Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont

by Saul Austerlitz

A thrilling account of the Altamont Festival--and the dark side of the '60s.

If Woodstock tied the ideals of the '60s together, Altamont unraveled them.

In Just a Shot Away, writer and critic Saul Austerlitz tells the story of "Woodstock West," where the Rolling Stones hoped to end their 1969 American tour triumphantly with the help of the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and 300,000 fans. Instead the concert featured a harrowing series of disasters, starting with the concert's haphazard planning. The bad acid kicked in early. The Hells Angels, hired to handle security, began to prey on the concertgoers. And not long after the Rolling Stones went on, an 18-year-old African-American named Meredith Hunter was stabbed by the Angels in front of the stage.

The show, and the Woodstock high, were over.

Austerlitz shows how Hunter's death came to symbolize the end of an era while the trial of his accused murderer epitomized the racial tensions that still underlie America. He also finds a silver lining in the concert in how Rolling Stone's coverage of it helped create a new form of music journalism, while the making of the movie about Altamont, Gimme Shelter, birthed new forms of documentary.

Using scores of new interviews with Paul Kantner, Jann Wenner, journalist John Burks, filmmaker Joan Churchill, and many members of the Rolling Stones' inner circle, as well as Meredith Hunter's family, Austerlitz shows that you can't understand the '60s or rock and roll if you don't come to grips with Altamont.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, American History, Crime, Pop Culture

336 pages, Hardcover

First published July 10, 2018

About the author

I am a freelance writer whose work has been published in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and The New Republic, among others.

I am an adjunct professor of writing and comedy history at New York University, as well as the author of Kind of a Big Deal: How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century (Dutton, 2023), Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era (Dutton, 2019), Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community (Chicago Review Press, 2014), Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy (Chicago Review Press, 2010), and Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes (Continuum, 2007).

Booklist named Another Fine Mess one of the ten best arts books of 2010, and Just a Shot Away received rave reviews, including from the New York Times Book Review, which called it “the most blisteringly impassioned music book of the season.” Generation Friends was named the second-best comedy book of 2019 by New York magazine, as well as one of New York’s 15 best books on TV comedies.

I grew up in Los Angeles and am a graduate of Yale University and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. I lives with my wife and two children in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont by Saul Austerlitz is a 2018 Thomas Dunne Books publication.

Altamont. That word always conjures up images of the melee and basic cluster f**k of the December 1969 free Rolling Stones concert in San Francisco. Forty-eight years later, we still can’t seem to stop dissecting this event, trying to pinpoint how it all went so far awry, trying to figure out exactly what transpired between the Hell’s Angels and Meredith Hunter, and hoping to finally get to the bottom of just whose fault it was.

I stumbled across this book in the Overdrive library and despite the fact, that I’d read the best book ever written on this subject, a couple of years ago, I’m always up for hearing another perspective, even if the subject has been examined six ways to Sunday.

Sadly, this book has quite a few issues. It looks as though it has been hastily arranged and rushed to publication in a ‘quick cash grab’ manner. There are no footnotes or references, no sources named, which should be a requirement,I would think. I can’t believe the publisher allowed this to go unchecked!!!

However, most of the information regarding the actual show, can easily be verified if one wants to do the research or check out a few YouTube videos.

Under these circumstances, I’d be tempted to slap a one-star rating on this bad boy because I can’t imagine recommending a book in this condition to anyone.

However, this book has one redeeming quality, an approach often overlooked by other biographers, and that is the focus on Meredith Hunter. In this way, the book is timely, addressing the death of young black man at the hands of a ruthless and very racist motorcycle club. Over the ensuing years, the finger pointing and blame game is ongoing. Was it the fault of The Grateful Dead who suggested the Angels act as security? Was the last- minute switch in venue? Was it because the planning was rushed and disorganized? Was it the flippant attitude of The Stones? Was it the copious amounts of drugs consumed by the crowd and the Angels? Many have testified that there was just something off- a tension hanging in the air that day- right from the get-go and things steadily declined until the atmosphere boiled over. I think it was all these things combined and it was a very toxic brew.

The aftermath of the show is just as murky. There was no conviction, no justice was ever served. Meredith Hunter was buried in an unmarked grave, and to this day no one from The Rolling Stones has ever reached out to his family, not even to offer a simple condolence. Later, when they got wind of a possible lawsuit they paid the family a paltry ten thousand dollars, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the money they earned on that tour, and what they eventually forked over to appease the Hell’s Angels for their ‘services’ at the concert- and maybe to keep them off Jagger's back.

Although this book is poorly constructed, edited, and pretty much a recap of the events that transpired before, during and after Altamont, the steps the author took to show Hunter as aliving, breathing human being, and not just someone who symbolized the end of a movement, is the only reason I’m giving the book a higher rating than it really deserves.

If you want a truly comprehensive accounting of Altamont I highly recommend the Joel Selvin book: “Altamont: The Rolling Stones, The Hell’s Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day.”

[Carol Storm · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book deserves two stars for the thoughtful interviews with Meredith Hunter's family, but beyond that there's not much to recommend it. Young Saul Austerlitz tells the story of the murder at Altamont and the collapse of the Sixties rock festival scene with no new insights, no new ideas, and no real interest in challenging anyone's assumptions about what really happened during the legendary riot at the Rolling Stones free concert.

By and large, young Austerlitz sticks to cheap shots, yet they're not even original cheap shots -- they're more like family heirlooms, handed down from father to son. Mick Jagger is greedy and manipulative. The Hell's Angels are white trash killers. Meredith Hunter was a gentle, child like soul, part Tiny Tim and part Emmett Till. (That gun he was waving was just for protection, natch!) The cover of the book features a flattering blurb from aging rock critic Greil Marcus -- and he's quoted again and again inside the book as the source of all wisdom and humanity. It all feels a little bit smug, a little bit pat, a little bit too cozy and incestuous.

Is there such a thing as cultural nepotism?

[Jonathan Rice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing and poorly edited. The lack of footnotes — probably the decision of the publisher to save space and production costs — is particularly galling in a book that relies very heavily on factual reconstruction of long ago events. And basic fact checking is shockingly lacking. It’s hard to have much faith in a book that gets details wrong, especially about the Rolling Stones. How hard is it to fact check song titles? At times the writer uses a narrative style that suggests he was actually there at Altamont in December 1969 but that event clearly happened long before he was born and the first person narrative reads like a written up version of the movie “Gimme Shelter” as many scenes from the documentary are simply transcribed. Ironic because the best parts of the book are when the author steps back and discusses the making of that documentary. For a book about the concert at Altamont on December 6, 1969 the author ignores many readily available sources — there is, for example, a well-known audio recording of the Rolling Stones set that provides important contrast with what’s in the film. Listen to the recording and it’s clear the basic chronology and length of the set was very misleadingly edited for the documentary. It’s a huge oversight that the author ignored the audio recording because he does make much of the divergent impressions of the concert in which many concert goers had no idea how much violence occurred near the stage. The divergent impressions were not solely due to whether people were sitting too far away to hear clearly or not. Even people fairly close to the stage had no idea a murder had taken place. The murder of Meredith Hunter was a horrible tragedy and the author is at his best discussing the almost casual manner in which that news was received by many at the time and the way that event has since been regarded as an abstract symbol or metaphor. Austerlitz does a good job in restoring the simple humanity of Meredith Hunter and what his murder meant to his family and loved ones. It’s surprising that there is no mention of the three other people who died at Altamont. Granted, a hate crime should be the focus but it’s curious that the three who died in accidents don’t get a single mention.

[Courtney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very disappointed in this book. First off, there are stupid little mistakes that should have been caught by the author or the editor. For example, the title of one of The Rolling Stones songs is “Moonlight Mile”, yet the author calls the song “Midnight Mile”. There are other mistakes as well regarding the forming of the band and who founded it, and other similar things that I am not going to take the time to list, but suffice it to say, they are mistakes that should have been caught by the editor. Secondly, the author had a agenda from the start that he definitely got across. That being that anyone with white skin is evil and out to get our black brothers and sisters, and there in lies the problem. If you are looking for a history of race relations from 1969 to the present, this book is for you, but if you are looking for the story of Altamont, or a small segment of Rolling Stones history, you may want to look elsewhere.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

So we have Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day which I read and Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, and the End of the Sixties which I want to read as well as the movie Gimme Shelter, so I was wondering why another book on Altamont. This one focuses a lot of attention on the man who was killed at Altamont, Meredith Hunter. The only problem I have with the book is the glaring mistake that had Jorma Kaukonen instead of Paul Kantner thanking the Angels for knocking out their lead singer. Anyone who has seen Gimme Shelter knows that is was Paul Kantner. It made me wonder what else the author got wrong in his research of the book. Also the Airplane were playing The Other Side of this Life not Somebody to Love when Marty Balin jumped into the crowd and got knocked out.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not terribly interesting writing on an interesting, terrible subject.

[Sean Asbury · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given this book as a gift and I wondered how the author could add anything more to already great books on this subject. What would the unique angle be? Well, after reading the introduction and how the author compared Hunter Meredith to Michael Brown I should have known what this would be about....and put the book down at that point.
What follows is 300 pages of blabbering, pointless absolute junk with absolutely ZERO new information about the event and instead a focus on Meredith's family (why?). The cover of the book calls this "heroic" - which tells you everything you need to know about what the author thinks of himself.
Sentences such as this pollute the book: "the 580 freeway was like a like of calligraphy drawn across the landscape of undulating hills..." blah blah blah.
Or this..."Altamont appeared like a boulder in a river, damming the flow of water that had heretofore been unimpeded".
Not to mention the 6 paragraphs that describe how his car would never be driven again....



The victim was high on drugs, track marks on his arms and agitating the system - while waving a gun! Nobody is saying that he should have been killed, but he certainly isn't the sweet innocent victim that the bleeding heart author makes him to be.

When you think that the book couldn't drone on any longer, the last 30 pages are updates on people that aren't relevant to this story at all.

This book is a waste and if you really want to learn about Altamont you should read Joel Selvin's excellent book.

[victor harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Held in December, 1969, the Altamont concert conveniently marks the end of the 60s and casts a cloud over the often upbeat assessment of the counterculture and Woodstock Generation. Because of the killing of Meredith Hunter by the Hell's Angels, who were hired as security for the concert, the focus of the narrative was on tragedy rather than a celebration of high profile bands. It was a free concert offered by the Rolling Stones in a hastily assembled venue that was ill-equipped to handle the masses that assembled. They were also responsible for hiring the Angels based on a recommendation by The Grateful Dead. The Dead would abdicate responsibility when the Angels went on a violence binge and didn't even take the stage.
In fact no one wanted to take responsibility for the murder of Hunter who would fall into obscurity. This work corrects that and traces his early life and the impact his death had on relatives and friends. He would not be entirely blameless in the incident as he pulled a gun on the Angels ( an unloaded one) which gave them some justification for their overreaction.
Very good pace and the author weaves the various story lines of the musicians, Hell's Angels, and cultural backdrop into striking commentary on the demise of the 60s counterculture.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't know much about Altamont before reading this book although I've always liked the history of the 60s. This book is a mess though, like others have said, no citations, boring accounting of most of it, and it starts out with an angle. While I'm sure race played a role in the Hells Angels actions, and moreso in the media ignoring Hunter's death, it shouldn't have been such a huge focal point. Everyone was on LSD and meth and lord knows what else, drunk, miserable, jammed in, and a violent biker gang in charge of security. So a kid waves a gun around? And in the direction of the stage? Not too many other ways this could end. There were many other injuries and a few other deaths that day that are completely glossed over. It's ironic that the author mocks the terrible coverage by the media when his own reporting is just as shoddy. Disappointed in this. I caught numerous writing mistakes too, like one minute Meredith is running away, and the next it's so crowded that a reporter can't put both feet on the ground. Distracting when you're reading about an already chaotic moment.

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's an Ellen Willis quote I keep coming back to, from her stunning 1969 takedown of Woodstock in The New Yorker: "What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of blues. It is bourgeois at its core, a mass-produced commodity, dependent on advanced technology and therefore on the money controlled by those in power. Its rebelliousness does not imply specific political content; it can be — and has been — criminal, Fascistic, and coolly individualistic as well as revolutionary. Nor is the hip life style inherently radical. It can simply be a more pleasurable way of surviving within the system, which is what the Pop sensibility has always been about. Certainly that was what Woodstock was about: ignore the bad, groove on the good, hang loose, and let things happen. The truth is that there can’t be a revolutionary culture until there is a revolution."

There's a Stanley Booth quote that has always stuck with me, from The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones: "Many people thought then that dancing and music could have a major role in changing the structure of society. They may have been naïve, but they were much more interesting than the sensible people who came along later."

Underneath whatever the Altamont disaster means about the balance or lack thereof between these two vaguely incompatible but somehow equally true viewpoints, it's really just a story of a badly organized festival that culminated in an innocent young man's death, and a rock band (really, two rock bands) incapable of facing up to their part of the responsibility for it. But that's not the whole truth any more than it's the whole truth to say that it's "the end of the '60s" or the failure of a Utopian vision of humanity (after all, when it's clearly one side whose behavior portends the doom of that utopia, is it really humanity that's failing or the macho hubris of a specific subset?). Nevertheless, the power of the event and the way it's lived in the imagination is how many strands of the great narrative of the '60s for which it seems to serve as an ugly climax, which in part is due to the way it was reported on from the beginning.

Austerlitz's absolutely magisterial narrative of that terrible day serves beautifully to deconstruct that mythos and uncover the real-world nightmare underneath, which in the end is really the story -- heretofore untold -- of Meredith Hunter, the man who was killed by Hells Angels during "Under My Thumb" on the Speedway that night. As much as could ever be possible, Austerlitz allows us to know him, and to bear witness to the magnitude of his loss -- which, in larger sum, puts into perspective how many disparate stories formed the teeming masses at Altamont and at every other grandiose gathering that succeeded or failed along the way to the vain attempts at unity that marked that moment and that generation.

The book is unkind to the Rolling Stones, who played despite the chaos, and the Grateful Dead, who organized the festival then ran away, but both bands deserve the treatment. It's abhorrent that the Dead washed their hands of the incident, continued to support the Angels in the years to follow, and allowed the Stones to forever take the lone mantle of "the Altamont band." (Members of the Flying Burrito Brothers and especially Jefferson Airplane were much more forthcoming in the time that followed.) It's equally if not more abhorrent that the Stones never took time away to apologize to Hunter's family, to hear out their grief, to offer anything of substance financially in their coping.

This isn't to say that the Stones caused Hunter's death or the morass of drug abuse and violence that preceded it, but only that it reinforces a point that Hunter subtly makes early in the book when contrasting the band with the Beatles. The Stones were great in their prime, one of my favorite bands of all time so long as you only dimly acknowledge their work after 1972 or so, but they were also terminally phony. They pretended, in their music, to be Black, but of course so did all of the British Invasion bands. They ostentatiously pretended to be the working-class stiffs that the Beatles actually were, fetishizing their own renegade outlaw behavior; they pretended, for a time, to be the harbingers of widespread political and social upheaval (at least on Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed); and they pretended to wield some sort of power over throngs of youth, to have the key to some sort of darkness, a vision that became all too real with the Angels' lashing out and Hunter's demise.

Beyond the tragedy of Altamont, it also exposes all of these illusions. It can't be a coincidence that the Stones lived out much of their remaining career as harmless hedonists; you can see the seeds of this taking hold in the footage from Gimme Shelter that shows Jagger watching the killing on an editing bay. In some ways it's like, well, good; but in others, it feels like a cowardly response to what might have been an occasion of growth. What if one's ambition was directed toward the actual changing of things for the better? (For all his faults, you cannot deny that John Lennon went further out on a limb for social change than any of the Stones ever did. Jesus, so did Carl fucking Wilson.) What if that might well have started with the simple gesture of reaching out to Meredith Hunter's family?

At any rate, I loved this book. I couldn't put it down. Only slightly annoyed at the glaring error early on that ascribes "Time Is on My Side" as a Jagger-Richards composition.

[David Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont by Saul Austerlitz (Thomas Dunne Books 2018) (781.660787).

Here's an important new book about the heyday of the hippies. This book describes in detail a concert held at Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969 which played a critical role in shaping our perception of the hippie era.

The tragic events that surrounded the free blockbuster concert headlined by the Rolling Stones at Altamont are thoroughly explored and recounted by author Saul Austerlitz. The reader may already be familiar with the events of the day, for the concert was memorialized in the early 1970's as a documentary film entitled “Gimme Shelter.”

The concert was planned as the West Coast's answer to Woodstock, which had set the hippie standard for peaceful and groovy mass gatherings of the young. Altamont instead became the anti-Woodstock and came to symbolize the end of the idealism of the Sixties. Poor planning by the event's organizers and an excess of bonhomie led to a gathering of over four-hundred-thousand young people at a remote location where the organizers had failed to make provision for food, water, toilet facilities, medical care, security, or even parking for the mass of humanity that showed up.

Billed as a day of music in the sun, the concert quickly became a horror show for those in the vicinity of the stage when the event's only “security detail” rolled into the arena. Those designated security providers were none other than the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. The Hell's Angels had been invited by the Stones to come sit on the edge of the stage and to drink beer all day. The Angels were to be paid in beer; they were promised $500 worth of free beer and seats at the edge of the stage in exchange for the bikers' keeping rowdy concertgoers off the platform and away from Mick Jagger.

The problems with the bikers began as they rode their motorcycles straight into and through the sea of humanity surrounding the stage. The crowd parted to allow the bikers to pass, but when the bikers reached the stage, there was nowhere for them to park their bikes but directly between the crowd and the platform. The stage had been erected at the bottom of a bowl. The result was that every time the crowd inched closer to the stage, the surge pushed those fans down front closer and closer to the Angels' motorcycles. Unfortunately, the bikers would not tolerate “civilian” contact with their motorcycles. The penalty for those who violated this dictum: beatings with pool cues, hands, and boots.

As the day wore on, the Angels charged into the crowd over and over to beat the hippies back and away from the stage and their beloved motorcycles. The musicians had a front-row view of the beatings distributed by the bikers. A member of the band Jefferson Airplane was knocked cold by an Angel for having the temerity to call out the bikers for the day's actions. It was obvious by that point that the inmates were running the asylum.

The day ended in tragedy when a seventeen-year-old concertgoer named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a Hell's Angel right in front of the stage. Amazingly, this entire sequence was captured on film. Hunter can be clearly seen flashing a gun in front of the stage after having been assaulted by a Hell's Angel. In a confusing sequence, one can see that Hunter was immediately tackled by a swirling scrum of bikers in front of the stage before he disappeared from view. (It's confusing in slow motion too). Hunter was stabbed numerous times and had been kicked and beaten past the point of recovery. He died under the stage before an ambulance could get through the crowd.

Author Saul Austerlitz took great issue with the behavior of the Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger at the concert. He also accused Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead of complicity in the day's events by having introduced the Stones to the bikers. The author's criticism was so pointed that after reading this book, I watched Gimme Shelter for the first time in many years.

Where Saul Austerlitz saw duplicity and guilt in Jagger and Garcia, I saw only pain, astonishment, and befuddlement.

Oh well...how else is our author going to create interest in a fifty year old concert when anyone remotely interested has already seen the film?

But don't let that last comment deter your interest. It's a fine book about an important historical event, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the Sixties.

My rating: 7.25/10, finished 8/15/19.

[Yenta Knows · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finished the book. Skimming more than reading because the authors overheated prose is. Just. A. Waste. Of. Time.

Having immersed myself in documentation of both festivals I’ll venture two opinions about why Woodstock was peaceful and Altamont was not.

Reason number one. Security at Woodstock was supplied by the Hog Farm, a commune that called itself the “please force”. When they needed to enforce a rule they would say “can you please stop doing that and do this instead?”

Compare that to the Hell’s Angels, whose method of enforcing rules was to beat someone up.

Reason number two. Neither festival had enough time to build the infrastructure necessary. But at Woodstock, they at least managed to build a high stage. And it seems as if the sound was OK for most listeners. Certainly a factor at Altamont was that the stage was low, so it was tempting to try to climb onto it, and the sound was weak, so that listeners pushed forward to hear.

—-Early Impressions—

First impression: oh my God how did this book ever get published?? The author appears to be a nice guy. I liked that he visited Meredith Hunter’s grave and recited the Kaddish. I liked that he sought out Meredith’s sister Dixie and interviewed her at length.

But why didn’t he — or his editor — tone down his excessive writing style? How could an editor allow a sentence like this one: “In one photograph from the era she is sitting on a barstool half-turned to face the camera, her luxurious curls tumbling over her ears and onto her forehead, dressed in a striking off the shoulder dress, earrings sparkling in her ears (page 28).

Even if she wanted to allow the unnecessary words (“dressed in a dress”) it’s luxuriant, not luxurious. This is basic grammar.

And why didn’t the editor notice silly errors, as when an apartment that lacks electricity is described as having a small refrigerator?

I’m picking up some useful factlets here and there. The Stones played a concert in Hyde Park in which security was supplied by a British version of the Hell’s Angels. Everything worked out fine, so I suppose they believed that the American Hell’s Angels would be as restrained as their British counterparts.

By the way, it would have been useful if the author had included the exact date of the Hyde Park concert. But he didn’t. This is characteristic of his style — not enough facts to be journalism, not enough substantive analysis to be commentary.

Page 32. I am switching to skim mode, looking for any reliable information while avoiding, as possible, the author’s execrable prose. Here’s the sentence that brought me to this decision: “Schizophrenia was an unforgiving master, one that encouraged its sufferers to seek relief from anything that promised a temporary respite from its hammerlock on the mind.”

Now this is where an actual journalist would have reviewed Altha Hunter’s medical records, discussed her condition with an authority on mental illness, and summarized, in lay prose, just what schizophrenia means for the patient and the patient’s family.

The author substituted blather for research.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite simply the best rock history book I have ever read.

I was too young to know about what happened at Altamont at the time, but as I grew older and became interested in music, I learned a bit about "the day the music died." (One of them, anyway.)

The book resonates and haunts because it doesn't just address the lack of planning and the disastrous choice of the Hells Angels as security. It also looks at the troubled life of Meredith Hunter, the 18-year-old African-American man who was killed by them, and the heartbreak his family suffered. Most of the coverage I've read about Altamont talked about what it meant for music and the end of the '60s peace movement. Much respect to the author for reminding everyone that a young man lost his life that day and he had a family who still mourns him.

I am a big Rolling Stones fan (they are my all-time favorite band), so it was a little hard for me to process their culpability in the disaster; much blame has been heaped upon the band, especially Mick Jagger, for somehow "harnessing" the dark energy present that day and unleashing it upon the crowd. Bollocks. Mistakes were made, certainly by the planners of the event, but it's absurd to blame it all on the band or on Jagger. Things went downhill fast and while it wasn't handled well, I don't think the blame lies with them.

I am certainly no scholar of the incident. This is the first in-depth take I've read on it. But I would have to place much of the blame on the Grateful Dead, who arranged the free concert, pegged the Hells Angels for security, and then bailed when they saw the violence getting out of control. (Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane was knocked unconscious by a Hells Angel, and the Grateful Dead refused to take the stage.)

I would place the majority of the blame on the Hells Angels. Their violent tendencies were exacerbated by mass quantities of booze and drugs, and they were ready to beat some heads. A drug-addled crowd of 300,000 probably didn't help matters. Crowd dynamics can be strange; you can often sense a change in a crowd, moving from just enjoying the music and being happy to a darker tone, with people ready to fight.

From the start, Altamont was set up for failure. While this was a fascinating read, it was also a tragic one.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in rock history and the '60s in particular.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I grew up in the 60s and remember Altamont in the news. I knew that the concert was a follow-up to Woodstock and that things went horribly wrong with a concert goer being killed in a savage attack by members of the Hells Angels. This book put the facts together. The first half of the book, up to the point of the killing was fairly solid reporting on the subject. I enjoyed it.

The second half of the book was a disappointing polemic on how the counterculture failed. This was not so interesting. The book contained weak, veiled references to racism. While the Hells were and still appear to be an undeniably racist organization, it does not appear that the victim was killed because he was black or because he had a white girl friend. It appears, based on the information provided, that he was killed because he tried to defend himself in the face of the animalistic biker organization. A family member of mine has recently had a similar experience with an Angles affiliated organization who tried to 'earn their colors'. Their mistake is that they picked 3 young veterans on leave instead of a lone 18 year old. This time the bikers lost.

If you want to read a interesting spin on the Altamont concert, are interested in the early formation of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and the Rolling Stones, or the reporting of the Rolling Stones journalists this book may hold your interest. Otherwise, I cannot say that I really recommend this book.

[David James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two recent books have examined the calamity at Altamont. Joel Selvin’s book titled after the festival itself will for now remain the definitive moment by moment account of what went wrong and why. But Saul Austerlitz is more interested in what it meant. And for him that includes many things, but most importantly, it means the death of a young black man brutally murdered by white men who got away with the crime. By highlighting this, and by detailing the brief life and horrific death of Meredith Hunter, he exposes the rot that existed at the heart of the sixties counterculture. Hunter has generally been relegated to the status of footnote to a story of lost innocence for white people. Austerlitz shows how his death fits into a long history of black men freely killed by white people without consequence, thus making this book not simply a damning indictment of The Rolling Stones (and even more so the Grateful Dead, who managed to sidestep their culpability in what transpired), but of the supposed sixties movement itself. In the end, it was every bit as white and self-focused as the mainstream culture it sought to supplant. Even in the aftermath, the hippies (as well as the Stones) made it about themselves. The victim whose death defined the day was cast aside.

Dropping this down to four stars because of some major factual errors. But the conclusion is spot on. Austerlitz is one of the few voices to get the heart of this story.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Austerlitz does a good job of bringing Meredith Hunter to life through accounts of his troubled family life, which was mitigated somewhat by his sister Dixie, who raised him. The author also has a solid feel for what it was like in the crush of the crowd near the tiny stage that was bristling with Hell's Angels. Lastly, he gives full attention to the aftermath of the concert - the making of the film, and the trial of the Hell's Angel who drew first blood in the killing of Meredith Hunter.

People that mythologize the Sixties won't like the author's negative view of the Stones or the Grateful Dead. Others, whether they're Baby Boomers who voted for Trump or of some other age cohort, won't like the author's view that Hunter's death was no different from a lynching or a cop shooting.

300,000 people attended Altamont. Allowing for attrition over the years, there are still hundreds of thousands of eyewitness points of view on the subject. With that in mind, if you read this book do yourself a favor and read Joel Selvin's book on Altamont, as well. Selvin's prose is less overheated and his connections with Bay Area music types allowed him to get a detailed view of the situation backstage as well as the business chicanery that fed into the hastily "organized" concert.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed with emphasis on full discovery and exposure of time and place, this is an important account of events that have been hidden in a haze of misinformation and side-stepping since The Stones free concert at Altamont Speedway in 1969.....a very long time. Austerlitz keeps the focus on the carelessness, greed, and cowardice that led to the loss of Meredith Hunter's life at the hands of The Hells Angels, and in so doing, puts this event in its proper place in history. The famous Rolling Stone magazine writer Greil Marcus is quoted on the cover, saying, "....The focus on Meredith Hunter and his family is heroic." Heroic? Really? This young man was murdered for being black at a concert. I applaud the author for stating that simple fact, and question Marcus' mindset.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am compelled to actually write a review, however brief. Saul Austerlitz has a fantastic sense of setting a scene and putting the reader in the moment. The description of the day's unraveling had my skin crawling. He also has a knack for managing the micro and the macro - Altamont may have been a symbol of the death of hippie idealism, but he never forgets that only happened because an 18 year old man was stabbed to death.

My problems come from the fact that there are no sources cited, and some extremely dubious conclusions are reached. This is a very compelling, if very flawed, book that is surely worth a read.

[Eric Keating · Rating 1 out of 5]

Saul Austerlitz starts and continues to lecture the reader about the Rolling Stone’s blame for the tragedy at Altamonte all while exploiting the victims family. This makes you feel lectured at every turn. Is it a tragedy? Yes! Was there anything the band could have done to prevent it? Other than canceling the show before it even happened which to me begs the adage hindsight is 20/20
Do not buy this book there are better books by better authors available that touch on the tragedy but tastefully
Saul wrote like it was a cash grab about a tragedy he even mentions modern day race issues manufactured by the left.

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read but not awesome. I like the author’s attempt to humanise Meredith Hunter, the teen allegedly stabbed to death by the Hells Angels at Altamont in 1969. Some good interviews with key players certainly shed some new light but there was a fair bit of repetition throughout this book.
The point was laboured very heavily - hells angels / greatly dead bad; stones - callow, unsympathetic and hunter - just a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. I did enjoy some of the socioeconomic history in the text but I wanted a bit more from this.

[Steve Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers a thorough but fairly prosaic take on Altamont: it represented the death of the idea that the counterculture could offer any real change in American politics or that hippies were immune to American violence and racism. The distinctive thing about it shouldn't be set aside, though: it engages at length with Meredith Hunter and his family both as individuals and part of a long line of African-Americans who were victims of violence committed by whites and then cast aside by other whites (including the Rolling Stones.)

[Chad Malkamaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This reads like an overly long magazine article than history book with just a bit too much proselytizing by the author about comparing this event to today. But the facts remain, Meredith Hunter's name is known for his tragic murder, but no one remembers the young man or knows his story. Also, the Grateful Dead remain one of the largest collection of scum bags and their actions at Altamont are unconscionable.

[Martha Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brings the story to life! Fascinating read.

I found this book thoroughly enlightening. The author covers a daunting variety of perspectives on the story, providing intense detail for each. Just when I thought he'd wandered astray from the original thesis, he artfully redirects to wrap it into a cohesive package. I recommend for anyone intrigued by music or modern history, and particularly for those who drink in that mystical reality where the two come together

[Melina Cruz]

Hey! I just wanted to say how much I loved your story, it was a truly amazing read. The visuals came so naturally that it felt like a cinematic experience.

I’m an artist who specializes in comic and webtoon commissions, and I couldn’t help but think of how amazing your work would look as a webtoon series. If that ever interests you, I’d be honored to bring it to life.

You can reach me on Discord (ava_crafts) or Instagram (@Evelyn) if you’d like to chat more or see examples of my work.

[Johnny Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only read this because I love Stones. Just a Shot Away with the Rolling Stones at Altamont revisits a 1969 music festival that took a dark turn. The writer does a post-mortem on what went wrong. It's an interesting read, but there's nothing new here and this is better as a documentary than a book. Save your money and watch "Gimme Shelter" instead.

[Victoria · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has a very clear agenda which becomes immediately apparent. DNF early on because I found the lack of credible sources questionable and I was able to easily disprove multiple statements made in the first few chapters with the bare minimum of research. There are better and more reliable accounts of the events of Altamont and the repercussions.

[Michael Belcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

When reading about a historic event, select a book written by a historian if you want accuracy and analysis. However, if you want entertainment and editorialization, select a book written by a journalist. This book is the later. An exciting (albeit often repetitive) summary of the tragic events which occurred during the free concert held at Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A breathtaking wholly original look at a story you've heard or heard of 1000 times before. This book makes it matter now rather than 50 years ago. Read it if you're only dimly aware of what "Altamont" means in the history of popular culture. Read it if you think you know all too well. Either way, it's miraculous.

[Michelle J Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating deep dive into the tragedy at Altamont. The author's focus on Meredith Hunter and his family adds a depth to the story that has been missing from previous accounts. The book is crispy written, well researched and difficult to put down.

[Edu · Rating 2 out of 5]

You're better off watching the Maysles brothers' acclaimed documentary Gimme Shelter (1970). The book reads like a transcript of the film, anyway.