If you are home alone overnight, I do not suggest passing the time by renting and watching Gimme Shelter, the documentary about 1969’s Altamont music festival.

After doing this last night, I slept fitfully, imagining myself packed in with three-hundred thousand drugged-out people in garish lighting. Bludgeoning pool cues and knives and no escape for miles, either, because the only way out is this beguilingly bucolic two-lane road. It looks like rural Spain, but it’s crammed with parked cars, so no one’s getting anywhere.

And when I woke up this morning--too early--the first image I saw before opening my eyes was Mick Jagger’s youthful profile, with the face of a young guy in the paroxysms of a scary acid trip just behind him, who is then grabbed by a Hell’s Angel and shoved back into the surging crowd.

Watching this documentary was my 1984 rat-attached-to-face. Worse though, it’s not fiction.