As Sympathy For The Devil kicked off their seventh studio album Beggars Banquet, it would herald events in the year a head something of a game changer for the Rolling Stones.
The album released on 5th December 1968 was generally greeted as a return to rock and roll form after the bands psychedelic diversions of Their Satanic Majesties Request LP the previous year.
Brian Jones the founder of the Stones, had been slipping into an unpredictable state and his involvement with the group had turned more and more frustrating for himself and the rest of the band. Drugs and drink had only increased his depression over his lack of involvement with the bands future. Jagger and Richards songwriting had eclipsed Jones original blues band and the gap between him and the group had reached a point of no return. Asked to leave by the group he announced his departure to the press on June 1969. A month later Jones was found face down in a swimming pool.
Recovering from Jones' shock death, by December the Stones were playing a free festival organised between their own management and that of the Grateful Dead in California. Relocating from the original planned venue, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival was finally set for December 6th 1969.
From the offset things were not looking good. With the stage being so low, members of the Hells Angels were asked to provide basic security to avoid invasion of the stage and general duties of assistance.
As the day wore on the Angels fuelled by free beer as a payment for their duties became more agitated by the crowd also agitated and fuelled by LSD and amphetamines.
The Stones delayed playing until the evening and by the time they were on stage fights were beginning to break out between Angels and crowd members.
Sympathy for The Devil had to be stopped mid song. Some futile efforts by Jagger to "cool out" were ignored by a hostile crowd. Then, thinking events could only get worse by not playing they continued on. There had now been a hand gun drawn, a stabbing and a death.
What ever the Stones represented to the counterculture and anti-establishment stance in the 1960's it was now over. It scared them, and who can blame them. Some feel the Stones were never quite the same band again after facing that particular Devil.
If the 1960's had been unwittingly symbolised by the inner cover of Beggars Banquet with its hedonistic excess' then the past years events had put that larking around into sharp contrast.
Robert Christgau wrote in 1972 that "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended"
Altamont came to be viewed as the end of the hippie era and the conclusion of late-1960s American 'Woodstock' youth culture.
Here it is.. Sympathy For The Devil, track 1, Beggars Banquet. 1968.
