Women,” “Gimme Shelter”
and “Midnight Rambler.”
The last two songs came
from Let It Bleed, an album
filled with violence,
decadence and social
cataclysm. Perhaps the alltime classic Stones album,
Let It Bleed debuted on the
U.S. charts at Number Three,
behind the Beatles’ Abbey
Road and Led Zeppelin II.
While the counterculture
foundered, the music scene
remained unassailably strong
as the Sixties drew to a close.
6, 1969, mere months after
Woodstock. The episode
literally and figuratively
marked the end the Sixties. A
violence-prone, drugwracked, daylong nightmare
for which Hell’s Angels
provided security, Altamont
was marred by the stabbing
death of a concert attendee.
The event, viewed in
hindsight as an epitaph, was
filmed and preserved in the
unnerving documentary
Gimme Shelter.
As the Beatles’ final chapters
were being written, the
Stones shifted into high gear.
If the former group expressed
the heady idealism of the pop
Sixties, then the Stones, by
contrast, were blues-steeped,
hard-rocking realists. It was
them to whom the baton
passed at the close of the
decade. The Rolling Stones
staged a free concert at
Altamont Speedway outside
San Francisco on December
In 1970, the Stones launched
their own record company,
Rolling Stones Records, for
which they signed a
distribution deal with
Atlantic Records. The initial
releases on the new label
were Sticky Fingers and its
raunchy, rocking first single,
“Brown Sugar.” With a cover
designed by artist Andy
Warhol that featured a
working zipper, Sticky
Fingers benefited from
guitarist Taylor’s melodic