"This song was a really pivotal moment in my life, it was the first record I ever bought and it was by a complete fluke. ‘Jeepster’ was in a bargain box for 10p and it happened to have a photograph of Marc Bolan and Mickey Finn on the label, that was unusual, it was rare to have a photograph on the label and Marc Bolan looked androgynous, very beautiful, mysterious and quite weird. “So at the age of ten I took a punt on this thing. With that money I could have bought a few comics and an ice lolly, I’d have taken the stick and put it in the wheel of my bike, which was very important! But I bought ‘Jeepster’ instead and I did that thing of walking home and looking and looking at it. Fifteen minutes later I put in on and it snagged my attention straightaway, I had to pay attention to it, but it was pop music. “I listen to it now and it’s quite lo-fi, but even then I had an awareness it sounded like people in a room and that it was pretty rough, which was a bit of an ask for a little kid, it certainly wasn’t music for 10 year olds, 15 year olds maybe. I heard the sound of his guitar and why the hell I was hearing bongos in there as well was really intriguing to me. Before it was three quarters of the way through I was planning on playing it again and trying to find out how this thing worked. “The riff is funky without being James Brown and his limitations as a guitar player were really useful on all of his records up until ‘20th Century Boy’, which was very brutal. ‘Jeepster’ is very funky but he’s almost playing with the same limitations of John Lee Hooker, if he was any better - a Ritchie Blackmore or an Eric Clapton - it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting because it would have sounded too bland, accomplished and slick. He’s hanging in there a bit, particularly on the outro, the riff is so dumb a more accomplished guitar player wouldn’t have been heard dead playing it. It’s so gauche, but it’s probably the best bit of music on the record. “Then there’s the way the band go in and out of time. I picked that up the third time I listened to it and that was really amazing, because on the radio at the time it was The Osmond’s ‘Love Me for a Reason’, The Carpenters, Andy Williams and all this slick, easy listening stuff, but this was a real pre-Glam record. “It identified me, I was ‘I know what it is to be a fan of this thing of my own now.’ I’d seen my parents be fans and to this day they’re fans of bands, but because I became a fan of this guy I was getting all these signals - particularly from girls’ magazines - about what it was to be a fan and having posters on my walls. The Smiths were very aware of that dynamic. “I grew up very close to my sister, who was eleven months younger than me and I’m glad that was something that happened for me, because I had a real sense of what she liked. I’d almost been like a twin, what they call an Irish twin with my sister, and it gave me a genuine appreciation of how great it was to be a girl. “It’s a fantastic function of pop culture, that shifting to take in different gender roles both ways, with people like Lady Gaga and Richey Manic. Marc Bolan was beautiful and he sounded really beautiful, the sound of a soft voice singing in a Rock and Roll way over a rock band has never really left me and that’s probably evident on my solo stuff. “Because of the photograph of Marc Bolan on the sleeve, his androgyny and the way he was singing, it was my first independent connection of seeing a different image of masculinity. I was very, very aware of that, because he was obviously wearing make-up and he was very pretty. I was hearing this guy singing in quite an effeminate voice and I owned the record, so I’d better love it. It wasn’t that I was just loving the music, I’d invested in this thing where this guy was like a woman and that was really exciting."

"Most people think that the concert at Altamont was the antithesis of Woodstock. But one of my students at UCSB recently commented that you could tell a lot about what went wrong at Altamont by watching what went right at Monterey. I couldn’t agree more . . . It’s fascinating to watch both of these films and compare what happened just a few years and less than a hundred miles apart. First off, Monterey Pop, which may be my favorite of all Criterion DVD packages. The booklet is printed on nature-rough hippy-grade paper stock that you would have first encountered on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, in the form of a free press or psychedelic poster on a telephone pole, and later on your thrift-store coffee table with a pile of pot about to be rolled next to it! Yes, it is this evocative! The DVD box set includes amazing outtake performances with Laura Nyro, Quicksilver Messenger Service, TINY TIM (!), and Buffalo Springfield . . . and another DVD, Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey, contains the complete performances by Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding (with commentary by the ever-enlightening Peter Guralnick, who knows the history of Memphis musicians better than anyone alive). The accompanying doc of a conversation between record producer Lou Adler and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker is such a coup—not only do you hear how the concert came together and how it was organized during the entire event, but you also get to hear Lou Adler’s story. A lot of people don’t know (although smarty-pants me did) that Adler started his music career with Herb Alpert, as songwriting and producing partners . . . and he has awesome stories of Paul McCartney hanging out at Cass Elliot’s house in Laurel Canyon . . . There’s endless music-nerd gold like that! The color in the film is all that psychedelia had to offer—vibrant, otherworldly, and hyperreal. There’s an innocence throughout Monterey Pop that exceeds the “positive vibes” of Woodstock a few years later and that is of course completely nonexistent in Gimme Shelter. You can also see in Monterey Pop the cops in the crowd (who were replaced by Hells Angels at Altamont) and SEATING! My student pointed out there were folding chairs on the lawns at Monterey—very civilized. Now that wasn’t throughout the concert grounds, but it was more in the tradition of the Newport Folk Festival than the mayhem to follow in Altamont. Also like Newport, the performers were in the audience—they were not in some rarefied backstage area, cut off from the fans or their fellow performers—and you get to see the moment when Mama Cass Elliot in the audience has her mind blown by the powerful performance of young Janis Joplin. There’s a fabulous interview with Papa John Phillips, who cofounded the event with Adler, and a gorgeous photo exhibit by photographer Elaine Mayes. Gimme Shelter director Albert Maysles was one of seven cameramen on Monterey Pop. And I need to point out that you do see a few Hells Angels on the lawn toward the end of Monterey Pop. So the Angels already had a presence at large outdoor rock events that far back. I’ve talked to a lot of people who were at Altamont as performers, friends of bands, and audience members, and the consensus is that nothing in this film was manipulated in the least: the vibe was bad from the very start, and the filmmakers didn’t create that in the editing room. Interestingly, the film is shot much darker than the saturated colors in Monterey Pop—but then again colors were becoming less vibrant in pop culture and fashion at that time too. But interestingly—here you have some of the same players—you have Jefferson Airplane, who are almost humble on the Monterey Pop stage (despite the fact that Grace Slick shows off her powerful rock pipes at Monterey—she was the first true female rock singer and very underrated in my opinion), having to stop their set at Altamont when singer Marty Balin is dragged off the stage and beat up by the Hells Angels. The Grateful Dead play a soothing jam at Monterey and don’t even make it to the stage at Altamont. Chris Hillman with the Byrds plays an evening set to the Monterey audience, and in Gimme Shelter his band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, only get two songs done before the mayhem drives them off the stage at the Speedway. Watching Charlie Watts listening to the interviews with the promoter and with Hells Angel Sonny Barger makes Watts your favorite member of the band if he wasn’t already . . . His quiet devastation over the murder at his band’s concert is profound to witness (and you do feel as though you are let in on a very private event)."