In Jan­u­ary, 1970—with a line that might have come right out of any num­ber of cur­rent opin­ion pieces tak­ing the media to task—Rolling Stone ripped into Time, Life, Newsweek, the New York Times for their cov­er­age of the 1969 Alta­mont Free Con­cert: “When the news media know what the pub­lic wants to hear and what they want to believe, they give it to them.”

What did the pub­lic want to hear? Appar­ent­ly that Alta­mont was “Wood­stock West,” full of “peace and love” and “good vibes.” Since, how­ev­er, it was “unde­ni­able that one man was actu­al­ly mur­dered at the con­cert, a cer­tain min­i­mal adjust­ment was made, as if that event had been the result of some sort of unpre­dictable act of God, like a stray bolt of light­ning.” The mur­dered fan, 18-year-old Mered­ith Hunter, was not, of course, killed by light­ning, but stabbed to death by one of the Hell’s Angels who were hired as infor­mal secu­ri­ty guards.

Hunter was killed “just 20 feet in front of the stage where Mick Jag­ger was per­form­ing ‘Under My Thumb,’” writes the His­to­ry Chan­nel: “Unaware of what had just occurred, the Rolling Stones com­plet­ed their set with­out fur­ther inci­dent, bring­ing an end to a tumul­tuous day that also saw three acci­den­tal deaths and four live births.”

We know the moment best from the Maysles broth­ers con­cert film Gimme Shel­ter, which opens with a scene of Jag­ger view­ing footage of the vio­lence. See the unrest dur­ing “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il,” above, and the con­fused scene of the killing dur­ing “Under My Thumb,” fur­ther down.

In an inter­view about that grim day, Joel Selvin, music crit­ic and author of a book on Alta­mont, sums up the judg­ment of forty years of his­to­ry:

It’s one of the few dark days in the his­to­ry of rock. This was the anti-Wood­stock. It also took place in Decem­ber of 1969, so it book­marked the end of the ‘60s in a chrono­log­i­cal way. The loss of inno­cence that day real­ly is why this has last­ed and why it endures as a cul­tur­al touch­stone.

The loss of Amer­i­can inno­cence is an old trope that assumes the coun­try, at some myth­i­cal time in the past, was a blame­less par­adise. But who was to blame for Alta­mont? The Stones were not held legal­ly account­able, nor was the bik­er who stabbed Hunter. In anoth­er echo from the past into the present, he was acquit­ted on self-defense grounds. “What hap­pened at Alta­mont,” was also “not the music’s fault,” writes The New York­er’s Richard Brody, who blames “Celebri­ty” and a loss of “benev­o­lent spir­its… the idea of the unpro­duced.”

To ascribe such incred­i­ble weight to this incident—to mark it as the end of peace and love and the birth of “infra­struc­ture” and “author­i­ty,” as Brody does—seems his­tor­i­cal­ly tone deaf. Strict­ly from the point of view of the Stones’ musi­cal devel­op­ment, we might say that the close of the six­ties and the year of Alta­mont marked a tran­si­tion to a dark­er, grit­ti­er peri­od, the end of the band’s for­ays into psy­che­delia and folk music. That sum­mer, Bri­an Jones drowned in his swim­ming pool. And the band fol­lowed the sneer­ing “Under My Thumb” at Alta­mont with a brand new tune, “Brown Sug­ar,” a song about slav­ery and rape.

You can hear the first live per­for­mance of the song at the top of the post, cap­tured in an audi­ence record­ing, two years before its offi­cial record­ing and release on 1971’s Sticky Fin­gers. “It was a song of sadism,” writes Stan­ley Booth, “sav­agery, race hate/love, a song of redemp­tion, a song that accept­ed the fear of night, black­ness, chaos, the unknown.” It’s a song that would face instant back­lash were it released today. “Twit­ter would lam­poon [the band] with care­ful­ly thought out hash­tags,” writes Lau­ret­ta Charl­ton, “Mul­ti­ple Change.org peti­tions would be signed. The band would be forced to issue an apol­o­gy.”

Jag­ger him­self said in 1995, “I would nev­er write that song now. I would prob­a­bly cen­sor myself.” And he has, in many sub­se­quent per­for­mances, changed some of the most out­ra­geous lyrics. Charl­ton con­fess­es to lov­ing and hat­ing the song, call­ing it “gross, sex­ist, and stun­ning­ly offen­sive toward black women.” And yet, she says, “When I hear ‘Brown Sug­ar,’ the out­rage hits me like a post­script, and by that point I’m too busy clap­ping and singing along to be indig­nant.” Sur­round­ed by the vio­lence at Alta­mont, Jag­ger chan­neled the vio­lence of his­to­ry in a raunchy blues that—like “Under My Thumb” and “Sym­pa­thy for the Devil”—captures the seduc­tive nature of pow­er and sex­u­al­ized aggres­sion, and gives the lie to facile ideas of inno­cence, whether of the past or of the con­tem­po­rary social and polit­i­cal late-six­ties scene.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Nev­er Released Ver­sion of The Stones’ “Brown Sug­ar,” With Eric Clap­ton on Slide Gui­tar

The Rolling Stones Intro­duce Blues­man Howl­in’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Great­est Cul­tur­al Moments of the 20th Cen­tu­ry” (1965)

The Haunt­ing Back­ground Vocals on The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shel­ter:” Mer­ry Clay­ton Recalls How They Came to Be

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Debates over whether or not we should destroy or alter U.S. icons seem to turn on a crit­i­cal ques­tion: are nation­al sym­bols qua­si-reli­gious totems of some tran­scen­dent sacred order? The kind of impe­r­i­al project like­ly to end up a col­lec­tion of crum­bling mon­u­ments with every oth­er empire of the past? Or are they liv­ing emblems of a sec­u­lar repub­lic whose pri­ma­ry embod­i­ment is its peo­ple? A coun­try, like its peo­ple, that must recon­sti­tute itself with each gen­er­a­tion in order to sur­vive?

Either way, the nation’s sym­bols have always with­stood cre­ative destruc­tion, détourne­ment, and recon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion. Sub­ject­ing nation­al iconog­ra­phy to the inter­ven­tions of artists and activists restores a sense of pro­por­tion, show­ing us that our gov­ern­ment and its sym­bols belong to the peo­ple, rather than the oth­er way around. The idea is a pow­er­ful one. So much so that its expres­sion nev­er fails to excite con­tro­ver­sy. And few expres­sions have pro­voked more ire than per­for­mances of (or respons­es to) the nation­al anthem that devi­ate from the staid tra­di­tion­al arrange­ment.

We could point to very obvi­ous anthem con­tro­ver­sies, like Roseanne Barr’s irrev­er­ent 1990 ren­di­tion. But cer­tain oth­er inter­pre­ta­tions have had much more seri­ous artis­tic intent, like that of nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zen Igor Stravin­sky, whose 1944 ver­sion (top) came from his “desire to do my bit in these griev­ous times toward fos­ter­ing and pre­serv­ing the spir­it of patri­o­tism in this coun­try.” Stravinsky’s earnest ambi­tion was thwart­ed. He couldn’t help but add his sig­na­ture, in this case a dom­i­nant sev­enth chord, to the arrange­ment.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

The Boston police respond­ed by issu­ing him a warn­ing, claim­ing, we not­ed in a pre­vi­ous post, “there was a law against tam­per­ing with the nation­al anthem” (there wasn’t). Stravin­sky “grudg­ing­ly” pulled the anthem from his Boston Sym­pho­ny bill. Over twen­ty years lat­er, the blind Puer­to Rican folk singer José Feli­ciano played the anthem before the 1968 World Series in his own emo­tion­al­ly-charged style. And like Stravin­sky, he was moti­vat­ed by love of coun­try. “I had set out to sing an anthem of grat­i­tude to a coun­try that had giv­en me a chance,” he lat­er recalled, “that had allowed me, a blind kid from Puer­to Rico—a kid with a dream—to reach far above my own lim­i­ta­tions.”

Much of the coun­try did not respond in kind. Even dur­ing the per­for­mance, Feli­ciano could “feel the dis­con­tent with­in the waves of cheers and applause that spurred on the first pitch.” After­wards, he learned that “a great con­tro­ver­sy was explod­ing across the coun­try because I had cho­sen to alter my ren­di­tion.… Vet­er­ans, I was being told, had thrown their shoes at the tele­vi­sion as I sang; oth­ers ques­tioned my right to stay in the Unit­ed States.” Feli­ciano admits, “yes, it was dif­fer­ent but I promise you,” he says, “it was sin­cere.” So was the most rad­i­cal of “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” inter­pre­ta­tions, Jimi Hendrix’s feed­back-laden ver­sion at Wood­stock the fol­low­ing year.

A vet­er­an him­self, Hen­drix wasn’t moti­vat­ed by wartime patri­o­tism or per­son­al grat­i­tude, but by a desire, per­haps, to tell the truth about what his coun­try was doing to thou­sands of peo­ple in South­east Asia—“Napalm bombs,” as he said at the time, “peo­ple get­ting burned up on TV.” It’s a sub­ject he occa­sion­al­ly touched on lyri­cal­ly; here he let the gui­tar tell it, “turn­ing the music to a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the lyrics: bombs burst­ing in air, rock­ets light­ing up the night,” writes Andy Cush at Spin, “Hen­drix began to sly­ly use the music’s own mar­tial bom­bast to reflect the vio­lence car­ried out under his nation’s flag.” He was hard­ly the first to exploit the song’s inher­ent bom­bast.

Almost 100 years before Woodstock—before the nation­al anthem was even the nation­al anthem—one of the most icon­ic of Amer­i­can of com­posers re-arranged “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner.” John Philip Sousa (who would go on to write “Stars and Stripes For­ev­er”) con­ceived the song in the “man­ner of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Over­ture,” New York­er music crit­ic Alex Ross tells us. (You can stream the Wag­ner­ian adap­ta­tion of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” here.) He was “young and lit­tle known at that time,” Ross remarks, “and his sly­ly Wag­ner­ian take on the future nation­al anthem was eclipsed by the famous­ly mediocre and expen­sive Cen­ten­ni­al March that Wag­n­er him­self penned for the occa­sion.” There’s no indi­ca­tion Sousa’s arrange­ment pro­voked a nation­al upset. But it did set a prece­dent for what we might as well call an Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of musi­cians alter­ing the anthem, using it to speak not to Fran­cis Scott Key’s Amer­i­ca, but to their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov: “I Am Crazy, Absolute­ly Nuts, About our Nation­al Anthem” (1991)

William Shat­ner Sings O Cana­da (and Hap­py Cana­da Day)

Slavoj Žižek Exam­ines the Per­verse Ide­ol­o­gy of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness