Besides, what happened at Altamont 1969? Finally Altamont Speedway in Tracy stepped in. From our new apartment, we can damned near see where it was held from here…give or take a foothill ridge. And it also is commemorated by [Gimme Shelter], which is a great movie. He doesn't quite realize that Altamont was going to have its own cachet and become an event in itself, and that the movie was worth one-million bucks, a big hunk of dough to the Rolling Stones in 1969.”. Sam Cutler brought The Hells Angels in to act as Security on December 6, 1969 in Livermore, California. So he's going to go into this and he's going to surf that Woodstock wave. Except for a few die-hard rock music fans and tons of empty wine bottles and other litter, the hills ... [+] around Altamont Speedway are serene compared to the scene the day before when an estimated 300,000 persons attended a free concert by the Rolling Stones and other rock music groups. around Altamont Speedway are serene compared to the scene the day before when an estimated 300,000 persons attended a free concert by the Rolling Stones and other rock music groups. View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2014 CD release of "Altamont Free Concert 1969" on Discogs. “They wanted a piece of that pie... to be a part of this underground that had sprung up since 1966 when they were last in America,” Selvin says of the Rolling Stones. Plans to host it at Sears Raceway in Sonoma fell through when the company that owned the site wanted $100,000 upon learning the concert was being filmed. It was the day the 60’s died. Forty-five years ago, on 6 December 1969, a free rock concert headlined by The Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco … The music was awful, the venue was awful, the crowd, etc. And as the Rolling Stones were trying to play “Sympathy for the Devil,” Jagger was telling everybody to cool out when things started to get out of control within the audience. “It's like a toxic mass psychosis,” says Selvin. A massive traffic jam on Highway 580 at the Altamont Pass before the free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway on Dec. 6, 2019. The Altamont Speedway concert had been reported as the West Coast’s response to Woodstock. I really enjoy talking to artists and learning about the stories behind their music and craft. What was the Altamont Free Concert? Not just for us, but for everybody." Death of Meredith Hunter during the Rolling Stones concerthttp://rockandrollstories.blogspot.com/ (Photo by Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images), free concert to be headlined by the Rolling Stones. (Photo by William L. Rukeyser/Getty Images), “At the end of their tour on a Monday, [the Stones] went to Muscle Shoals to record “Brown Sugar” and a couple other songs,” says Selvin. There were a number of reasons why the free concert happened. The spirit of change can never truly die, but on that tragic day at the Altamont Free Concert, a spirit did fade away. I just hit them up on Facebook to confirm. There were no longer sacraments of a movement. For the Stones, said Selvin, mounting the event — which also included the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and Santana — was their way of being part of the counterculture hippie zeitgeist as represented by Woodstock, according to Selvin. John Springer Collection/Getty Images To San Francisco-based veteran music writer Joel Selvin, who wrote the 2016 book Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day, now out in paperback, the concert was a toxic cocktail of greed and innocence.