PositiveThe Village VoiceIn the nearly fifty years since the Rolling Stones played a free outdoor concert at a racetrack in Alameda County, California, the word \'Altamont\' has become synonymous with the end of the 1960s, and the death of the hippie dream. On December 6, 1969, the Stones played for a crowd of over 300,000 people, with the Hells Angels serving as an ad hoc security team at the suggestion of the Grateful Dead — who would end up so cowed by the bikers’ overzealous tactics that they left the grounds without playing. The concert had been hastily arranged, and the location chosen at the very last minute; the lack of planning or foresight, combined with a deeply misguided trust in the Angels as counterculture allies, resulted in an infamously disastrous show that culminated in the death of eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter, an African-American concertgoer who had traveled to Altamont from the Bay Area with his girlfriend and a couple friends. He would never make it back.
Joe Hagan
RaveThe Village Voice\"The story Hagan sets up is one of a shrewd and pathologically ambitious young man who saw dollar signs in the bloodshot eyes of Haight-Ashbury hippies, a devoted fan of the music energizing youth culture in the late 1960s who built his legacy the American way: by monetizing a movement that swore itself immune to the forces of capitalism … Sticky Fingers is a thorough going-over of Wenner and his epic magazine. It’s also a sharp survey of America’s golden age of print journalism and a bracingly unsentimental study of how the 1960s became a booming business before the decade had even ended.\
