“Let It Bleed was born in an age of reckoning, against the worldwide backdrop of daily, televised Armageddon: America’s quagmire in Vietnam; the civil warfare and racial conflict at home; the bombs and Marxist rhetoric of a new, extreme underground; the twisted bloodlust of Charles Manson, the mastermind of the Tate Murders in L.A. (August 1969) a short drive from where the Stones finished their album that fall. And when the Stones decided to end their 1969 tour with a generous flourish – a free festival in Northern California, four months after the mass utopia at Woodstock – the result on December 6th at Altamont Speedway was fear, mayhem and a killing near the stage caught on film.” – David Fricke
“’Suddenly, its almost 1970, and the realization that rock music has been with us in force for a decade and half comes as a distinct shock,’ Don Heckman a New York Times pop critic, wrote in the last week of 1969 at the front of his review of Let It Bleed. Even before the review appeared, new history was made. In the first week of December – between the last official date of the U.S. tour, at a Florida rock festival, and the tragedy at Altamont – the Stones stopped in Florence, Alabama, at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios to try out two new songs, ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’, the first stirring of the band’s next album, 1971 Sticky Fingers. And two numbers that had surfaced at Olympic in 1969, ‘Shine A Light’ and ‘Lovin Cup’, would return in the ragged glory of 1972’s Exile on Main Street. Suddenly, it was almost the Seventies. And The Rolling Stones – who had just released the last great rock album of the Sixties, Let It Bleed – were already there.” – David Fricke
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