Review by Booklist Review
By 1969, despite being one of the biggest bands in the world, the Rolling Stones were broke. Manager Allen Klein made them more money than they could imagine, yet very little of it made it to Mick and company. To raise funds, an American tour was launched to culminate with a free festival in Golden Gate Park. When that venue fell through, the concert was moved outside Sonoma, before finally landing in Altamont, a godforsaken spot in Alameda County, with only 36 hours to spare. The band carried on with their tour and their rock 'n' roll lifestyle, leaving the details to others, although no one knew for sure who was in charge. With 300,000 attending, the Hells Angels serving as security (with no cops on the premises), very little in the way of concessions or medical care, and plenty of bad acid, the festival erupted in violence, including the killing of an 18-year-old. Rock journalist Selvin (Here Comes the Night, 2014) fills in all of the details, fleshes out major and minor players, and provides expert analysis of the cultural significance and lasting legacy of Altamont, the day the sixties died. --Segedin, Ben Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The Altamont festival of December 1969, a concert near San Francisco that featured the Rolling Stones and others, is often seen as a prime example of the darker side of the Sixties. Its chaotic and shambolic planning, vast quantities of dangerous drugs, and ultimately the stabbing death of a concertgoer, seared Altamont into one of rock's bleaker moments. Journalist and author -Selvin's (Summer of Love) narrative history of the festival, from its conception to its aftermath, draws on interviews he conducted, published journalism, and remembrances. He portrays participants from the Stones to the Grateful Dead and members of their organizations, while depicting a changing music scene, and counterculture infighting, coexisting with the era's naïveté and innocence-all percolating elements that culminated on the fateful day; his observation that Altamont was an illustration of these dynamics and "dramatized" them rather than caused them, is prescient. -VERDICT A fascinating account of the festival and its repercussions, this is also a cultural historical portrait of the West Coast rock scene, a history of the bands involved, and of the counterculture itself. Will be of interest to rock and pop culture fans.-James Collins, -Morristown-Morris Twp. P.L., NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
