Grace Slick in a blue velvet suit. Gram Parsons bashing a tambourine. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young appearing like they like each other. Altamont will be forever known as the death of the Sixties, but the Library of Congress just made it a little sunnier with previously unreleased footage.
The 30-minute clip — released via the Congress’ blog — contains no sound, with a fuzzy home video quality that looks as if your drunk aunt filmed your backyard family barbecue. And yet it shows that contrary to how it was remembered, Altamont was more than a Rolling Stones concert gone terribly wrong, where the Hells Angels famously knifed 18-year-old fan Meredith Hunter.
Here we see footage not included in Gimme Shelter, like the Flying Burrito Brothers’ performance at nine minutes in. Gram Parsons commands the stage, while Keith Richards and Mick Jagger marvel from afar. (That same night, Richards played “Wild Horses” for Parsons, which he ended up covering on Burrito Deluxe a year later.) Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young take the stage around 11 minutes, ironically kicking off with “Woodstock.” (Following the festival, the supergroup would head to UCLA for their second concert of the day).
In the blog post, Neely Tucker explains that the Library of Congress found the footage in 200,000 reels of film it acquired 20 years ago from archivist Rick Prelinger. A technician discovered two reels labeled “Stones in the Park,” which Neely assumed was the well-documented 1969 Hyde Park show. But he was pleasantly surprised to find he was incorrect.
“Many people know the Gimme Shelter documentary pretty well, but there’s a lot more in this home movie,” he wrote. “Although the footage is silent, we were all thrilled to see close-up footage of concert performers who were cut from the film, such as Carlos Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young. It was especially great to see Gram Parsons fronting the Flying Burrito Brothers, since you only see the back of his head in Gimme Shelter.“
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Brad Paisley has called Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding “one of the least pretentious weddings he’s ever seen”.
The country star attended the ceremony alongside his actress wife, Kimberly Williams-Paisley. They joined around 1,000 guests at New York City’s Madison Square Garden earlier this month as the global pop icon married the American football star.
Although the celebration attracted enormous attention and involved tight security and a stunning makeover of the famous arena, Paisley said the occasion never came across as excessive.
“Ironically, (it) was one of the least pretentious weddings that I've ever seen or ever will see,” Paisley told The Associated Press during an interview. “It meant a lot to be (invited). It was, kind of, a big thank you from her to invite us.”
Paisley, who chose Swift as an opening performer for his tour when she was a teenager in 2007, said he was delighted to be included in what many considered the biggest celebrity wedding of the year.
“They were very clear with the invite, and I took this personally when I got the invite, because in the invite, it said, ‘If you're getting this, you mean a lot to us,’” he revealed.
The musician also explained that guests were not told the wedding’s exact location until the date drew nearer.
“It was really fun to watch the cat and mouse game of, like, ‘We can tell you roughly where it's going to be, we're not gonna say what building... and here's the date. If you're in, we'll tell you more,’” he continued. “I went to my wife, I said, ‘Want to go?’ and she said, ‘Absolutely, we gotta be there!’ So, we did it, it was RSVP yes.”
Other famous attendees included Brad Pitt, Gigi Hadid, Bradley Cooper, Ed Sheeran, Sabrina Carpenter, Hugh Grant, Haim and Tom Hanks.
