wade through the crowd, no longer separated by a stage and guards. Unexpectedly, someone punches Jagger in the face. “Somebody punched Mick!” says a disembodied voice. It stands in for our own voice of disbelief.
Yet, part of this story about how a rock crowd turned murderous is based less on what the filmmakers are doing and more on the attitude that viewers bring to the film, an attitude that hinges on pied-piper notions of rock’s subversive influence.
In fact, I’ll argue that far from reinforcing ideas about the subversive influence of rock and its intoxicating effect on its audience, the filmmakers complicate the media’s oversimplified story. I’ll explore their perspective grounded in the shots and cuts of audience that reveals a plural audience, without a message, without a unified goal, attitude, or style. Entertaining this aspect of the late 1960s rock audience requires that we abandon the standard narrative of Altamont representing the death of 1960s idealism, so aptly contained in the headline from above: “Stones Concert Ends It—America Now Up for Grabs.” Let us first consider what this audience was.
Who Was Listening?
The audience was big. In the Rolling Stones 1969 tour, the size of rock concerts grew to the size of major sporting events. Christgau called the tour “history’s first mythic rock & roll tour” (1992: 247). The Beatles had played the first stadium in 1965. Fifty-five thousand screaming fans—mostly young girls—filled Shea Stadium in Queens, but fans were not allowed on the field. The band played in the outfield. Madison Square Garden and the Altamont Speedway were not just larger venues, they were spaces in which audiences could come to the threshold of the stage.
The audience was listening. The crowds that Maysles shot were, as Barry Faulk argues, a new rock audience made up of counterculture listeners (2010: 100). Whereas the audiences that met the Beatles five years earlier sat, stood, and screamed, the 1969 rock audiences were more interactive. At this point in rock history, the genre had folded in folk music audiences and progressive jazz audiences, both rife with listeners. What’s more, rock had displaced jazz as the soundtrack to college. College degrees floated through these new crowds.
The audience was plural. In his essay contextualizing Jefferson Airplane, ethnomusicologist Patrick Burke untangles the complexity of 1968 San Francisco counterculture by separating the cultural radicals from the political radicals. He then shows the ways in which white counterculture borrowed heavily from black Civil Rights–era political groups (2010: 66). He argues that “we should view the 1960s not as a romantic epoch during which a unified counterculture fought an unfeeling power structure, but rather as a complex moment in which various cultural and political factions came together and pulled apart in ever-changing ways. Moreover, we need to examine music as an expressive form with the potential to evoke multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings, rather than regarding it merely as a vessel for unambiguous political messages” (65). Burke’s call to examination parallels the way that music and mass audience manifest in Gimme Shelter. Diverse shots of the audience foil any ability to idealize the crowd. As a strategy, the montages reveal the plural nature of the crowd. Now, let us examine how the film presents them as a plural mass.
Showing the Plural Mass
The confounding sense of so many of these shots is palpable. This emerges as Maysles and I discuss shooting the crowd. As we talk, we move from the crowd representing fanaticism to reveling in the details of the crowd.
I first ask, “Was that something you were curious about—that type of fanaticism?”
He answers, “Yeah. In as much as that was the thing that was going on. You see [it] in the faces of the audience. I was so lucky. One depends on being able to be at the right place in filming a concert…. Thank God I was able to get the audiences close up, near the stage. I remember that young woman had tears coming down.”
The rest of the conversation went like this:
HARBERT: “That’s an unbelievable shot.”
MAYSLES: “Ah!”
HARBERT: “Did you shoot that?”
MAYSLES: “Yeah.”
HARBERT: “She’s still moving along and bobbing her head as she cries. The people outside of her also smiling and bobbing their heads. They’re oblivious. But it’s not …”
Maysles interrupts excitedly: “The guy who’s looking up like this. And then, way off in the distance, this woman with a very attractive body nude coming down the aisle. Then that very much overweight woman, fighting her way …
I finish his sentence: “… with stuff in her hair!”
MAYSLES: “Yeah!”
It’s perhaps unusual for scholarship to operate through a series of “ahs” and “yeahs,” but for me, this is a good way of valuing these shots. Bafflement and inscrutability contribute to an acknowledged pluralism. Essentializing this crowd does violence to its members. The Maysleses and Zwerin provide a Jamesian flow between details, often striking, revealing the complexity. (After all, William James did coin the phrase “stream of consciousness.”) Even though we started on an idea—fanaticism—the images are productively irreducible.
Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1967), Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970), and Mel Stuart’s Wattstax (1973) all show greater degrees of unity among the crowds, erasures of difference supposedly brought about by the unifying nature of musical performance. Conversely, Gimme Shelter bears all the disorder of a mass event. The crowd shots offer plenty to confound any sense of unity. Consider this series of shots:
Young family with toddler
Close-up of a young man chugging a large, unlabeled brown bottle, cigarette in hand
Man, possibly on drugs, spinning
Sober couple spreading out a picnic blanket
Some shots themselves reveal an incongruity: A couple lies kissing on the lawn; zoom out to reveal that the man is holding a Doberman Pinscher on a choke chain.
A woman collects money for the Black Panther defense fund amid a less-than-enthusiastic crowd, cutting with her saying, “After all, they’re just negroes you know,” as a young black man drops change into her bucket.
The most confounding shot occurs after conflict begins to threaten the show. Cut to a sagittal close-up of a woman looking screen left, supposedly at the aftermath of violence. “They’re not going to play music until we get a doctor,” she says. She tries again, this time in a soft voice that we can hear but certainly is too soft to be audible to anyone nearby, “Somebody help.” Cinematically, however, it calls us to empathize with her concern. A bit louder: “Somebody’s hurt.” Then she leans back as a zoom-out reveals the crowd looking at her. Most editors would cut here before her concern shifts; but Zwerin keeps the shift, following her through a smile and an offhand frivolous melody on a flute. As a playful punctuation, Zwerin cuts to a clown face looking directly at the camera. The flute trill/melody continues through a cut to a bubble floating across the crowd. Over those two shots, deep concern for human life shifts to haphazard play.
Maysles delivers faces, and Zwerin ensures that we don’t linger in one person’s experience of the event. As noted in the beginning of the chapter, Maysles gets close to faces when he shoots. Not only does he get close, but he also favors frontal shots that encourage empathetic responses. He explains how he has done that through so many of his shots: “I’m intent on conveying the experience of the subjects to the
