While footage from the day has previously been shown in the Maysles Brothers’ documentary Gimme Shelter, the Library of Congress has now shared a home movie that has never been seen before. The video, which comes without audio, shows Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and more performing and hanging out in the crowd. Watch it below
The Library’s head of the Moving Image Section, Mike Mashon, wrote " I sent the reels up for 2K digitization by our film preservation laboratory. A couple of days later, I heard from some very excited colleagues that the scan wasn’t the Hyde Park show. It was from the Altamont Speedway concert in California and it definitely wasn’t footage from the 1970 documentary. Many people know the Gimme Shelter documentary pretty well, but there’s a lot more in this home movie.” (NME)
Excerpt from New York Times - Photographs by Bill OwensText by Jonathan Blaustein - To read the full article click here
A half-century ago, 1969 capped a radical, idealistic decade that saw the rise of the hippie generation and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Woodstock, perhaps the most famous concert ever, happened that summer, with free love and drugs serving as backdrops to sets by Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Richie Havens and others.
But another large, raucous rock festival that year became notorious for very different reasons: Altamont. That December, the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead organized an impromptu concert at Altamont Speedway, in the golden hills of Northern California’s East Bay, that drew an estimated 300,000 people. Four people died, including a man who was killed by members of the Hells Angels who had been hired to provide “security” for the event.
The concert was featured in the documentary film “Gimme Shelter,” and a few photojournalists captured the experience. Among them was Bill Owens, who would soon rise to photographic fame for his seminal early 1970s project “Suburbia,” which cheekily documented the rise of the suburbs in California.
Ms. Bagby stayed into the night, and photographed a Hells Angels member stabbing an African-American man, Meredith Hunter, near the stage as the Stones played. Mr. Owens didn’t know anything had gone horribly wrong until the following day.
In addition to pictures of Mick Jagger making his way through the crowd, and Jefferson Airplane and Santana on stage, Mr. Owens managed to capture images of the Hells Angels beating people with pool cues, and feared his family might be at risk.
The few pictures that survived have been collected in a new photo book, “Altamont 1969,” that was recently published in Italy by Damiani Books. It’s a fascinating collection of photographs, in addition to being an important document of a turbulent chapter in American cultural history. To read the full article click here
