Stefan Ponek, the KSAN talk-show host, says he was aware of the strategizing for the free concert from the beginning and was in on some of the meetings. He recalls having contact with the Maysles, "but they were purists who didn't want to affect the action, and I don't think they did have much of an effect, to tell the truth."

Goldstein had experience in site management at Woodstock. In San Francisco as part of the Maysles' team, he realized, at a meeting at the Grateful Dead's ranch, that "no one was in charge of obtaining a site." Basic questions were being ignored, like "who was the lessor, who would pay for insurance, rent, etc., who was getting the permits and in what name." He saw that the group needed a lawyer and he put the Stones' management in touch with Melvin Belli.

Despite Belli's involvement, the group suffered a series of canceled clearances and broken deals that led from Golden Gate Park to Sears Point to, finally, just 24 hours before the show, Altamont.

In a passionate essay he wrote two years ago for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, Goldstein summarized the chaos from the point of view of someone sympathetic to both the Stones and to the Maysles brothers:

Gimme Shelter

Directed by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin

Starring the Rolling Stones

"In retrospect, of course, everyone should have walked away. But, there was no one, no way to say STOP! NO! And, we shouldn't forget that, in the aftermath of 'Woodstock,' there was a general euphoria -- more than a feeling -- the sure knowledge that we, the rock 'n' roll, be-in, wear a flower in your hair community had triumphed and could, in anarchy, find peace, and overcome with love any who had an interest in violence. Not everyone believed that. Some raised concerns about public safety, control, etc. Those voices were overwhelmed."

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The unexpected antistars of the day and of the eventual movie were the Hells Angels. Goldstein reminds us that on July 5, 1969, three days after the drowning of Brian Jones, the band's original lead guitarist, the Stones gave a free concert in London's Hyde Park for a few hundred thousand people. As Goldstein puts it, "the English Hells Angels volunteered to be an 'Honor Guard.' It was a lovely, peaceful day. So it seemed natural to the Stones' crew to ask them to perform that same or a similar function at the concert culminating the Stones' U.S. tour."

It wasn't unusual to see Angels at the Bay Area rock shows of the time. The Stones' road manager, Sam Cutler, asked Rock Scully, his counterpart with the Grateful Dead, to extend the invitation. "A meeting was arranged at which it was agreed that the Angels would have an area set aside for them," Goldstein writes. Everyone understood that the Angels would both serve as Honor Guard "and perform other, normal 'watchdog' functions" that they were accustomed to providing at Bay Area rock concerts ..." And finally, "They would receive $500 worth of beer as a gratuity."

Not everyone took the Angels' participation so lightly. Marcus told me that his wife -- then nine months pregnant -- was planning to attend the free concert until she heard that the Angels would be part of it. Marcus said, "It's definitely true that Angels were lounging around the stage areas [of concerts at the time]. Allen Ginsberg had invited Angels to a Bob Dylan show and viewed them as 'our outlaw brothers of the counterculture,' though I always thought that was, for Ginsberg, the ultimate act of cruising."

He continued: "But what people don't want to talk about is that the Angels had attacked an antiwar march from Berkeley just when it crossed the border into Oakland, and beat the shit out of people. So it was a question of which myth you bought and how cool you wanted to think they were. The Grateful Dead took one perspective and me another."

Booth insists that the Stones themselves had next to nothing to do with the Angels' hiring. ("We had some lovely security: off-duty New York detectives, pros, who knew what they were doing, and were not happy to be at Altamont. The Angels were just violent bozos.") At any rate, Angels or no, Goldstein notes that there were scores of "volunteers who wanted to help throw a party. They wanted to have a 'Woodstock' where many thought it had rightfully belonged."

One of them was 16-year-old Douglas Cruickshank, now an editor at Salon. "We went out the day before to help build the stage and put up the towers and unload the trucks," Cruickshank recalls. "Everyone was feeling positive and wonderful. The next day, by sunrise, a deluge of people just began pouring in, coming and coming, with cars parked on off-ramps, cars parked everywhere -- to the poor farmers it must have been like having an invading army. Then the Angels came.

"There was a whole bunch of them throwing full cans of beer at people in the audience -- the cans could go way up in the air and come down on people. I heard a woman got a concussion when she was hit with a beer can."

Cruickshank saw the real-life unspooling of the moment in the movie when Jagger emerges from his helicopter and a fan abruptly slugs him. He also saw the Angels wreak numerous casualties on defenseless crowd members, with fists, feet and pool cues. "It was too many people; too much drugs; and the Angels just got out of fucking hand."

Did the show seem like a movie set? "One of the tough things about talking about the '60s is that it's hard to evoke the real spirit of that time," he said. "People now can't imagine anyone doing something for non-cynical reasons. I have no idea what the truth of [the Stones'] situation was, beyond them wanting to do a free concert -- and it was done semi-commonly then. Another, more cynical view may be true. But it doesn't ring true to me. Even when you saw cameramen, no one thought that the movie was the point of the thing."

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