Most of the Stones’ Love You Live album was recorded during the 1975 Tour of the Americas and the 1976 tour of Europe. But what really makes the record interesting is the side recorded at a small club in Toronto, the El Mocambo.
BILL WYMAN: We wanted to do some live music of a really different nature, in a club where we could get a really good atmosphere and a bit of audience reaction, just basic blues stuff like we did in the early days, on our live album.
How would it be to play a club after fifteen years away?
KEITH RICHARDS: That was what we were all wondering before we went on, “Gosh it’s been so long since we did this.” And the amazing thing was that two bars into the first number it just felt so natural, as if those years in between didn’t exist. It didn’t make any difference anymore. We could have been playing at the Crawdads next weekend. It just felt so natural that it just reinforced my belief that every band has got to make some sort of effort to break out of the circuit that we’re all put on and we just sort of accept. For instance, I hate to say it, an American tour. If they tell us that the Stones are doing an American tour, we can probably name you 97 percent of the cities that we’re going to hit. There just seems to be this circuit build up that gets more and more entrenched every time. There are theaters and auditoriums all over the place. They don’t hold fifteen thousand, twenty thousand people but I don’t see why you can’t do them both.
Yet it’s very different playing small venues, as the Stones well knew.
BILL WYMAN: First of all, you know that three-quarters of the kids are using binoculars in a big stadium, and you’re just dots on the horizon. So you have to wear clothes not because they look good but because they stand out—a brilliant red jacket—so they can make out you’re not an amplifier or something. When you’re in a club it’s smoky, and it’s intense, and very personal. Like, in the El Mocambo, the girls were grabbing our legs and crotches, while we’re playing, which adds a little bit to the show from our side (chuckles).
This was among the challenges of being superstars—the more success the Stones had, the more pressure there was to focus on the business rather than the music.
KEITH RICHARDS: I think it’s true, there is that conflict. Individually it depends upon the band and its members. But for instance, the business side of it is how come the Stones aren’t living in England together, which would be so much easier for us to organize things and get things together instead of everybody being three thousand miles apart. Half the time, Mick’s in New York and I’m in Switzerland. Or I’m here and he’s in New York and Bill’s in France. That’s the business side of it and that’s the effect it has and it slows us down so much and it just . . . To get everybody into one place to even decide what to do next is a major operation.
The Stones at MSG in June of 1975
Why had it been so long since the Stones played a club? The answer came down to dollars and sense.
CHARLIE WATTS: If you’re going to spend a quarter of a million dollars to build a stage for Madison Square Garden, how can you do a club the next day? You’ve got to earn back that money to make the whole trip worthwhile. We spend a million dollars, or a million and a half dollars, to set up a tour before we even come here. Just to organize a tour, from there to there, people going around checking out ceilings, how much weight the roof will stand, before you even sell one ticket. You’ve got to think financially, unfortunately, you can’t play little clubs.
BILL WYMAN: It was an idea we’d had for some years, but we found it very uneconomical. In the old days, when you traveled in a van and you lived in tiny hotels, two in a room, you could afford to do small clubs. But touring America and staying in suites at the Plaza, and having the best food and good wine and restaurants means your expenses can reach five hundred thousand dollars—and you lose one hundred thousand dollars or two hundred thousand dollars each. But it’s the only place in the world where you can actually make some money from touring. Europe you can’t. England you can’t. Australia’s really hard, and . . . we have to make some money, especially Charlie and me, because we don’t write songs. So the only money we physically earn is from record royalties, which I can’t complain about, but if you only do one record every two years, that cuts it down. It sounds very mercenary, but it’s the facts of life.
Fortunately for the Stones, they did eventually find a way to break out of the stadium touring rut, but amazingly, it wouldn’t happen for another quarter century! The Stones’ visit to Toronto wasn’t only known for those El Mocambo shows, it was also the site for one of the more infamous episodes in Rolling Stones history. And that’s the story you’ll read as soon as you turn the page.