Keith Richards rocks the stage once again at Madison Square Garden in 1981
REHEARSALS FOR THE Stones’ 1981 tour took place on Long View Farm in Massachusetts.
STEVE MORSE: They rehearsed for that ’81 tour at Long View Farm. And that was in central Mass. in farm country. And they would be up all night, they had a soundstage, and they would perform, and they wouldn’t start until after midnight. So they were a bit of a nuisance to the farmers in the surrounding valleys out there.
GREG PERLOFF: Bill Graham and I showed up at Long View Farm to meet with the band and no one was there. We found the caretaker and he told us that Mick went out for a ride. So we took a football out of the car and started throwing it around. For like an hour. We had nothing to do. No idea where we were staying or anything. And all of a sudden, galloping up on horseback, comes Mick Jagger. It was like a scene out of a movie.
That was when Chuck Leavell first started playing with the Stones.
CHUCK LEAVELL: My connection was through Bill Graham. One day I’m at home and I get a call from his office saying, “Would you be interested in auditioning for the Rolling Stones?” I was very interested because at the time, I didn’t have anything going on . . . Ian Stewart called me. We had a great talk; I was very surprised and very pleased, obviously. This was on a Thursday and I actually had a gig Friday and Saturday of that weekend and I asked him if it would be OK if I come up Sunday or Monday and his response was, “Well, we’d really like to have you there tomorrow.” So the next day I was on a plane to Long View Farm. Stu picked me up; we had a nice talk. We got there to the farm. I saw Mick jogging out with the security guys.
One person was notably absent at Long View Farm, at least at first.
GREG PERLOFF: All of a sudden people start showing up. And there’s no Keith Richards. Later on we sit down for dinner at this long table, it’s the whole band and some crew guys, and Bill says, “Where’s Keith?” And they were all like, “Oh,” like no one had noticed he was missing. And then, about twenty feet away, you see this arm flop over the sofa, and someone says, “There’s Keith.” He had been out on the sofa for the entire time we had been there.
We get to the next day and we’re really ready to get to work—still no Keith. You’ve got the barn, which is also a recording studio but from the outside it could be a horse barn. And then outside you’ve got this pond, and while we’re waiting for something to happen, Bill and I start throwing the football around again. And at that point, Keith Richards walks out, boots on, blue jeans on, no shirt, telecaster strapped over his shoulder, and he starts walking out of the barn and towards the lake. And there was a cord on the guitar, the longest cord you’ve ever seen in your life, like a two-hundred-foot cord. And Keith stares at the lake and starts in on the opening riff to “Under My Thumb.” We stopped and went, “Yeah. That’s why we’re here.” It was magic. And that was the beginning of the ’81 tour.
The tour grossed over thirty-six million dollars over fifty shows. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t tension between the two notoriously difficult personalities who were in charge, Bill Graham and Mick Jagger.
GREG PERLOFF: There were interesting ego things. Bill was a very famous promoter and producer at that time. And early in the tour there was this wonderful article about Bill. And Mick asked to see Bill and Bill went to his suite and Mick had the newspaper laid out and said, “Bill, what’s the name of this tour?” The answer being the Rolling Stones. It was one of the few times I ever saw Bill shook up. The message was, there is one star on this tour, and it’s not Bill Graham.
Greg didn’t let his ability to book the Stones go to his head.
GREG PERLOFF: I was doing all the deals for the tour as Bill was actually out on the tour. I was twenty-nine years old and feeling a bit full of myself. And an agent friend said, “You know, Greg, anybody can book the Rolling Stones. Let’s see you book Dr. Hook on a rainy Tuesday in Des Moines.” There’s no band in the business even close to how big the Rolling Stones are. If you want to understand the power of the Rolling Stones from a different perspective, for six months of my life, everybody took my phone call.
The Stones made an unusual gesture at the end of their time at Long View Farm, a special thank you to any of their neighbors they might have bothered.
STEVE MORSE: I saw the sneak concert at Sir Morgan’s Cove in Worcester. But the Stones made sure that they gave free tickets to the Sir Morgan’s Cove show to the farmers. The Stones took care of their neighbors.
Bill Graham was the tour manager at the time. And I recall how he kicked all the media out, away from the door. As the day evolved, there were about fifteen hundred to two thousand kids trying to get in unsuccessfully. And the tickets had been given away on WAAF, the Worcester rock station. Literally handed out on the streets. If you were wearing an AAF shirt, you’d get a ticket. It became a great promotion for the radio station.
Bill Graham would get in shouting matches with the media. There was a photographer I brought with me named Stan Grossfeld. And Stan later won two Pulitzer Prizes. At the time, he was making a name for himself and he and Bill got in an unbelievable shouting match because Bill would not let Stan in. So Stan somehow got in and he ends up coming out on a balcony overlooking the front door, getting these incredible photos of the crowd. And here’s Bill Graham down on the sidewalk waving his fist, “You get down off of there!” And Stan happily took his picture.
It was just an eleven-song set. Just a tune-up for the tour. They arrived and left in a thirty-five-foot-long Winnebago. And as they were leaving, Jagger opened the blinds and started mugging for the cameras.
A still from Hal Ashby’s Let’s Spend the Night Together, a concert film about the 1981 tour
One of the notable aspects of the Stones’ 1981 tour is that it was the first time a rock band had a corporate sponsor. In the Stones’ case: Jōvan Musk men’s cologne.
STEVE MORSE: The American rockers at the time wouldn’t have considered corporate sponsorship. They thought it was cheesy to get involved with it. The British acts were out in front with that. A lot of the American bands and music critics didn’t like it at all. But as time went on and people saw how expensive it was to tour and how the tickets would have to be raised astronomically to compensate, then all of a sudden it became OK to do.
GREG PERLOFF: At that point we were totally against corporate sponsorship. Bands didn’t charge as much as they could for tickets because it was unseemly. The Stones actually came to us with Jōvan. It was groundbreaking at the time.
Graham wasn’t assured of getting the ’81 tour but in the end, he won out.
GREG PERLOFF: There were a number of companies competing for the ’81 tour and we were fortunate enough to get it. When we did the Stones in ’78, we did some special effects. We had some helicopters flying overhead dropping plastic blow-up girls down and Ping-Pong balls, and at the same time we had helium balloons coming up from the front of the stage. This was for Some Girls. In those days, the local promoter could actually do some of these special promotion items and this was the first tour that they really went out and did some really good business. That had a lot to do with getting the ’81 tour.
SUMMIT AT BUDDY’S PLACE
One of the most memorable nights on the ’81 tour was on November 22, when the Stones played Buddy Guy’s club in Chicago, the Checkerboard Lounge. Muddy Waters joined them on the bill.
Buddy guy: First of all, they had promised to do that seven times before they finally did it. They wanted it to be a surprise. They shocked everybody, including me. They came up in one of the raggediest vans that ever rode. I think the door was cracked; the windshield was cracked. And they was all disguised.
They was trying to do it and keep the media away. But you couldn’t keep the media away from there. This particular night, Junior Wells and I was coming out of Vancouver through Seattle and we almost missed the plane. When I got almost to the Checkerboard—and I owned the Checkerboard at that time—they had the road blocked off. One of the policemen said, “You can’t go up there because the Rolling Stones is there.” Thank God there was a sergeant recognized me and said, “Well, you can’t stop him, because he’s the one that owns the club.”
When I got to the front door there was people on top of the building, and I thought it was going to crash in because it wasn’t real good construction. They was hanging off the roof . . . and some of them recognized me and one guy screamed, “Buddy, I’ll give a thousand dollars to get in there.” The place didn’t hold but sixty-four people. And the Stones had fifty-four. I started crying out of one eye. That night I didn’t make anything off the bar; nobody was drinking. I had the Rolling Stones in my place and I didn’t make a nickel.
In the end I was so happy because it put the club on the map . . . I saw Charlie Watts a year, two years later and he said, “I got to apologize Buddy, ’cause I don’t even remember being in your club.” When I walked in the door he was laying out on the bar . . . There was so many people out of it that night, so I say, “Everybody’s high but me. Give me a shot of Jack Daniel’s.”
Muddy started singing his song about champagne and reefer. And there was at least twenty policemen in there when Muddy started singing and Mick Jagger threw a bag of weed up there. I said, “Oh shit, they’re going to get arrested.” The police didn’t do nothing but laugh. They didn’t give a damn what they did.
Back then, I didn’t have any kind of awards or anything. And every time I got to play with Muddy and the Rolling Stones on the stage that was up there with my Grammy and my induction into the Hall of Fame. I was sitting on top of the world. How high can you go?
The shows featured a mix of indoor and outdoor venues.
GREG PERLOFF: The outdoor tour had these beautiful scrims in front of the stage, and the indoor shows had a stage that was in the shape of a flower that opened up and it was a spectacular stage. The Stones have gone on to become one of the real leaders in concert production. There was resistance at the time, Keith saying, “I want to play on a stage, I don’t want to play on a fucking toy.” Bill and Mick convinced him. At that point he said, “Well, I’ll do it. But if this stage doesn’t hold up, you’re fucking paying for it.”
Were there any incidents?
GREG PERLOFF: And we get through the entire tour and we’re in Hampton, Virginia, filming the last two shows of the tour and we do the second-to-last show and everything’s great and someone on the crew decides we need a photograph of the entire crew. So we all go on the stage to take this picture and the stage collapses. Thank God no one was injured but there went a lot of the profits from the tour. We had to rebuild the stage for the show and the filming the next night.
From a business point of view, the Stones debuted a couple of other advanced concepts in ’81.
GREG PERLOFF: The idea of not paying to sell our merchandise. The other thing on the US tour is we only advertised in one market. We started out with a press conference to introduce the shows. And every show just blew out. This was the beginning of the Stones really becoming a professional organization.
Part of the way the Stones compensated for a lack of traditional promotion was radio (see chapter 39).
GREG PERLOFF: In those days, FM radio ruled. We did a lot of press conferences. Radio had to cover the tour. They had to be the first to announce it, all of the information. There were no presales back then. The tickets went on sale and if you were first in line, you got the front row. We realized that radio was going to sell it for us. All we had to do was whisper, “The Rolling Stones are coming.”
