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Writer Stanley Booth was there from the beginning. (He eventually chronicled his time with the band in "Dance With the Devil," also released as "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones.") Booth recalls that the band had been stung by criticism about high ticket prices from respected San Francisco Chronicle jazz and pop critic Ralph Gleason. "The band's trend of thought was: 'Gouge people for money? We don't know what American prices should be. We're not fucking businessmen. In fact, yeah, we'll have a free concert,'" he says.

Booth says the band also wanted to do a film, intrigued by rock movies like "Don't Look Back" (D.A. Pennebaker's documentary on Bob Dylan) and "A Hard Day's Night." There were reports that Haskell Wexler, the famed cinematographer and director of "Medium Cool," had turned them down, and that they couldn't reach an agreement with Pennebaker either.

"I had never heard of the Maysles brothers," Booth said. "Once they came on, I fell in love with them immediately. But I have to say I really didn't realize how fucking brilliant they were -- they were such sweet down-to-earth guys, so easy to be around, that you didn't realize how really good they were at what they were doing." He says flatly that the concert wasn't staged for the cameramen. "To intrude on anything was absolutely antithetical to the way the Maysles brothers worked," he says. "They would never ask anybody to do anything. What happened, happened -- no one had a game plan, least of all the Rolling Stones."

Albert Maysles recalls that he and his brother met with the group at the Plaza Hotel in New York, then went to Baltimore the next night -- Nov. 26 -- to see them in concert. He'd never seen the band before. "'Oh, sure,' we thought. 'They are great.' Then we came back and saw them again at the Plaza, because their Madison Square Garden performances were coming up. We didn't just want to make a concert film, but we had a hunch it would be more than that -- just what it was we didn't know. We made a deal with them to go to Madison Square Garden and started filming. We got so excited we stuck with them for the next couple of weeks, going to Boston, Florida and Alabama."

Did it take long for the Stones to get used to them? "We had just started to shoot a little bit, in the dressing room at the Madison Square Garden, when Mick came over to us and we put the camera and the tape recorder down. He said, 'You know, I'm not going to be an actor in this film.' We said, 'That's not the way we work.' From then on, it was absolutely smooth sailing. We didn't have to show them anything and we had their total cooperation."

Maysles acknowledges that a cinéma vérité filmmaker is not an invisible man, but an inevitable presence in the action: "People who feel they know what goes on in the relationship between the documentary filmmaker and the subject sometimes think: 'Oh, it's fly on the wall. You don't want to be noticed or watched.' That's not it. A fly on the wall is a fly in the ointment -- you're stuck to the wall, you can't move around. It's very important that you have a rapport with the people that you're filming. It needn't be the kind of rapport where they feel they have to please you or follow your command; it's the kind of rapport where you're welcome and it's OK for you to be there. A human relationship is formed, and it can be formed almost immediately, the way it was with Mick."

Goldstein also came aboard at Madison Square Garden. He recorded sound for Albert when David was occupied. "They had no specific objective in mind," says Goldstein. "As you know, in the film there are virtually no personal moments with the Stones -- the Maysles were not involved with the Stones' lives. They did not have unlimited access. It was an outside view."

The Stones paid the Maysles $14,000 to shoot the Madison Square Garden concerts; as they traveled with the Stones, the filmmakers also received some expenses. When it became clear that the free concert was going to happen, the Maysles did not extend their commitment immediately: Footage of the free concert announcement that appears in "Gimme Shelter" had to be bought from a news agency. The Stones eventually gave them $129,000 to shoot at Altamont.

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