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A thrilling account of the Altamont Festival -- and the dark side of the '60s.If Woodstock tied the ideals of the '60s together, Altamont unraveled them. In Just a Shot Away, writer and critic Saul Austerlitz tells the story of "Woodstock West," where the Rolling Stones hoped to end their 1969 American tour triumphantly with the help of the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and 300,000 fans. Instead the concert featured a harrowing series of disasters, starting with the concert's haphazard planning. The bad acid kicked in early. The Hells Angels, hired to handle security, began to prey on the concertgoers. And not long after the Rolling Stones went on, an 18-year-old African-American named Meredith Hunter was stabbed by the Angels in front of the stage.The show, and the Woodstock high, were over. Austerlitz shows how Hunter's death came to symbolize the end of an era while the trial of his accused murderer epitomized the racial tensions that still underlie America. He also finds a silver lining in the concert in how Rolling Stone's coverage of it helped create a new form of music journalism, while the making of the movie about Altamont, Gimme Shelter, birthed new forms of documentary. Using scores of new interviews with Paul Kantner, Jann Wenner, journalist John Burks, filmmaker Joan Churchill, and many members of the Rolling Stones' inner circle, as well as Meredith Hunter's family, Austerlitz shows that you can't understand the '60s or rock and roll if you don't come to grips with Altamont.
About the Author
I am a freelance writer whose work has been published in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and The New Republic, among others. I am an adjunct professor of writing and comedy history at New York University, as well as the author of Kind of a Big Deal: How Anchorman Stayed Classy and Became the Most Iconic Comedy of the Twenty-First Century (Dutton, 2023) , Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era (Dutton, 2019) , Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018) , Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community (Chicago Review Press, 2014) , Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy (Chicago Review Press, 2010) , and Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes (Continuum, 2007) . Booklist named Another Fine Mess one of the ten best arts books of 2010, and Just a Shot Away received rave reviews, including from the New York Times Book Review, which called it "the most blisteringly impassioned music book of the season. " Generation Friends was named the second-best comedy book of 2019 by New York magazine, as well as one of New York's 15 best books on TV comedies. I grew up in Los Angeles and am a graduate of Yale University and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. I lives with my wife and two children in Brooklyn.
