THE ROLLING STONES’ 1972 tour has been described as the first modern rock ’n’ roll tour. Many feel it was the best that any band has sounded live, ever. It amounted to more than just a series of concerts.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: That tour was special. It was a social event. It was a cultural event. It was a business event. It’s the kind of thing that rock ’n’ roll can’t do anymore. It has to do with timing, it has to do with setting; it was a perfect crossroads. This is what’s called history.
One of the many interesting people who traveled with the Stones on the ’72 tour was Swiss-born iconic photographer and observer of the American condition Robert Frank. Frank was making the never-to-be-officially-released documentary of excess on the tour called Cocksucker Blues.
ROBERT FRANK: I have never been on anything like this. I have been on trips with extraordinary people before but they were always directed outward . . . this totally excludes the outside world. To never get out, to never know what city you are in . . . I cannot get used to it.
Marshall Chess describes the Stones’ partying during this period:
MARSHALL CHESS: Oh, it was right up there. To the max. It was at the very start of that whole sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. I was the same age as the Stones and fell right in with all that. What was there not to like about any of it? I was in my twenties. My marriage had broken up so I had no responsibilities in that way. I wouldn’t say I was a major womanizer but I definitely knew how to enjoy myself. Like any man I appreciate a pretty woman. On those Stones tours there was a lot of very hot women around the band and a lot of extra ones to go around.
Unused ticket from one of the most famous concerts of all time, Mick’s Birthday Show
The bigger issue for Marshall was drugs.
MARSHALL CHESS: Before I joined the Stones I’d smoked marijuana, that was it. Suddenly every drug on the planet was freely available. As soon as we started touring, I found myself with multiple addictions. By the end of the first big tour I was doing everything there was to do. I liked to be high all the time. When you’re living that life you don’t stop for a moment to think that there’s gonna be a long, dark tunnel waiting for you somewhere down the line.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: The brilliance of Keith was you didn’t know about the junk unless you were using junk. You didn’t get in the room with him unless you were using junk. They had lived in public since they were eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They were very clever at presenting a public face, a second face, a third face. Then it was a secret life even further back than that. They had everything compartmentalized. You had to really pass tests to get to the inner circle.
Marshall was in that inner circle. When did things get out of hand for him personally?
MARSHALL CHESS: It was on tour that the real partying went on, after the shows. I did seven years of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. I came out of it a better man than when I went in. I made it out. Jimmy Miller and Nicky Hopkins didn’t make it out alive.
What was it like touring with the Stones in those days?
MARSHALL CHESS: Those tours were epics. I even got to play on stage with the band a few times. On the 1973 tour of Europe I played trumpet and conga drums on the last three numbers of the Stones’ set, finishing up with “Street Fighting Man.” I used to be a bugler in the Boy Scouts, then I played in my high school band. My dream was to become a musician but my family discouraged that. They thought it was a stupid life. They had a point. In those days being a musician was a hard road to travel. There were no rock stars. But I regret it to this day because I think I’d have been a great musician. I had it in me.
The Stones were using Stevie Wonder’s horn section to fatten their sound and they insisted I join them on stage. Walking out to play in front of twenty thousand people, that was a thrill. I blew so hard my lips were bruised. My abiding memory is Mick showering me with rose petals at the end of the show and thirty thousand people focusing their energy on me. It was such an intense feeling.
PETER RUDGE: THE RINGMASTER
Before Peter Rudge got the job as road manager of the Stones, he was on the road with the Who.
PETER RUDGE: We were making a rock opera called Tommy. That attracted the attention of Mick and the Stones and Rupert Loewenstein, because they were coming off the back of Altamont. I got a call from somebody saying, “The Stones would like to meet with you.” I went in and I met the Stones at the Beverly Hills Hotel at Rupert Loewenstein’s bungalow. It was hysterical: Keith kept leaving the room. Mick was in and out of the room. Rupert was the only constant. We just talked. I sensed even then that Mick ran the show. Keith was the conscience of the group. There were a lot of discussions about the ticket prices. They were mindful of all the pitfalls of the ’69 tour. About two or three months later I got a call that said, “Hey, the Stones would like you to come work with them on the ’72 tour.” I was a pretty young kid.
How was his experience on the ’72 tour?
PETER RUDGE: That tour is unique in terms of what we accomplished. It was a fusion of rock ’n’ roll and celebrity that transcended music and attracted a huge media curiosity at that time. It was Ahmet Ertegun and all his social circles. Mick reached out to people like Bob Ellis, who managed Billy Preston [and] happened to be married to Diana Ross. We had parties at Diana Ross’s house in LA and [Motown founder] Barry Gordy was there.
It was a self-contained traveling tour. We controlled everything. I was the guide horse. It was kind of like playing the media themselves because there was such a fascination with the Stones: here comes the devil incarnate, lock your daughters up. We created the template for the modern tour from a structural, organizational, and a production point of view. And the gigs were phenomenal.
Is it true that the Stones had issues with disgruntled Hells Angels on the tour?
PETER RUDGE: There was the underlying issue of the Hells Angels. They wanted the Stones to pay their legal fees from Altamont. The Stones said, “It’s your problem. You killed the kid. You’re the ones who decided on taking that course of action.” So we were constantly being harassed by Hells Angels. Once, I was walking down Madison Avenue, two bikers rode up the side of me when I was pushing my three-month-old kid down the road. I was wired up by the FBI, because the Angels were trying to shake us down for money. On that tour, you had Hells Angels trying to knock the back door down and Truman Capote sitting in the dressing room with Jackie Onassis’s sister.
What were the Stones themselves like during the ’72 tour?
PETER RUDGE: The Stones knew that the gig didn’t finish when they walked off stage. They really understood that everything they did would either add or subtract from the Stones legend. So they were really good at working that. Mick and Keith had an incredible chemistry. Keith, the dark gypsy, with his rat retinue that hangs on, and Mick prancing around with Ahmet, prancing around with Nancy Reagan, prancing around with David Geffen. No one could pin him down.
Charlie was probably the only one that could speak to all five of them. Mick was coming along—the new boy, the baby. Dear old Bill would plod along being Bill, worried more about the football results back home than anything else. But it worked. If bands like each other, they don’t last long. If bands don’t like each other, they tend to last forever.
The official tour chronicler was Robert Greenfield.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: Now we hear that the Stones are going to go on tour in America. I want to write about the tour, but I’m not really the choice of Rolling Stone magazine. Then, they’re informed by the Stones that I’m the only guy acceptable. I didn’t pay for anything on the tour. Nor did Rolling Stone pay for anything. My expenses were covered by the Stones. I’m on the Stones’ touring party . . .
Peter Rudge is running the tour. I fall in love with Peter because he’s a character of major proportions. He’s hysterically funny and he’s so smart.
In effect, Greenfield was an honorary member of the group. And his memories of the time were as extraordinary as anyone’s. Remember the Stones’ trip to Alabama in 1969? Three years later, things weren’t that different but were maybe just starting to change.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: We got to Mobile, Alabama—my distinct memory was that there were these little shacks all around the gig in which black people lived, where old black men were rocking back and forth on the porches. There were thousands of white kids to see the Stones. I don’t think there was a single black person in the audience. Stevie Wonder opened every night. Every night, a bunch of us would go up and watch Stevie. I saw all these white kids and I have to believe that was the start of cultural change in America. That once you love black music, you’re going to have some problems thinking black people aren’t as good as you are.
Across the country, the audience was changing before their eyes.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: The other amazing thing was being in Minneapolis, where everybody was white and blond and seeing seventeen-year-old guys in full makeup and drag. Mick knows all about Bowie, that’s why he looks that way on the tour. He’s wearing this beaded onesie that’s cut down to his navel. He’s wearing eye makeup; he’s got a full-time makeup man on the tour. He’s well aware of the transgender, cross-sexual vibe that’s going on in England. It’s not going on in America, that we know about, yet here are these kids who have already tuned into T. Rex and it’s already starting. The ’60s have ended and the weirdness of the ’70s is beginning.
Another notable stop on the tour was the Playboy Mansion.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: In Chicago, the Playboy Mansion scene was insane. It was hot and cold running bunnies and playmates. The bunnies were keeping score, I later learned, keeping track of how many Stones they had slept with. One of my great memories was going into Keith’s bedroom there—he had been out that day buying guitars at pawnshops—and I swear to you a playmate I recognized came in while he was talking to me about the guitar, and Keith said something to her like, “That’s alright darling. I’ll fuck you later.” She said, “OK,” and she walked out.
The other great moment: there was a grand piano in the living room and Stevie sat down to play, and I was leaning on the piano. And he’s singing this show tune I’d never heard before. It was stunning.
The tour was marked by a large number of outsiders backstage, including a pimp/doctor, multiple writers, a filmmaker, Keith’s pals, friends of Mick’s from the jet set. It became a source of tension.
KEITH RICHARDS: Personally I just don’t want to know about ’em. I mean, how they get in there and why they’re there in the first place, I don’t really know. It’s a difficult thing to handle anyway, because it starts with things like, Oh, Truman Capote is going to come along and write something on the Stones and he comes along and brings along Princess Lee Radziwill and some other socialites from New York and you’re surrounded by those people. I mean, all those jet setters must be loud or something. They seem to be on this massive ego trip anyway, which I just don’t want to know about. All I can say is those people will not be around a second time. There’s no way they’re going to be in our company ever again.
MICK JAGGER: The whole business was very exaggerated. After all, there were only two people on the tour, and they were only there for a couple of days. I mean, REALLY.
By the tour’s end, the Stones were at another level in multiple senses of the word. The tour culminated on July 26, 1972, Mick’s twenty-ninth birthday, with one of the band’s greatest ever performances (the Birthday Show), followed by a celebration of the Stones courtesy of Ahmet Ertegun.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: The other iconic moment would have been the party on the roof of the St. Regis hotel where Ahmet Ertegun introduced the Stones to another level of social life in America. The entertainment was Muddy Waters and Count Basie . . . What you saw on the ’72 tour was a weird mixture. The counterculture is still dying, but by the time they get to New York and they go to that party on the St. Regis roof, they are now enshrined as full-on superstar show business celebrities who play rock ’n’ roll, which is no longer an outlaw form of music, but by the end of the Stones’ ’72 tour is now hip for the wealthy and the famous and the powerful.
The St. Regis roof party was the talk of the town, described by Bob Dylan as “encompassing. It’s the beginning of cosmic consciousness. A Felliniesque finale to the Stones tour.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: That party makes Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball look like small potatoes. That is the ultimate New York party.
The party was arranged by Ahmet Ertegun, the founder and president of Atlantic Records.
PETER RUDGE: It was a match made in heaven, the Stones and Ahmet, the son of an ambassador and aristocrat, a culturally sophisticated man with an unbelievable love of blues and jazz. Those characteristics were manifested individually in Mick and Keith. He was kind of that person who could sit with Keith for hours talking about music, could sit for hours with Mick talking about music. It was a magical run, the Rolling Stones and Atlantic Records. It’s where the Stones wanted to be because they loved the soul and DNA of the label. They were with someone that could help build their social profile, to introduce Mick to a world he was fascinated with socially. And Ahmet knew how to play Charlie with all the jazz stuff. He knew how to play Bill Wyman with all of the football stuff. He was masterful.
He had a tremendous effect on the Stones—musically and individually. He genuinely loved being with them . . . It was fun . . . It was a team and Ahmet was very much a part of that team, and Ahmet respected the Stones agenda.
When they signed to Atlantic Records, they went to finishing school almost. They graduated. By the time they came out of Atlantic Records, they were institutionalized. They lost the street edge. Ahmet was a tremendous influence in the Stones’ life.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: The heavy hitter on the tour was Ahmet. When Ahmet showed up at a gig, everybody stood at attention. He must have spent as much money on them in New York as they made at the Garden that night. Ahmet and Mick socially were parallel figures. Even Mick knew he was with someone of equal weight.
Greenfield was impressed with the Stones’ work ethic. They were always trying to get better.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: Bill Graham said, “If they weren’t great, nobody would want to buy tickets to come and see them.” They always left it all on stage. I saw Keith furious angry screaming at Charlie at shows in England because he wasn’t on the beat. That’s somebody who gives a shit. I saw them after shows—they would record everything on little recorders—sort of disconsolate. Jagger sitting in a hotel room with his head in his hands, “Fuck, we were shit! So fucking bad.” They always wanted to walk out and do great shows.
And usually, they did. It’s interesting to note that Greenfield hasn’t seen the Stones since.
ROBERT GREENFIELD: Once you’re off the bus, you can’t get back on.