Thread: The Rolling Stones and The Festival That Ended the Flower Generation

This is rock history gold and also a damn good set of live musical performances by the Stones and others plus footage of surrounding insanity so extreme it is said to mark the end of the flower generation. I'll give you a hint. They hired the Hells Angels to work security at a hippy festival. It is called Gimme Shelter, and here is the entire documentary. It is excellent for late at night when you are in a laid back mood.

Technically the whole movement was doomed from the beginning by the fact that the college hippies and working class hell's angels couldn't unite. It's pretty much the same thing holding us back now, the workers and collegiates can't see eye to eye on anything.

They are two cultures that have always had trouble communicating. I have watched the documentary a bunch of times, and I still don't know who messed up and who didn't. I know what it's like to be in an authority position and have to deal with unruly trouble makers, and I know what it's like to be screwed with unjustifiably by people abusing authority. I have sympathy for both positions, but I don't know who was doing what when. It might be that the Hells Angels were pissed at a few hippies for kicking over their motorcycles and they saw all 300,000 of them as one big gang they hated, but there apparently really were some hippies causing trouble. There were also hippies who were so loaded on drugs that they were in zombie states, and they were wandering onto the stage without realizing the problem they were causing. You can see Hells Angels being really harsh with some of them over that.

The Hells Angel who stabbed the guy to death was found not guilty. It was ruled justifiable homicide. The guy who was killed had pulled a gun. I am still not sure why he did it. You can see the incident at the very end of the film.

It was all a big clusterfuck, but the music was phenomenal.

They both fucked up because they discriminated against each other. They considered each other trash. We should learn from their mistake, and stop judging each other based on extreme cases. For instance, I shouldn't consider all republicans stupid just because of the tea party.