "Plundered My Soul" and "I'm Not Signifying" are the best thing the band has put out since Tattoo You, and some of the alternate takes are dynamite. The scrapped version of "Loving Cup" contrasts with the tight version found on the album proper with a far looser structure, the metaphorically intoxicated innuendo of the album cut swapped out for a literal drunken swagger. This alternate take is better than the one that made the album, and in many ways it captures the album's overall mood of a deflated party better than any one track on the record (for a more in-depth look at this curious case, check out Ben Ratliff's fascinating view on it for the New York Times in an otherwise mixed re-appraisal of the album as a whole). Also worth more than a few spins is a considerably more defiant edition of "Soul Survivor," sung by Richards with feral menace that contrasts with his more enticing outlaw tone on "Happy." The remaster itself justifies buying whatever numbered copy of the album you're on, but these bonus cuts, while not nearly as comprehensive as they might have been, are fantastic and more-than-welcome additions.

Gimme Shelter

There are plenty of documentaries that capture the end of life, of dreams, of careers; but how many have shown us the end of an era? I'm not talking about newsreel footage of something like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall was simply symbolic, but the zeitgeist had changed in the Eastern bloc well before it. I mean a snapshot of a culture crumbling before your very eyes. The events of Altamont on December 6, 1969 could not have been predicted by anyone, yet, when you watch the film, it creeps up with a terrifying inevitability that turns this rockumentary into a suspense thriller.

The Maysles open the film with the Stones at Madison Square Garden earlier in '69, strutting out on the stage triumphantly to "Jumpin' Jack Flash." We then pull back to see the Stones also watching this footage. They're in the final stage of the documentary: reviewing the planned cut to see if they'll give it their approval. They wistfully smile at Jagger's stage banter, but something is amiss. We soon learn why; after this brief portion of footage, the Maysles play a radio broadcast aired shortly after the disastrous Altamont concert in which we hear the report of 4 dead (one murder, three accidental) and numerous injuries. Sonny Barger, the leader of the Hells Angels who provided "security" at the concert, calls in and blasts the Stones' ego and unruly crowds for the violence and stands by his boys.

The look on the Stones' faces go from nostalgic to morose over the course of the broadcast, and we begin to understand how the event has impacted them. The rest of the film plays out in chronological order: the Madison gig ends and the Stones, on top of the world, announce a free concert at Altamont Speedway without planning a thing beforehand. Now their managers have to deal with furious organizers who were barely contacted before the announcement and now have to lay down an actual deal. Though the organizers rage, it's the Stones who look foolish in all this; what right did they have to just announce a concert? Even here you can see the rampant, unchecked ego as their managers schmooze the organizers and deflect any blame they try to place on the band.

The set-up for the event builds, frankly, like a Hitchcock film. Roadies attempt to set up scaffolding and amps, but the already gathering crowds begin climbing them immediately. One of the technicians tries to warn Jagger, but he dismisses the man as "trying to tell him what to do." After the technician comes back a few times, he finally gets sick of Jagger's foppish dismissal and simply walks away.

To make matters worse, the Stones won't go on until nightfall, even though the supporting acts conclude mid-afternoon. The Flying Burrito Brothers start things up, and immediately it all goes to Hell. A great deal of the audience showed up a day in advance to get close to the stage, so they were worn out and stoned out of their skulls before the place was even rigged properly. Combined with weather fluctuations (hot during the day, cold at night), improper facilities and a lack of "freak-out" tents for people to be calmed during bad trips, the tragedy seems an inevitability. Some concert-goers start tussling with the Hell's Angels as soon as the Brothers strike up, and one of the band members pathetically calls out to the Angels to stop beating the zonked out fool, practically weeping "You don't have to do that!"

By the time the Stones take the stage, the crowd is at each other's throats. They strike up "Sympathy for the Devil," and the place goes off like a shot. People rush the stage and the Angels close in from the rafters. There's something infinitely striking about the Stones' most sinister tune causing such a riot; especially disturbing is the fact that during a song named "Sympathy for the Devil," a group called the Hell's Angels seem to materialize out of nowhere to protect the band. The Stones stop and restart, and by the time the song is finished they must ask for a doctor and an ambulance.

But it is their next number, "Under My Thumb," that the infamous stabbing of 18-year old Meredith Hunter occurred. A black man in a green suit so loud the blind could spot him, Hunter pulls a gun on the Angels during the song and is promptly stabbed by another biker. The Maysles replay this moment for the Stones as if it were the Zapruder film, freezing on Hunter's gun and then the knife plunging into his back.

The film up until this has a sinister, darkly funny irony, as it captures a mindset that the film eradicated. At the earlier Madison Square Garden gig, Ike & Tina open for the band, and it's impossible not to think of their then-secret domestic life as Tina seduces the crowd while Ike looks on coldly. The Altamont gig, though unsettling from the start, overflows with people so firmly disconnected by drugs that they'd become truly lost. The hippies started out as rebellious youths who came together to "free their minds" as it were to search for some higher plain of consciousness, or at least that's what they told us. But here they've simply lapsed into drug addictions, and they've lost politics to vague messages of love and the chance to see bands for free.

Consider the frail white woman who walks among the crowd raising money to "Free the Black Panthers." She doesn't really know what some members of the Panthers are being jailed for, but argues that they should be let go because (and this is a serious quote), "After all, they're only Negroes." Now, I know that was the polite term in the 60s, but the way she says the statement shows such a deep ignorance of, well, everything that you can't help but laugh at her. Likewise, there's something kind of amusing about hippies getting stoned, stripping nude, "dancing" (or whatever you call those frantic spasms), and then getting violent. It's something you expect to see in a Bunuel film, and suddenly it's happening in real life.

But for sheer wretchedness, nothing beats the bands pleading with the crowds for peace. Apart from that member of the Flying Burrito Brothers who whimpered at the Angels for beating an audience member, Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick gets big unintentional laughs when she breaks up a fight of her own, admonishing the Angels for their brutality but acknowledging to the crowd that, when they get unruly, the bands "need people like the Angels to keep people in line." These bands can sing and preach about peace and brotherhood all they want, but in the end the artists are clearly on a pedestal. Jagger too tries to calm the mob with pleas of "Brothers and Sisters! Why are we fighting?" that seem even more pretentious when you consider how little he cares for anyone but himself the entire time.

However, the ending saps any and all of the dark chuckles from the piece. The Stones refused to release an earlier doc called Cocksucker Blues because it depicted the more hedonistic aspects of the band (a.k.a. everything everyone already knew about the band even then), yet the sign off on this film, unquestionably a darker portrait of their shortcomings. I wondered why they would do such a thing, and came to the conclusion that, for the band, this is the closest they can come to absolution. Perhaps by putting the film out there someone will forgive them. I don't know why they'd think this, as the band come off like prima-donnas who allowed a crowd to become a mob just so they could make an entrance in style, but I think they made the right decision in the end. As they file out of the room, the camera freezes on Mick Jagger's ashen face before showing people leaving Altamont and cutting to the credits. If you look at Mick Jagger lately, he looks as alive as ever; sure, he looks like a skeleton re-animated through Dark Arts, but he's still vibrant. But the Mick we see in this freeze-frame looks closer to death than even the post-drugs elder Jagger ever has. It's a haunting image that could play in any horror film.

Gimme Shelter has been describe as the greatest rock and roll movie ever made--and it certainly is--but that neglects its much greater significance. Gimme Shelter premiered exactly one year after the events on Altamont, mere months after the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rocked the counterculture, and it put the nail in the coffin of the 60s. It captures the hippie culture as it passes its crest and begins to crash ashore; in 1967 they became the dominant youth force in the country and, in the turbulent election of 1968, it seemed as if the lunatics had taken over the asylum (though the hippies were never as big as people make them out to be). But by 1969, with LBJ gone, the hippies ran out of a big issue and slowly slid into permanent drug hazes. Though Gimme Shelter is a comment on the egos and callousness of rock stars, it endures as a snapshot of this downfall of the counterculture, the moment where the 60s, a beast that was already dead, finally rotted until someone noticed the stench. For that reason Gimme Shelter belongs as much in a history classroom as it does the shelf of any rock aficionado, and it's one of the all-time most important documentaries ever made.