INTRODUCTION JOEL SELVIN
Summer, 1972—with the Beatles disintegrated and Bob Dylan semi-retired, the Rolling Stones stood, unchallenged, at the peak of the rock music world. Upstarts such as Led Zeppelin may have seized the day momentarily—”Stairway to Heaven” was ubiquitous that spring as the recently released Led Zeppelin IV settled into a five-year run on the charts—but the Stones still reigned supreme, exalted above all other rock stars. They had just released a two-record set in May, Exile on Main Street, that followed in the wake of three of the greatest rock albums ever—Beggar’s Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), and Sticky Fingers (1971).
The Rolling Stones’ cocaine- and tequila sunset-fueled 1972 tour would be rock’s most glittering moment, with its four-million-dollar box office bigger than any before, and hangers-on the likes of best-selling author Truman Capote and Princess Lee Radziwill. The band’s touring party on the private jet included its own doctor, trained in emergency medicine and always ready to write prescriptions, as well as photographer Robert Frank, who captured the mayhem on his Super 8 home movie cameras, edited into a never-released (but widely seen) feature film, Cocksucker Blues. There was Mick Jagger, ready for his close-up, and wasted Keith Richards, wearing a jacket with a Coke emblem and slouching under a sign reading “Patience Please … A Drug Free America Comes First!” for photographer Ethan Russell. Annie Leibovitz, writer Robert Greenfield, and others, including Jim Marshall, joined the tour at various stages. They dubbed themselves “STP”—Stones Touring Party—and adopted the stickers from the automotive oil additive with the same acronym, with its double meaning as slang for a popular hallucinogenic drug in the psychedelic underground. They were like a pirate crew where everyone had drunk more than his share of grog. This was rock and roll at its greatest.
Jagger with Chris O’Dell, production assistant for the 1972 tour. O’Dell started her career at Apple Records with the Beatles, and after the 1972 tour went on to work with Dylan; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; and Linda Ronstadt as one of the first female tour managers.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at Sunset Sound doing post-production work on Exile on Main Street, spring 1972, Los Angeles, California.
The band recorded most of Exile on Main Street in the basement of Keith Richards’s rented chateau in Nellcôte, France, working with producer Jimmy Miller, but retreated to Los Angeles to finish the album at Sunset Sound. That old studio in the middle of Hollywood, where Annette Funicello made all her records, was started in the fifties by Walt Disney’s music maestro, Tutti Camarata. Elektra Records practically turned it into a house studio—the Doors made several albums there—but the Stones had also worked the room before, on sessions for Beggar’s Banquet.
With the record due to be released in May and the eight-week, thirty-city tour set to start in June 1972, engineer Andy Johns spent many sleepless nights through the first three months of that year trying to bring the project across the finish line. Last-minute panic set in. The record went through a number of marathon remix sessions, overdubbing vocal parts and doing whatever might be needed to get the album out the door. On assignment for Life magazine, Jim Marshall traveled to Los Angeles and captured Mick and Keith lolling around the studio, also shooting a separate portrait session with Mick. These are precursors to the intimate backstage images Marshall captured from the tour itself.
This Stones tour pierced a veil for rock music. Life was mainstream press. The Rolling Stones had become famous beyond the subterranean cultural reaches of the rock-and-roll demimonde. Rock music itself was grandly ascendant, just beginning to flex its popular strength in those early post-Woodstock years, and the Rolling Stones were rock’s biggest stars. This tour would be a victory lap under the brightest spotlight and upon the largest stage the Stones had ever known. Rock music would grow bigger, but it would never be greater than the Rolling Stones tour of America in 1972.
The tour began in Vancouver, Canada, where two thousand kids without tickets battled cops outside. The next night in Seattle, the band cut a few songs from the set and tightened up the show. Stevie Wonder was their opening act: a half-hour explosion of talent and soul from his opening drum solo to hopping off stage at the back of a conga line of tall, beautiful black female vocalists. The Stones cut their set down to under ninety minutes. After two successful shows in Seattle, the band was ready for San Francisco.
The taint of Altamont still lingered over the Stones, especially in the Bay Area. At the end of the 1969 tour, the band left town in a hurry after a planned free concert before an audience of near a half-million turned into a disaster. Members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, hired for $400 worth of beer to act as security guards, beat the crowd with pool cues and even knocked out Jefferson Airplane vocalist Marty Balin during his performance earlier in the day. The Stones waited until sunset to take the stage, only to have the performance interrupted by fights and outbreaks in the crowd during “Sympathy for the Devil.” People died; one, Meredith Hunter, was killed directly in front of the stage. The band and their touring party took off after the concert in their overloaded helicopter like refugees fleeing Saigon.
In the aftermath, San Francisco rock impresario Bill Graham had some harsh words for Mick Jagger, but nonetheless had managed to coax the band into playing the Winterland for the 1972 tour. The 5,400-seat former ice rink where he held weekly rock concerts generally featured far-less-famous bands. In San Francisco the Stones first encountered the West Coast rock establishment, through musicians such as Jerry Garcia and Neil Young. John Lee Hooker came backstage to visit between shows. And, of course, there were the masses—the computer ticket agency reported more than 100,000 orders for the approximately 20,000 tickets available to the four shows. There also waited media—not just Rolling Stone hipsters, although they alone were enough. Jim Marshall was among them.
Marshall was a big-time photojournalist before the term was invented. When he lived in New York, he worked for the top glossy photo magazines—Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post—and his shots graced the covers of literally hundreds of album covers, from Miles Davis to Johnny Cash. His landmark photographs of Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar, Bob Dylan kicking a tire, or Janis Joplin snuggling up to her Southern Comfort bottle were cornerstone pieces of the emerging field of rock photography. At age thirty-six, Marshall was already that industry’s grand old man.
Marshall first photographed the Stones at their 1965 performance at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, a turning point in the nascent San Francisco rock scene; six months later, many people in the crowd that night had started bands of their own with funny names like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company. Marshall covered the Stones’ Oakland Coliseum Arena performances in 1969. He shot Altamont. He knew Winterland like it was his own living room.
San Francisco threw its doors open to the Stones. Bill Graham hosted a party at the Trident, a fashionable Sausalito restaurant owned by Kingston Trio manager Frank Werber, who made it happen even though the place was usually closed on Mondays. In between nights at Winterland, the boys sought out the Isley Brothers at a soul joint in a tin Quonset hut across the Bay Bridge.
San Francisco rock impresario Bill Graham presented four shows over two nights at the Winterland and was also responsible for promoting shows in the Los Angeles area.
On the 1969 tour, the band had something to prove. Since their first U.S. tour in 1964, a thousand bands had sprung up. The Stones in ‘69 proved their primacy, even if the jubilant triumph finished with the massive free concert at Altamont that made a crater of the Woodstock myth, a nasty piece of punctuation to the entire decade. The 1972 model Rolling Stones was different. This time, the Stones rested certain of their status. Before he gave way to grand gestures calculated to play to the grandstands in the massive baseball parks the band soon inhabited, Mick Jagger was the most powerful archetypal rock vocalist in the world. Countless hundreds have borrowed from his book. He remains the single most dominant rock performer in the business, through generation after generation of other would-be rock stars. But at performances throughout the 1972 tour, Jagger was at his absolute peak, giving not just career-defining performances, but genre-defining, the apex of an entire art form.
From San Francisco the tour moved down the coast to L.A. The band had a long history with the city; Los Angeles always treated them like stars. The Stones, who recorded “Satisfaction” at RCA Studios, landed Friday at the Hollywood Palladium,
Graham bought four hundred pounds of peanuts to give away to the crowds waiting outside the Winterland for hours before the show, San Francisco, California.
a small theater on Sunset Boulevard, broadcast home of the ancient Lawrence Welk Show, and rocked the house Saturday at the Long Beach Municipal Arena, an old barn on the seaside, finishing up with two shows on Sunday at the 18,000-seat Forum (home of basketball’s Los Angeles Lakers) that ran by the clock, as opposed to the long delays common on the 1969 tour. The band made the short flight to San Diego the next morning. Marshall shot the Los Angeles shows, traveled with the band on the plane to San Diego, and photographed that show as well.
Throughout his entire career, Marshall battled for access. Without free access, he couldn’t do what he did—breathe in the moments and freeze them on film. The Stones knew Marshall. Even without the clout of the Life assignment, Marshall was a formidable figure. Like Jagger and Richards, he walked around armed and hammered: a pistol somewhere on his person, a shot of bourbon or scotch near at hand, and more than his ration of coke up his nose, if he could manage it. Marshall could be querulous, abrasive. He didn’t fit into the Stones’ inner circle with the same ease as patrician Ethan Russell, who had been little more than an amateur photographer when he first hopped aboard the Stones’ touring party in 1969, and who was also along for parts of the 1972 ride.
Nothing escaped Marshall’s penetrating eye. Even in the short time and limited space accorded him, Marshall harnessed the essence of this band. His photograph of unshaven Keith Richards, cigarette between his lips, strumming an acoustic guitar at Sunset Sound, has been published many times (although it wasn’t in the original Life article). He caught Jagger backstage before a show, in a pink dressing gown, peach ascot around his neck, leaning on a cane talking to Mrs. Mick Taylor—one of the greatest candid portraits of Jagger ever. Even standing next to a beautiful woman in an impossibly short skirt, Jagger dominates the landscape. He radiates star quality, his electrifying presence glowing even with his engine running at idle.
Life hit the streets in early July with Marshall’s Mick Jagger leaping off the cover. It was not the kind of press coverage the bad boys of rock and roll were used to; the story by longtime staff contributor Tommy Thompson, though, was more like what they expected.
“The Rolling Stones!
“Are they still among us?
“How can they be? In history’s first disposable society, where everything from graceful landmarks to diapers to rock groups is used and thrown away, how can the Stones survive? In a decade—ten years!—of performing, they have earned some of the worst press clippings since Mussolini. To read them is to scan the underside of a rock. One would gather that the Stones began their journey on the River Styx. Their official trademark—on record labels, posters, jeweled pins—is a taunting, devil’s-red tongue stuck out at the world. Their spoor is scandal, dark, rumor, divorce, adultery, illegitimate children, drugs (when Jagger [sic—it was really Richards] wears the trademark ‘Coke’ sewn into his jacket, he is not endorsing cola), even blood and violent death.”
Same old “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?” stuff that had been circulating since their hustler manager first planted that angle with the Fleet Street press in the United Kingdom, who were only too glad to play along. Marshall’s photographs, however, were a different matter.
Splashed across six pages in full color, Marshall catches the Stones backstage in anonymous concrete bunker basements, Richards daubing on makeup from a paint box full of colors, Jagger in pre-show repose. The concert action shots show Jagger poised to toss his basket of rose petals on the Winterland crowd and working up the crowd at the Forum in a white jumpsuit. Marshall elegantly details the power and majesty of the Stones. His photographs dwarf the snide, sniveling dismissal by Thompson.
Marshall’s photographs are powerful because they tell the truth. He never tried to manufacture an image to suit a musician. He photographed them as he saw them and, in his eyes, these people looked larger than life, which is how he brought them to us. That is exactly what is so extraordinary about the photographs Marshall took those few days he was with the Stones—he shows them to us both as stars and as mere mortals, and they are all the more impressive because he does. Their steely magnificence shines back through Marshall’s Leica.
His shots were always impeccably composed. He rarely cropped his images and never resorted to darkroom tricks. Once he clicked the shutter, the photograph was done. With Marshall, it was all about his eye. His finger may have been on the shutter button, but his gut pulled the trigger. In his images of the Stones onstage, you can see the sound and hear the picture. In capturing the musicians offstage, Marshall shows us Olympians at rest. There is no mask to slip. Marshall sees the Rolling Stones as people.
The tour wound its way toward a conclusion on Mick Jagger’s twenty-ninth birthday, July 26, at Madison Square Garden in New York. The guest list backstage ranged from Bob Dylan to Zsa Zsa Gabor—the Beautiful People meet the Rock and Roll Circus. Appearing on the cover of Life gave the Rolling Stones the imprimatur of cultural ascendancy. Rock and roll—only recently a music exclusively meant for teenagers—was reaching its majority. The Stones had given the music high style and grand drama. The band would never be any better; these were golden days for both the Rolling Stones and rock music.
Although many of the photographs are imbued with the everyday sensibility of the hours backstage and time on the road before the next ninety minutes under the floodlights, Marshall also captured the age of classic rock at its height in a few frames with the Rolling Stones in California those days and nights in June 1972. It was an era that was over before we really knew it was an era. If anyone ever asks about this moment in time, wants to know about what this special breed of men called British rock stars looked like at their peak, we have Marshall’s 1972 photographs of the Rolling Stones.
