The night a friend of mine in California told me about Altamont, I was having dinner with a woman I’d met a week before — just when the crowd at the Speedway was beginning to gather, in fact. We sat in my apartment and listened to Let It Bleed, and as Mick Jagger sang out the climax of "Gimme Shelter” to Merry Clayton — "Love, sister, it’s just a kiss away, it’s just a kiss away” — I touched her for the first time. There were contradiction I enjoyed them as always, because: the Rolling Stones epitomized thing I loved most in the world of rock, and roll. I played their records all the time.