Altamont
The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day
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کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
Narrator John Pruden's resonant narration lacks the pathos that usually accompanies such uproarious fare as this audiobook. The Altamont Free Concert, which took place near San Francisco in December 1969, was the West Coast's response to Woodstock, which had taken place in August of that year. Altmont unfurled at the end of the Rolling Stones' legendary tour, when the band was at the height of its powers. It would forever solidify the band's reputation as rock's reigning bad boys, especially after a member of the Hell's Angels stabbed a fan to death in front of the stage while the Stones played--an incident famously captured on film in the ensuing documentary, GIMME SHELTER. As Selvin investigates all the mind-boggling details of what went wrong, Pruden's level tone results in a smooth and engaging performance. J.S.H. � AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
May 30, 2016
Fewer than four months after the amorphous idealism of the 1960s achieved its Woodstock apogee, the Altamont Free Music Festival destroyed and buried it; in this methodical history, music journalist Selvin (Red, cowritten with Sammy Hagar) provides a cultural coroner’s report. Altamont was the brainchild of the Rolling Stones, who hoped to burnish their hip bonafides by embracing psychedelic San Francisco, but the concert was a disaster of poor planning, greed, and drug-addled naïveté about the social forces underlying the event. Hired as security for $500 worth of beer, the Hell’s Angels behaved like peckish sharks in a tankful of agitated minnows, attacking the audience and murdering a young African-American man while a documentary film crew, which included George Lucas, captured the tragedy. Selvin’s meticulous research exposes the criminally irresponsible management of the event. There were many culprits—including bad acid, an indifferent local police department, the Rolling Stones’ noblesse oblige, and the Grateful Dead’s embrace of the Angels—but Selvin assigns equal blame to the preposterous idealism of the era. Though his reconstruction brings events nearly a half-century past as close as yesterday, his biases undermine some of the book’s broader claims (e.g., declaring that the Stones never made a good album after the concert). Selvin’s presentation of Altamont busts the myth of innocence lost; in fact, Altamont just made reality harder to ignore.
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