“The documentary started out as a chronicle of The Rolling Stones on a U.S. tour, and turned out to be a first-person view of the anti-Woodstock, the final confirmation that the sixties were over, and that the hippie culture of peace & love spawned by baby boomers was indeed a failure. Watching Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock today is probably seen with the same mindframe as Charleton Heston’s character in The Omega Man, where he views the film in an empty theater in a post-apocalyptic city. Some argue that Gimme Shelter captured the death of the sixties, but in my opinion, the sixties had died a few months before the Stones played their fateful free concert at the Altamont Speedway. The Manson Family had already murdered Sharon Tate, showing the world the ugly underbelly of hippie culture. Gimme Shelter simply showed us that there was no hope for the flower children, and that their era was indeed over.”

Read the rest over at my blog