Few bands have left such a lasting legacy on the history of music as The Rolling Stones - still performing in the 21st century, early interviews see Mick Jagger questioning whether the band will last even another year. Time has proven them to be as enduring and popular as they were when they first emerged from the suburbs of London in the early 1960s. And yet, as the seminal rockumentary Gimme Shelter demonstrates, it wasn't all plain sailing for The Rolling Stones - documenting the final weeks of their 1969 American tour, it reveals the dark side to the counterculture movement which the Stones were a key part of - a world where the love and peace espoused by the Hippie movement collapsed into drug-fuelled paranoia and violence. The climax of Gimme Shelter - and the closing moments of their tour - came with the notorious Altamont Free Concert, where members of the Hell's Angels - tasked with providing security - killed a member of the crowd. The brutal stabbing is captured on film, with the victim wielding what appears to be a revolver. It was a low point for The Stone Roses and a sad addendum to the music of the decade. Gimme Shelter is undoubtedly one of the greatest music documentaries ever committed to film - one of the credited camera operators just happened to be a young filmmaker by the name of Martin Scorsese, who went on to make a documentary of his own following The Rolling Stones called Shine a Light. The contrast between the two is striking, with the Stones trading in close calls with bad acid and bad bikers for media-friendly benefit concerts for the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation - surely a far cry from their anti-establishment roots.
