Hollywood would play its part in mythologising the Altamont Free Festival, with the Maysles brothers’ Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, funded by 20th Century Fox, capturing the terrible events on film. Organised by the Stones, it was referred to at the time as “Woodstock West,” but is now historically linked to the Hells Angels who had been brought in as festival 'security', and is frequently compared to Dennis Hopper’s film Easy Rider as a symbolic end to the 1960s hippie counterculture. 

Charlotte Zwerin and David and Albert Maysles’s Rolling Stones film “Gimme Shelter” (1970) is the Zapruder Film of concert documentaries, the best vantage of a critical inflection point of fading American innocence. And ironically, it was used as exculpatory evidence in the 1971 murder trial of Alan Passaro, the Hells Angel who fatally stabbed Hunter. Passaro was acquitted, his actions ruled self-defence.

But long before the jury reviewed it, Mick Jagger picked through the film in the editing room, asking David Maysles to rewind the tape at the moment of Hunter’s stabbing. Video of Jagger’s inspection is included in the film’s final cut; Altamont was meant to be the victorious swan song of the Stones’s ‘69 tour of the US. 

The counterculture saw the Hells Angels as they wanted to see them, turning a blind eye to their professed love of violence, their misbegotten politics, and their outright racism. That alliance was in the process of breaking down on this terrible Saturday in December 1969, shattered by the overly ambitious professional demands imposed on the Angels, and a creeping rage toward the music loving hippie masses. 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was pronounced dead at 6:20 PM Pacific Time on December 6, 1969. His killing defined the legacy of Altamont.

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