The Rolling Stones’ North American tour of 1972 began on 3 June in Vancouver and wrapped up with a four-show stint at Madison Square Garden, New York, on 24-26 July.
During that 53-day stint they played 48 shows in 32 cities and endured threats from the Hells Angels, drug busts, band arrests and riots. They started a fire in the Playboy Mansion, they were targeted by an extremist group in Montreal and guitarist Keith Richards and Stephen Stills pulled knives on one another during an argument in a Denver hotel room.
The Stones' 1972 US tour changed rock music forever – in terms of the demand for tickets, the intensity of the performances and the wild behaviour of the entourage – though whether its remaining principal players remember any of it is a moot point.
Pool cues and motorcycle chains
The shows were the Stones’ first on North American soil since their infamous headline performance at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival on 6 December 1969. The festival – which also featured Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – drew an estimated crowd of 300,000, overwhelming the venue, which didn’t have the facilities to cope.
What’s more, members of the Hells Angels were hired to act as security, accepting payment of $500-worth of beer. The Angels used pool cues and motorcycle chains to keep the surging crowd from the metre-high stage, which had been erected at the bottom of a hill.
By the time the Stones took to the stage, violence was in the air and their performance was interrupted constantly – as shown in the documentary Gimme Shelter. Following a scuffle, 18-year-old fan Meredith Hunter drew a revolver and was stabbed 16 times by Hells Angel Alan Passaro. Unaware of the severity of the situation, the band finished their set and fled the scene.
The events of Altamont cast a shadow over the end of the ’60s and the Stones themselves. What’s more, in the run up to the 1972 tour, the Angels were demanding retribution. ‘There was the underlying issue of the Hells Angels,’ tour manager Peter Rudge later said. 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.’
'Mick wanted a doctor to keep him alive if he got shot on stage'
It was a febrile time in the US – anti-Vietnam War protests were reaching fever pitch and about a month before the tour there had been a failed assassination of the governor of Alabama and presidential candidate George Wallace, who’d become notorious for his segregationist views.
Though Jagger laughed it off in the press, privately the pressure was starting to show, as Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir, Life: ‘Mick, who was getting appropriately nervous about people trying to get at him – there were threats and there were freaks fixated on him; people would walk up and hit him; the Angels wanted him dead – wanted a doctor around who could keep him alive if he got shot on stage.’
Having a personal doctor on tour might have been unheard of a decade earlier, but this was the golden age of rock’n’roll excess, with debauchery and decadence on a previously unimaginable scale, as Richards went on. ‘The whole entourage had exploded in terms of numbers, of roadies and technicians, and of hangers’ on and groupies.
'We had become a pirate nation'
'For the first time we travelled in our own hired plane, with the lapping tongue painted on. We had become a pirate nation, moving on a huge scale under our own flag, with lawyers, clowns, attendants. For the guys running the operation there was maybe one battered typewriter and hotel or street phones to run a North American tour through 30 cities.’
Included in the party were a fleet of writers and photographers documenting the shenanigans. And these were no mere hacks, with author Truman Capote, journalist Stanley Booth and filmmaker and photographer Robert Frank among them. The Stones knew exactly what they were doing – the reports, photographs and films from the frontline of the tour increased the air of mythology around the band.
For Robert Frank, the photographer who, in his 1958 book The Americans, had done so much to capture life in post-war America, this was something else. ‘I have never been on anything like this,’ he said. ‘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.’
As Peter Rudge later recalled, nothing was left to chance. ‘We controlled everything. I was the guide horse. I 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, organisational and a production point of view. And the gigs were phenomenal.’
Some had weapons, a few even had bombs
Mayhem followed the Stones Touring Party (as the tour became unofficially known) wherever it went. The tour began in Vancouver, Canada, where an estimated 2,500 kids without tickets congregated outside the venue – some had weapons, a few even had bombs, some got involved in running battles with police as they attempted to force their way into the venue. Thirty-one police officers were injured, with eight taken to hospital, and 13 rioters were arrested.
Unaware of the commotion, the Stones and opening act Stevie Wonder thrilled concert goers with an explosive show. ‘They unleashed sweat, swagger, and sizzling guitars,’ raved the reviewer from UK music paper the New Musical Express. ‘From “Brown Sugar” to “Midnight Rambler”, the crowd couldn’t get enough. Mick Jagger strutted and screamed with full-on charisma, while Keith Richards and Mick Taylor shredded riffs that set the arena on fire. Raw energy, epic rock — pure Stones magic.’
The wild scenes – outside venues, on stage and behind the scenes – became a familiar story throughout the tour. Rioting broke out in San Diego on 13 June after holders of counterfeit tickets were turned away from the venue, leading to 60 arrests and 15 injured. The following night, in Tucson, Arizona, local police used tear gas to disperse roughly 300 youths attempting to push inside the venue as the doors were being closed.
'I see weird things out front some nights'
Two nights after that, following a show at the Denver Coliseum, Richards and Stills had an altercation in a hotel room which, legend has it, became so heated that the two loose cannons drew knives on one another. The Stones being in town was also used for political ends – to draw attention to their cause, French-Canadian separatists blew up the Stones’ equipment truck when it arrived in Montreal on 17 July.
Interviewed around their shows in Chicago on 19 and 20 June, Jagger reflected on the reactions of the audience at the shows to that point. ‘Did you see men leaping on stage the other night? Great big men they were too. With clenched fists... shouting. I've had to stop doing that one – the clenched fist…
'I see weird things out front some nights. The guy begging me to whip him during “Midnight Rambler”. Pleading for it and grabbing at the belt. His eyes... Another held up a burning cigarette to catch my attention, then crushed it in his palm and held it up, all black with ash and fucked up. Weird, eh?’
Wild times at the Playboy Mansion
During their stay in Chicago, the Stones were invited by Hugh Hefner to stay at the Playboy Mansion, as Richards dimly recalled in Life. ‘The memory is very hazy. I know we did have some fun there. I know we ripped it up…. Bobby [Keys, saxophonist] and I played it a little too far when we set fire to the bathroom.’
The unhinged behaviour of the crowds was nothing compared to that of the Stones themselves, who reached new levels of rock’n’roll excess on the tour. ‘‘It’s very hard to explain all the excessive partying,’ Richards reflected. ‘You don’t say, OK, we’re going to have a party tonight. It just happened.
'It was a search for oblivion, I suppose, though not intentionally. Being in a band you are cooped up a lot, and the more famous you get the more of a prison you find yourself in. The convolutions you go through just not to be you for a few hours.’
This came to a head before the 19 July show at the Boston Garden, when five members of the Stones party were arrested. ‘We landed in Providence from Canada, and while they were searching all the baggage, I was sleeping on the fender of a fire truck, one of those nice, curved old-fashioned ones with the mudguards,’ Richards said.
‘I felt a sudden explosion of heat – a flashbulb right in my face – and I just leaped up and grabbed the camera. Kicked the photographer. And I got arrested. And Mick and Bobby Keys and Marshall Chess demanded to be arrested with me. I’ve got to give that to Mick.’
It happened that in Boston that day, police were dealing with unrest from the city’s Puerto Rican community, so the mayor of Boston – wary of more trouble if the Stones did didn’t go ahead – demanded that the detained party were released. The episode meant that the Stones were hours late for their own show – luckily for them, Wonder carried on playing after his support slot, keeping the audience placated while Jagger and Richards raced across the city to the show.
The tour ended with four shows at Madison Square Garden, New York City, from 24-26 July. Jagger turned 29 on the final night, and was given a cake and giant panda toy on stage. He ended the show by throwing custard pies into the face of his bandmates.
Afterwards, there was a party thrown by Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun at the presitigous St Regis hotel, where entertainment was provided by Muddy Waters and Count Basie and guests included Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol.
Journalist Robert Greenfield wrote, ‘That party makes Truman Capote’s Black And White Ball look like small potatoes. That is the ultimate New York Party… He must have spent as much money on them in New York as they made at the Garden that night.’
Weeks after the tour that changed rock’n’roll forever, a burnt-out Jagger was in reflective mood, ‘When I’m 33, I’ll quit. That's the time when a man has to do something else. I can’t say what it will definitely be. It’s still in the back of my head, but it won’t be in show-business.
'I don’t want to be a rock star all by life. I couldn’t bear to end up like Elvis PRESLEY and sing in Las Vegas with all those housewives and old ladies coming in with their handbags. It’s really sick.’ All these years later, he’s still going.
