War, children, it's just a shot away

The Rolling Stones - Let it Bleed - 1969

By the end of 1969, most of the "peace & love" feeling that had heralded the hippie and psychedelic movement that would so influence the second half of the decade had grown sour. And when it went sour, it went sour really quickly.
Only in August of that same year, 400,000 people had peacefully gathered in Woodstock, in a festival that was billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 days of Peace and Music", and that would become legendary. While not without some incidents, Woodstock was truly a peaceful and harmonious event. The Rolling Stones were not part of Woodstock, but they were part of the next big festival, only four months later, which was the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Festival. This one was brutally violent, with one guy stabbed by one of the Hell's Angels who were guarding the place, several injured, destroyed property, musicians hurt, and a generally violent atmosphere throughout.
The stabbing happened during the Rolling Stones set, and there's always been a lot of talk about how they were responsible for the presence of the Hell's Angels.
But I don't think they're to blame. It is much simpler and sadder than that: paraphrasing Phil Spector, they lost that loving feeling. Which is quite tragic, in a way, thinking of how all those feelings of love and caring would end up with such mindless violence.
And the feeling of violence and despair were everywhere at the end of the decade. And this album, released on the eve of the Altamont events (literally, it was released the day before the festival), is a prime example of the feelings and thoughts of the time.
For the most part, Let It Bleed is pure, classic Stones. The bluesy, dirty, provoking Stones we all know. This is the first album by them we have here since Their Satanic Majesties Request, and it's great to hear them back to being themselves. And there's tons of them playing their archetypical "bad boys" role, the whole sex and drugs and rock'n'roll is clearly here.
But two songs are different here, and they are, I think, a clear metaphor for the end of the decade. The first one is "Gimme Shelter", probably the greatest song they've ever written, a song about fear that seems to mount to terror thanks to the incredible vocals of Merry Clayton. They open the album with this song, and no matter how much cheekiness and bravado we hear in the following songs, it's somehow tainted with that feeling of fear.
The other gem here is the last track: "You can't Always get what you Want". This one is about something that seems as far removed from the concept of the Rolling Stones as it gets: compromise and resignation. Each section of the song tells a little story about expectations and disillusion, and it serves as a great metaphor to close the album, the year and the decade.

• Hours after her amazing performance on "Gimme Shelter", Merry Clayton, who was pregnant at the time had a miscarriage, attributed by some to the effort of her performance. 
• "Love in Vain" was a song written by blues legend Robert Johnson. It's a beautiful song, and a really good version.
• This was the last album to feature the band's founder Brian Jones in it. Having increasing drug problems and erratic behaviour, he had left the band in June 1969, only to die drowned in his swimming pool one month later.
• The choir in "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is the London Bach Choir, a classical music choir that was founded in London in the mid 19th century. 

Random thoughts about the 60s

Now that I've reached the end of the decade, a few thoughts come to mind.

The first one is how much rock evolved in these 10 years. When we started, we had 2 minute simple songs, mostly cheerful and optimistic. By the end of the decade, progressive rock was gaining ground with their long songs, complex time signatures and nods to classical music. The lyrics had also changed drastically, and in a way, by 1969, they had already pretty much covered all the topics and genres they would even cover.

The other thought is, of course, the influence of The Beatles in the whole scene. I don't think I had ever realised how big an influence they had on pretty much everything, especially in the second half of the decade. Pretty much every single band we've seen here had, at some point or another, tried something The Beatles had tried at some point before. Some bands, like Pink Floyd or Deep Purple, would move on to doing very different things in the future, but sometimes felt like they were "holding back" somehow. 

Another thing that surprised me a bit, was how often albums were released back then. We've had at least one album, sometimes two (or more) per year. Thinking of bands like Pink Floyd releasing two albums in a year sounds completely strange, considering the pace they set later, but the same can be said about many other bands that started out in the 60s and continued on throughout the following decades. 

I think the 60s actually really ended a bit later, probably by the time Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin died, but as I mentioned at the start of this post, this was, in a way, the beginning of the end. 

Some more thoughts:

• For some strange reason, singles would never make it into albums. The trend started changing actually some time around 1968 or so, but I had never realised that. It's a bit annoying because there are some great songs out there. I'm sure they'll come up in some future compilations.
• No Frank Zappa, no Dylan. Well, no many others, I know, but those two I sort of feel bad about not having anything by them from those days. As an aside comment, by 1969, Frank Zappa, who released his first album in 1966, already had 8 albums!
• Also, no live albums. That is, other than a couple of songs here and there and the first disc of Ummagumma. 
• This was a short decade for me. The next ones are going to be much, much longer.