The Rolling Stones Tour History

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List of the Rolling Stones concert tours

The Rolling Stones concert at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula, Montana on 4 October 2006 WaGriz RollingStones.jpg

Since forming in 1962, the English rock band the Rolling Stones have performed more than two thousand concerts around the world, [1] becoming one of the world's most popular live music attractions in the process. The Stones' first tour in their home country was in September 1963 and their first American tour began in June 1964. In their early years of performing, the band would undertake numerous short tours of the United Kingdom and North America, playing in small- and medium-size venues to audiences composed largely of screaming girls. As time moved on, their audience base expanded (in terms of both size and diversity) and they would increasingly favour larger arenas and stadiums. For many years, the group would choose to play North America, Continental Europe , and the United Kingdom on a three-year rotating cycle. [ citation needed ]

Concert tour chronology

Many audio recordings exist of Rolling Stones concerts, both official and unofficial. Seventeen official concert albums (eighteen in the US) have been released by the band, 6 of which were previously unreleased concert recordings released from 2011–2012, including the highly bootlegged Brussels Affair . Several of their concerts have also been filmed and released under a variety of titles, such as The Stones in the Park which records the band's performance at Hyde Park in 1969 on the festival of the same name . [ citation needed ]

Advertisement for their 1st American Tour 1965 Stones ad 1965.JPG

The most famous and heavily documented of all the band's concerts was the Altamont Free Concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1969, the final show of their American Tour 1969 . For this concert, the biker gang Hells Angels provided security, which resulted in a fan, Meredith Hunter , being stabbed and beaten to death by the Angels after he drew a firearm. [2] Part of the tour and the Altamont concert were documented in Albert and David Maysles ' film Gimme Shelter . As a response to the growing popularity of bootleg recordings , the album Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! (UK 1; US 6) was released in 1970; it was declared by critic Lester Bangs to be the best live album ever. [3]

The biggest concert the band gave was in Rio de Janeiro , Brazil, part of the A Bigger Bang Tour , in 2006. The second largest was in 2016, when the band played for the first time in Cuba, during their América Latina Olé tour. An estimated 1.2 million fans, more than half of the population of Havana, saw the Rolling Stones whose music had been banned by the Cuban regime until only nine years before the concert. A live album and film, The Rolling Stones: Havana Moon , were released in 2016.

In bold , the tours which, when completed, became the highest-grossing of all time . [6]

  • List of highest-grossing concert tours
  • List of highest-grossing live music artists

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The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in London in 1962. Active across seven decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the rock era. In the early 1960s, the band pioneered the gritty, rhythmically driven sound that came to define hard rock. Their first stable line-up consisted of vocalist Mick Jagger, guitarist Keith Richards, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts. During their early years, Jones was the primary leader of the band. After Andrew Loog Oldham became the group's manager in 1963, he encouraged them to write their own songs. The Jagger–Richards partnership became the band's primary songwriting and creative force.

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Mathis James Reed was an American blues musician and songwriter. His particular style of electric blues was popular with a wide variety of audiences. Reed's songs such as "Honest I Do" (1957), "Baby What You Want Me to Do" (1960), "Big Boss Man" (1961), and "Bright Lights, Big City" (1961) appeared on both Billboard magazine's R&B and Hot 100 singles charts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jumpin' Jack Flash</span> 1968 single by the Rolling Stones

" Jumpin' Jack Flash " is a song by the English rock band the Rolling Stones, released as a non-album single in 1968. Called "supernatural Delta blues by way of Swinging London" by Rolling Stone magazine, the song was perceived by some as the band's return to their blues roots after the baroque pop and psychedelia heard on their preceding albums Aftermath (1966), Between the Buttons (1967) and especially Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967). One of the group's most popular and recognisable songs, it has been featured in films and covered by numerous performers, notably Thelma Houston, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Peter Frampton, Johnny Winter, Leon Russell and Alex Chilton. To date, it is the band's most-performed song; they have played it over 1,100 times in concert.

<i>Cocksucker Blues</i> Unreleased American documentary film

Cocksucker Blues is an unreleased documentary film directed by the still photographer Robert Frank chronicling The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972 in support of their album Exile on Main St.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mick Taylor</span> British guitarist, former member of the Rolling Stones (born 1949)

Michael Kevin Taylor is an English guitarist, best known as a former member of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (1967–1969) and the Rolling Stones (1969–1974). As a member of the Stones, he appeared on Let It Bleed (1969), Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert (1970), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile on Main St. (1972), Goats Head Soup (1973) and It's Only Rock 'n Roll (1974).

<i>Sticky Fingers</i> 1971 studio album by the Rolling Stones

Sticky Fingers is a studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. It was released on 23 April 1971 on the Rolling Stones' new label, Rolling Stones Records. The Rolling Stones had been contracted by Decca Records and London Records in the UK and the US since 1963. On this album, Mick Taylor made his second full-length appearance on a Rolling Stones album. It was the first studio album without Brian Jones, who died two years earlier. The original cover artwork, conceived by Andy Warhol and photographed and designed by members of his art collective, the Factory, showed a picture of a man in tight jeans, and had a working zip that opened to reveal underwear fabric. The cover was expensive to produce and damaged the vinyl record, so the size of the zipper adjustment was made by John Kosh at ABKCO records. Later re-issues featured just the outer photograph of the jeans.

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<i>Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!</i> 1970 live album by the Rolling Stones

Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!: The Rolling Stones in Concert is the second live album by the Rolling Stones, released on 4 September 1970 on Decca Records in the UK and on London Records in the United States. It was recorded in New York City and Baltimore in November 1969 prior to the release of Let It Bleed . It is the first live album to reach number 1 in the UK. It was reported to have been issued in response to the well-known bootleg Live'r Than You'll Ever Be . This was also the band's final release under the Decca record label and not under its own label Rolling Stones Records.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Honky Tonk Women</span> 1969 single by the Rolling Stones

" Honky Tonk Women " is a song by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. It was released as a non-album single on 4 July 1969 in the United Kingdom, and a week later in the United States. It topped the charts in both nations. The song was on Rolling Stone ' s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972</span> 1972 concert tour by the Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972 , also known as the "Stones Touring Party", shortened to S.T.P., was a much-publicized and much-written-about concert tour of the United States and Canada in June and July 1972 by the Rolling Stones. Constituting the band's first performances in the United States following the Altamont Free Concert in December 1969, critic Dave Marsh would later write that the tour was "part of rock and roll legend" and one of the "benchmarks of an era."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Rolling Stones American Tour 1969</span> 1969 concert tour by the Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones' 1969 Tour of the United States took place in November 1969. With Ike & Tina Turner, Terry Reid, and B.B. King as the supporting acts, rock critic Robert Christgau called it "history's first mythic rock and roll tour", while rock critic Dave Marsh wrote that the tour was "part of rock and roll legend" and one of the "benchmarks of an era." In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine ranked the tour among The 50 Greatest Concerts of the Last 50 Years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Rolling Stones US Tour 1978</span> 1978 concert tour by the Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones' US Tour 1978 was a concert tour of the United States that took place during June and July 1978, immediately following the release of the group's 1978 album Some Girls . Like the 1972 and 1975 U.S. tours, Bill Graham was the tour promoter. One opening act was Peter Tosh, who was sometimes joined by Mick Jagger for their duet "Don't Look Back". The Outlaws backed up Peter Tosh. Another act opening that day was Etta James, famous for her classic song "At Last".

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Rolling Stones UK Tour 1971</span> 1971 concert tour by the Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones' 1971 UK Tour was a brief concert tour of England and Scotland that took place over three weeks in March 1971.

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Live'r Than You'll Ever Be is a bootleg recording of the Rolling Stones' concert in Oakland, California, from 9 November 1969. It was one of the first live rock music bootlegs and was made notorious as a document of their 1969 tour of the United States. The popularity of the bootleg forced the Stones' labels Decca Records in the UK, and London Records in the US, to release the live album Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert in 1970. Live'r is also one of the earliest commercial bootleg recordings in rock history, released in December 1969, just two months after the Beatles' Kum Back and five months after Bob Dylan's Great White Wonder . Like the two earlier records, Live'r ' s outer sleeve is plain white, with its name stamped on in ink.

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" Little Queenie " is a song written and recorded by Chuck Berry. Released in March 1959 as a double A-side single with "Almost Grown", it was included on Chuck Berry Is on Top (1959), Berry's first compilation album. He performed the song in the movies Go, Johnny Go! (1959) and Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll (1987). One year earlier, Berry had released "Run Rudolph Run", a Christmas song with the same melody.

<i>Live from A&R Studios</i> 2016 live album by the Allman Brothers Band

Live from A&R Studios is an album by the Allman Brothers Band. It was recorded on August 26, 1971, at A&R Studios in New York City for a live radio broadcast. It was released on April 1, 2016.

  • ↑ Burks, John, "Rock & Roll's Worst Day: The aftermath of Altamont" , Rolling Stone , 1970-02-07, URL retrieved 18 April 2007
  • ↑ Bangs, Lester. "The Rolling Stones: Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out" Archived 30 November 2006 at the Wayback Machine . Rolling Stone . 12 November 1970 (accessed 28 April 2007)
  • ↑ "Blues before sunrise – Marquee Club, 165 Oxford St, London W1D →2JW" . stonesexhibitionism.com . July 2016 . Retrieved 13 July 2016 .
  • ↑ "12th July 1962" . rollingstones.com . July 2016. Archived from the original on 19 June 2015 . Retrieved 13 July 2016 .
  • ↑ The Rolling Stones' 12 July 1962 debut show 14-song setlist was as follows: Kansas City (Wilbert Harrison cover); Honey What's Wrong (Bully Fury cover); Confessin' The Blues (Chuck Berry cover); Bright Lights, Big City (Jimmy Reed cover); Dusty My Blues (Elmore James cover); Down The Road Apiece (Chuck Berry cover); I Wanna Love You (Charles Smith cover), I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man (Muddy Waters cover); Back In The U.S.A. (Chuck Berry cover); Kind Of Lonesome (Jimmy Reed cover); Blues Before Sunrise (Elmore James cover); Big Boss Man (Jimmy Reed cover); Don't Stay Out All Night (Billy Boy Arnold cover); Happy Home (Elmore James cover). The line-up was: Mick, Keith, Brian, Stu, and Dick, but no drummer. [4] [5]

Works cited

  • Carr, Roy . The Rolling Stones: An Illustrated Record . Harmony Books, 1976. ISBN   0-517-52641-7
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Ultimate Classic Rock

The History of the Rolling Stones’ Outrageous Tour Announcements

In early 1975, rumors were starting to spread that the Rolling Stones  were about to announce a massive North and South American tour through summer and fall. A news conference had been scheduled on May 1 at a hotel located on Fifth Avenue right next to Washington Square Park. However, there was no press conference that day.

While journalists huddled inside the hotel, waiting for the Stones and getting out of the rain on a typically sweltering, muggy early summer day in New York, a rumbling was heard outside. And then screams. The writers and photographers rushed out to see what was happening, and then they realized what was causing what by now had become near-chaos in the streets.

There they were, the Rolling Stones (along with keyboardist Billy Preston) on the back of a flatbed truck performing a raucous and wonderfully sloppy version of "Brown Sugar."

At the end of the eight-minute performance, Mick Jagger , clad in blue jeans, white T-shirt and black leather jacket, reached into a plastic garbage pail and began tossing out flyers which contained all the tour dates. People clamored for the precious pieces of paper as they floated to the sidewalk.

That is how the world learned where the Rolling Stones would be playing and when. (And yes, there was much discussion after the announcement about whether or not this would be the final Stones tour given the age of the band members at that point. After all, Jagger would turn all of 32 years old in July of that year).

The media had been had. But in tricking them, the Stones had pulled off one of the great promotional tour announcements, if not the greatest in history. Supposedly, the idea came from drummer Charlie Watts , who remembered that jazz bands up in Harlem used to ride around during the day performing on the backs of trucks in order to promote that evening's concert. Little did Watts know that he created a new tour announcement standard for the band that they would try to one-up over the years.

As we'll see, since then, the Rolling Stones have been inventive and even ingenious when it comes to letting the world know that they are about to become ours again, at least for a summer or so. But whether or not anything will ever come close to topping what they executed on that dank, drizzly but ultimately dazzling May Day 1975, will certainly be up for discussion.

1989 - Steel Wheels Tour Announcement:

In August 1989, to announce what essentially was a comeback tour that point, the Stones took to the rails. Steel Wheels would be the first Rolling Stones album since 1986, and to help promote the supporting tour, the group appeared by antique caboose – pulling up and New York City's Grand Central Station to field questions from more than 300 members of the media in attendance. As Jagger said that day: "I don't see it as a retrospective or a farewell or any thing like that. It's the Rolling Stones in 1989.” The band also provided short sample of their upcoming single, "Mixed Emotions," with Mick Jagger holding his microphone up to a boombox the band had brought along.

1994 - Voodoo Lounge Tour Announcement:

In May 1994, the band chose water as their mode of tour announcement, cruising by boat from the Manhattan docks at West 79th Street to Pier 60 at West 19th Street to announce their Voodoo Lounge tour. This would be the first time that bassist Bill Wyman would not be along for the ride, replaced by Darryl Jones.

In somewhat tamer fashion, August 1997 saw the band arriving by red Cadillac convertible under the Brooklyn Bridge for the announcement of their Bridges to Babylon tour in support of the album by the same name.

2002 - 'Tip of the Tongue' Tour Announcement:

Sensing that maybe the last couple of tour announcements had been too tame, in 2002 the Stones got back in stride with a spectacular entrance into New York City's Van Cortland Park, arriving in a dazzling blimp emblazoned with their famed tongue logo.

Interestingly, the band has always made these announcements in New York City – and 2005 was no different. Maybe because it had been eight years since the last new album, the Rolling Stones didn't just do a news conference at the Julliard School in New York to announce the Bigger Bang tour on May 10, they also performed a mini concert. Once more, just like back in 1975, New Yorkers were treated to a free if slightly less spontaneous performance by the "greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world."

Watch 2005's Bigger Bang Tour Announcement

And that would be that for big, splashy tour announcements – at least as far as in-person events and spontaneous performances. As they prepared to hit the road for more recent tours like "50 and Counting," the Rolling Stones relied almost exclusively on social media to tease, hype and spread the word. Times have obviously changed in terms of how a tour is promoted. Still, we can fondly remember how this legendary band often went the extra mile to give us the satisfaction we wanted.

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Gallery Credit: Bryan Wawzenek

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Top 7 Iconic Moments from The Rolling Stones’ Tours

by Thom Donovan October 22, 2023, 10:15 am

A rolling stone gathers no moss . A proverb becomes a Muddy Waters song. Then the Muddy Waters song is picked to name a young band in London. 

Videos by American Songwriter

You can’t call a band The Rolling Stones and not hit the road. The Stones have logged many miles in six decades. Seven iconic moments from The Rolling Stones tours stand out in this legendary band’s long career. Dedicated to Charlie Watts. 

1. Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, 1964

In 1964 The Rolling Stones had just begun their second U.S. tour. On October 29, they performed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Dubbed the T.A.M.I. Show, the concert for Teen Age Music International (or Teenage Awards Music International on some posters) featured some of the biggest names in rock ’n’ roll and R&B. 

The Rolling Stones shared the bill with James Brown, Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, and others. Free tickets were given away to more than 2,500 teenage fans. James Brown was scheduled to headline but was replaced by The Rolling Stones on the day of the show. Keith Richards lamented going on after James Brown. Richards said it was the worst mistake of the band’s career as Brown delivered an electric performance. 

The British Invasion was well underway in the U.S. and The Rolling Stones were one of the bands leading the takeover of popular culture in America. 

[RELATED: The Rolling Stones Play Surprise NYC Show, with Guest Lady Gaga, to Celebrate New Album’s Release; See Photos]

2. Hyde Park, 1969

The Stones played a free show in Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. The Stones hadn’t performed in more than two years and this concert was the first with their new guitarist Mick Taylor. Taylor had replaced the band’s founder, Brian Jones, who was let go from the band a month earlier.

Circumstances around the concert changed when Jones was found dead two days before the Hyde Park show. The Stones decided they must continue. Mick Jagger read Percy B. Shelley’s Adonais —an elegy for Romantic English poet John Keats—in tribute to Jones. White butterflies were released after Jagger’s recital.

It wasn’t to be one of The Stones’ finest moments. Reeling from Jones’s death, they struggled through the set, fighting out-of-tune guitars. Mick Jagger’s usual energy was missing and his voice sounded weak according to critics at the time. Keith Richards said the band was out of practice after two years away from the stage.

A massive crowd had gathered for the show—estimated between 250,000 and 500,000 people.

Regardless of the lackluster performance, the Hyde Park concert was pivotal for The Rolling Stones because it’s how the band found the strength to carry on. 

3. Altamont Speedway Free Festival, 1969

Remembered as a violent and tragic event, The Rolling Stones headlined a free festival at the Altamont Speedway outside of Tracy, California. An estimated 300,000 people arrived to watch The Stones along with Santana; Jefferson Airplane; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; and the Grateful Dead. 

Hells Angels were brought in for security which proved to be fateful when violence erupted. As each act took the stage, tension grew between the crowd and the Hells Angels. The Grateful Dead chose not to play due to the increasing violence. 

When The Rolling Stones concert began, a fan named Meredith Hunter approached the stage and was beaten back by the Hells Angels. Hunter returned with a gun only to be stabbed and beaten to death. He was only 18 years old. 

The free festival was a catastrophic event of violence and death. Many fans were injured, cars either stolen or wrecked, a drug-induced drowning in a nearby canal, and two additional accidental deaths marked one of the most tragic concerts in history.

[RELATED: 3 Movies Every Fan of The Rolling Stones Should See]

4. The Marquee Club, 1971

One month before the release of Sticky Fingers , The Rolling Stones played the Marquee Club in London. A rare club date for the band, the intimate setting was used to debut new songs. 

Rock royalty showed up to watch the gig, including Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. A camera crew was brought in to film the show. The film documents Mick Taylor’s influence on the band. The Stones ripped through a new song called “Brown Sugar,” now a classic.  

5. Madison Square Garden, 1972

Returning to tour the U.S. for the first time since the Altamont tragedy, The Rolling Stones ended the run with three nights at Madison Square Garden in New York. At the venue, Dick Cavett interviewed the band for his show on ABC. Cavett’s program aired performances of “Brown Sugar” and “Street Fighting Man.” Cavett, prior to airing the performances, tells his audience not to be concerned about the frenzy in the crowd, it’s only excitement and not a riot. 

[RELATED: Rolling Stones Guitarist Keith Richards Says He Misses Late Drummer Charlie Watts “Every Day”]

6. Some Girls: Live In Texas, 1978

The concert film, recorded July 18, 1978, at Will Rogers Auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas, sees The Stones at the height of their live powers. Out promoting their album, Some Girls , the band gives an energetic performance in front of 25,000 fans.

Ronnie Wood was made an official member in 1975, and the chemistry between him and Keith Richards is captured on 16mm film. New songs “Beast of Burden” and “Shattered” hold up with classics like “Honky Tonk Women” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

7. The Checkerboard Lounge, 1981

A legendary band performs with their idol on the South Side of Chicago on November 22, 1981. The Rolling Stones joined Muddy Waters onstage at the Checkerboard Lounge performing “Baby Please Don’t Go,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “Mannish Boy.” It was the only time The Rolling Stones performed live with Muddy Waters. 

The performance was thankfully recorded and released as a concert video and live album, mixed by the legendary Bob Clearmountain.

Brian Jones named the band after the song “Rollin’ Stone,” recorded by Muddy Waters in 1950. Thirty-one years later The Rolling Stones traveled full circle. 

Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images

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  • Teaser Tag: Music & Money

“Stones Gather Dollars” 1989-2008

October 1989 edition of Forbes business magazine featuring Mick Jagger & Keith Richards among the world's 'highest paid entertainers'.

In the feature story, Forbes writer Peter Newcomb provided a detailed look at what the Stones were then up to, and by way of their experience, a revealing look at the rock ‘n roll business on its way to the 1990s.

The Stones, even then, were a “senior” rock ‘n roll group, having risen to fame, along with the Beatles, a good 25 years earlier in the 1960s. Yet at this point in their lives and careers, they still had another 20 years of performing ahead. But in the late 1980s when Forbes caught up with them, they were at the beginning of a series of live concerts called the “Steel Wheels Tour,” a tour launched to coincide with a new album, also titled Steel Wheels . This tour, however, also presaged a new era in the business of rock ‘n roll, and specifically the big business of concert touring.

     In 1988, a Canadian promoter named Michael Cohl had guaranteed the Stones a take of $70 million for the tour.  The math went something like this: the tour would draw 3 million people in just under 60 locations.  At about $30 a ticket, a $90 million gate would be generated, with 40 percent paid to the stadium owners and local promoters, leaving 60 percent — or more than $50 million — to the Stones and the tour promoter.  Tour-related merchandise, including T-shirts, jackets, and other paraphernalia, would boost the take to the guaranteed $70 million.  In fact this tour, and its related business, would generate considerably more than $70 million.

Macy’s, Bud & Beyond

     The Stones had also made arrangements to sell tour-related material not only at the concert sites, but also at department stores such as Macy’s, J. C. Penney, and Marshall Field.  In some of these stores, “Rolling Stones boutiques” offered a full line of products stamped with the Steel Wheels logo: $5 bandanas, sweatshirts, skateboards, $450 bomber jackets, and two lines of Converse high-top sneakers.  There were also pay-per-view TV rights in the offing at $6-to-$7 million, not including foreign TV rights.  A tour-related movie and a two-hour TV special were being planned as well.  “We never dreamed there was any money when we started this thing. It was idealism. It was not knowing what else to do with your life. But then, suddenly, the impossible happened.”               – Keith Richards, 1989  And finally, Anheuser-Busch paid close to $6 million for rights to make its Budweiser beer the tour sponsor.  All of this meant that the Stones would gross about $90 million for the year.

Budweiser was a Steel Wheels sponsor.

Business Savvy

     At the time of the Steel Wheels Tour in 1989, the Rolling Stones were already pretty savvy business people.  Since 1971, they had secured the services of a former London merchant banker named Rupert Zu Loewenstein, who carries an old Bavarian title of “Prince” and became their financial advisor.  The Stones by then were also pretty capable when negotiating recording deals.  In 1985 they signed a distribution agreement with CBS Records that reportedly gave the band $25 million for four albums and the rights to all the old Rolling Stones catalog from Atlantic.  Walter Yetnikoff, the CBS record chief who negotiated with Jagger, said that “Mick was very astute,” lauding him as a guy who could think on his feet, capable of figuring royalty and tax rates in his head.  Jagger had studied macroeconomics at the London School of Economics, which he would later say was mostly economic history.

     But the Stones weren’t always on top of their game economically.  In fact, in the early years, they lost a good deal of money making bad deals.  During the mid-1960s, when the Stones first broke out, they had sold some ten million singles, including their monster 1965-66 hit “Satisfaction.”  They also sold some five million albums in the early years.  Still, they were not making money. “When we first started out, there wasn’t really any money in rock ‘n roll. There wasn’t a touring industry; it didn’t even exist….”                           – Mick Jagger   “When we first started out, there wasn’t really any money in rock ‘n roll,” Jagger explained to Fortune magazine in 2002.  “There wasn’t a touring industry; it didn’t even exist.  Obviously there was somebody maybe who made money, but it certainly wasn’t the act. …[E]ven if you were very successful, you got paid nothing.”  The Stones also suffered from lack of negotiating experience.  “I’ll never forget the deals I did in the ’60s, which were just terrible,” Jagger would later say .   In 1965, Allen Klein, a New York manager, helped the Stone’s negotiate a new contract with Decca records and also helped the group win their first million-dollar payday.  But Allen Klein also helped himself.  His company, ABKCO, still retains the rights to the Stones’ early songs from the 1960s through 1971 — a sore point with the Stones, who parted ways with Klein in the early 1970s.  Since then, the Stones have been very much a business-minded rock ‘n roll group, attentive to everything from royalty rates to tax policy.  But by the time of their 1989 Steel Wheels tour, their business savvy had reached a new level and demand for their music was as strong as ever.

Steel Wheels Success

Just as the Rolling Stones were beginning their North America 'Steel Wheels' tour in 1989, they appeared on the cover of Time magazine, September 4th, 1989. Click for copy.

Tour Model Honed

     Yet 1989’s Steel Wheels was just the beginning for the Rolling Stones.  More gate-busting tours would follow over the next two decades.  But Steel Wheels became the model.  Its promoter, Canadian Michael Cohl, was hired permanently by the Stones to become their full-time tour manager.  With each subsequent tour, the 1989 experience was honed, costs were pared, and even bigger paydays resulted. 

     The Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour of 1994-95 grossed nearly $370 million worldwide.  In 1997-1999, the Bridges to Babylon/No Security Tour grossed more than $390 million, attracting some 5.6 million people worldwide.  By 2002, Fortune magazine estimated that between 1989 and 2002, the Stones pulled in about $1.5 billion, including tours and other business, an amount that exceeded what other rock ‘n roll competitors did in that same period, whether U-2, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, or Bruce Springsteen.  Nor did the Rolling Stones’ touring end in 2002.  Their Forty Licks world tour of 2002-2003 played to an audience of 1 million, generating $200 million over 32 show dates in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the Far East.  In 2005, they released a studio album, A Bigger Bang , followed by another tour — this one the highest-grossing tour in history, pulling in $558 million between the fall 2005 and late August 2007, according to Billboard .

     The Stone’s success with touring and their tour-related businesses no doubt had an impact on other “retired” rockers who in recent years decided to get back in the game and on the road again.  But other economic factors were also at work by the late 1990s.  The traditional music sales model was changing dramatically with the internet and MP3 players, as album and CD sales began to plummet.  The live-performance business became a much more important source of income for artists, old and new.  Still, the Stones appear to have made a special category all their own.

     Fortune magazine’s Andy Serwer, writing in September 2002 on why the Stone’s continued their appeal way beyond their prime hit-producing years, explained:

“…Subjectively, the Rolling Stones sound pretty damn good, even after all these years.  And objectively, if they’re such has-beens, then how do you explain the band’s phenomenal commercial success over the past decade? No, they aren’t writing groundbreaking songs anymore — in fact they haven’t really recorded any new material of note in 20 years — but we sure are listening to their old stuff.  A lot.  And buying concert tickets.  Millions and millions of them.  And that’s the wrinkle here. Even though the Stones have been in what you might call a creatively fallow period, we want to hear them more than ever.  Couple that with the fact that they have perfected their business model, and it’s easy to understand why they are such an astounding money-making machine.”

Although not turning out hits at the rate they did in the 1960s & ‘70s, the Rolling Stones in the 1990s & 2000s used concert filming & DVDs to package their music in a new way as in 1995's Voodoo Lounge DVD.

Songwriting, Ads & Film

     Beyond touring and DVDs, there have also been other business deals and income streams to help fill the Stones’ coffers.  Songwriting royalties continue to flow to Jagger and Richards for the 200 or so songs they have jointly written.  “Music publishing is more profitable to the artist than recording,” Jagger explained to Fortune magazine in 2002.  “It’s just tradition.  There’s no rhyme or reason.  The people who wrote songs were probably better businesspeople than the people who sang them were.  You go back to George Gershwin and his contemporaries — they probably negotiated better deals, and they became the norm of the business.  So if you wrote a song, you got half of it, and the other half went to your publisher.  That’s the model for writing.”  So anytime one of the Jagger/Richards songs is played on the radio or any other public venue, they get a piece of the action.

In 1995, Bill Gates made a multi-million-dollar deal to use the Rolling Stones’ 1981 song ‘Start Me Up’ as the theme song in an advertising campaign to launch & sell Microsoft’s new computer software.

     Ray Gmeiner, a vice president at Virgin Records has stated that “The Rolling Stones are a unique brand because they’ve taken the business side of rock and roll to the level that few if any other bands have.”  Add Roger Blackwell and Tina Stephan in their 2004 book, Brands That Rock :  “The Rolling Stones organization is a well-oiled, money making machine, and to say it resembles anything less than a Fortune 500 firm would be unjust…”

Still Rocking

The Rolling Stones, 2005.

     Their business empire aside, however, at the center of the Rolling Stones is their music.  Millions of fans young and old still enjoy that music, and will no doubt continue to enjoy it for many years into the future.  And for the Stones too, the music is key.  They don’t really need to be touring; they make money standing still.  In a 1995 interview with Jan Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine, Jagger told Wenner that love of the blues, love of rock music, and love of performing that music was at the center of what he did.  And Keith Richards has said much the same.  “This whole thing runs on passion,” Richards told Fortune in 2002.  “Even though we don’t talk about it much ourselves, it’s almost a sort of quest or mission.”  New York Times reporter Stephen Holden recently wrote in an April 2008 review of Martin Scorcese’s documentary featuring Stone’s concerts, “…[T]he Rolling Stones appear supremely alive inside their giant, self-created rock ‘n roll machine. The sheer pleasure of making music that keens and growls like a pack of ravenous alley cats is obviously what keeps them going.  Why should they ever stop?”

Other stories on the Rolling Stones at this website include: “Paint It Black” (song history & subsequent uses); “Start Me Up” (use of song by Microsoft as Windows 95 theme song), “…No Satisfaction” (1966 song that marked a kind of cultural divide at the time); and, “Shine A Light” (Martin Scorsese / Rolling Stones film trailer). Additional stories on music history, song profiles, and artist biography can be found at the “Annals of Music” category page. Thanks for visiting – and if you like what you find here, please make a donation to help support the research and writing at this website . Thank you. – Jack Doyle

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Date Posted:   3 December 2008 Last Update:   9 July 2017 Comments to: [email protected]

Article Citation: Jack Doyle, “Stones Gather Dollars, 1989-2008,” PopHistoryDig.com , December 3, 2008.

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Rolling Stones at Amazon.com …

Sources, Links & Additional Information

Poster for 2008 Martin Scorsese film of Rolling Stones’ concerts.

Peter Newcomb, “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” Forbes , October 2, 1989.

Constance L. Hays, “2 Generations of Fans Enjoy Rolling Stones’ Live Legacy,” New York Times , October 11, 1989.

Tom Harrison – Music Critic, “Keith Richards Sets The Tone,” The Vancouver Province , November 1, 1989.

Michiko Kakutani, Pop View, “Troubadours Of Fickle Time And Its Passing,” New York Times , September 4, 1994.

Richard Harrington, “That Old Jagger Edge; At RFK, the Stones Rock and Roll On,” Washington Post , August 2, 1994, p. F-1.

“Microsoft Throws Stones Into Its Windows 95 Ads,” New York Times , August 18, 1995.

David Segal, “With Windows 95’s Debut, Microsoft Scales Heights of Hype,” Washington Post , Thursday, August 24, 1995, p. A-14.

Jann Wenner, “ Jagger Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interview ,” Rolling Stone , December 14, 1995.

Michiko Kakutani, “Heart of Stones,” New York Times Magazine , October 12, 1997.

Richard Harrington, “Smooth Stones Roll Out The Oldies,” Washington Post , October 24, 1997, p. D-1.

Kelefa Sanneh, “Rolling Stones Revel in the Act of Survival,” New York Times , September 27, 2002.

Andy Serwer and associates Julia Boorstin and Ann Harrington, “Inside the Rolling Stones Inc.,” Fortune , September 30, 2002.

“A Conversation With Mick Jagger,” The Charlie Rose Show , Thursday, November 14, 2002

Roger Blackwell and Tina Stephan, Brands That Rock, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004.

Jon Pareles, “Swaggering Past 60, Unrepentant,” New York Times , August 23, 2005.

J. Freedom du Lac, “Time on Their Side; The Rolling Stones, Still Rocking Like It’s 1995, or 1965,” Washington Post , October 4, 2005, p. C-1.

The Rolling Stones, No. 4, “The Forbes Celebrity 100,” Forbes , June 14, 2007.

Stephen Holden, “Only Rock ‘N’ Roll, but They’re Still at It,” New York Times, April 4, 2008.

“ The Rolling Stones ” and “ Shine a Light ,” Wikipedia.org , 2008.

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Seaside streets & Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 'filling up' with hundreds of thousands of onlookers & fans during the evening prior to Rolling Stones’ concert, February 2006.

The Pop History Dig is a website offering historical and topical stories on business, politics, and popular culture.

Moscow, Russia

stones tours history

See the official Rolling Stones web site in Russia , also having info in English!

How "the rolling stones" solve the problem of unemployment in moscow, their own uncompetence, their own openess, thanks to constantin preobrazhensky (moscow) for supplying info about the web site and the stones show in russia. also thanks to leonid ulitsky , italy, for info..

stones tours history

Things To Do | The Rolling Stones in Chicago: A timeline of…

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Things to do | the rolling stones in chicago: a timeline of the band’s 55-year fascination with the city’s blues.

Author

The Rolling Stones’ fascination with Chicago predates the band, when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bonded as teenagers over their mutual interest in Chicago blues and Chess Records. Since then, they’ve performed and recorded in the city dozens of times. Here’s a timeline of some key moments in Stones-Chicago history.

June 10-11, 1964

The Rolling Stones record in the U.S. for the first time, at Chess Records studio in Chicago. They track a number of songs culled from the Chess catalog, including “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” The track was written by Muddy Waters, who much to the band’s delight happens to be in the studio the second day and helps them load in their gear. Engineer Ron Malo is the band’s gold standard for a recording engineer. “No one (in England) could get a really good funky American sound, which is what we were after,” Richards once said. Added bassist Bill Wyman: “He knew exactly what we wanted and got it almost instantly.” The Stones pay homage by recording an instrumental, “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” named after the address of Chess Records, which appeared on their “12 x 5” album later in the year. Between sessions, the band holds a “press conference” on a traffic island in the middle of Michigan Avenue, before they are booted to the sidewalk by a Chicago police officer who cheerily informs the visitors: “Get outta here or I’ll lock up the whole goddamned bunch.”

Rolling Stones in Chicago on June 10-11, 1964

Nov. 8, 1964

The Stones return to Chess Records to record more music. Richards unveils the guitar riff that would form the basis for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which would be finished the next year.

Nov. 15, 1964

The Stones play their first Chicago concert at the Arie Crown Theater, the final date of their second North American tour. Brian Jones, who had been sick and missed several earlier shows on the tour, returns to the lineup, joined by Jagger, Richards, Wyman, drummer Charlie Watts and keyboardist Ian Stewart. The Shangri-Las are the opening act.

May 9, 1965

On its third North American tour, the Stones visit the Arie Crown for a second time. As with its previous concerts, the set list is mostly covers of artists whose songs shaped the quintet’s sound — Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke, Willie Dixon — plus the Jagger-Richards top-10 hit “The Last Time.” The latter also has a Chicago connection, as it’s essentially a rewrite of the Staple Singers arrangement of the traditional gospel song “This May Be the Last Time.”

Nov. 28, 1965

The third Chicago concert at the Arie Crown in less than 13 months, this time with the band’s first No. 1 U.S. hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” closing the show.

July 10, 1966

Back at the Arie Crown on their fifth American tour, and for the first time Stones originals far exceed the number of covers in the set. The Jagger-Richards songs performed include “The Last Time,” “Paint it Black,” “Stupid Girl,” “Lady Jane,” “The Spider and the Fly,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” “Get Off My Cloud,” “19th Nervous Breakdown” and the encore of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” There is no sign of Jones on the stage, as he is out with an illness.

Nov. 16, 1969

The Stones play the International Amphitheatre as part of the band’s first U.S. tour in three years (a day before the band played two shows at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Three weeks later, the tour would end in tragedy at the Altamont Speedway in California, with an audience member being stabbed and beaten to death by Hells Angels members who had been hired by the Stones to provide security. But in Chicago, the Stones are in prime form, with their hero, Berry, as one of the opening acts. The band lineup for this tour includes guitarist Mick Taylor for the first time, as a replacement for Jones, who had died a few months earlier.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on Nov. 16, 1969

June 19-20, 1972

Three shows in two days at the International Amphitheatre, with Stevie Wonder as opening act. The set list brims with songs from the month-old “Exile on Main Street.” At least 25 concertgoers reportedly are arrested. The reviews are gushing: “They were famous; now they are a legend.”

July 23-24, 1975

Back-to-back shows at the Chicago Stadium. Taylor is out and Ronnie Wood in as guitarist, with guest musicians Billy Preston on keyboards and Ollie Brown on percussion. Jagger swings over the audience on a rope, a prelude to the bigger, more elaborate spectacles that Stones shows would become in future decades.

July 8, 1978

The Stones headline for the first time at Soldier Field. The stadium is filled on a steamy summer day with 80,000 fans, with opening acts Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Peter Tosh and Journey, featuring new vocalist Steve Perry. The Stones set list includes most of the songs on the quintet’s latest release, “Some Girls.” Later that night Jagger drops in on a Lefty Dizz set at Kingston Mines.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on July 8, 1978

July 9, 1978

Jagger, Richards, Watts and Wood join Muddy Waters on stage at the Quiet Knight.

Nov. 22, 1981

Amid a three-night sold-out stand at the Rosemont Horizon (now Allstate Arena), Jagger, Richards, Wood and Stewart join Waters on stage at the Checkerboard Lounge. Also jumping in are Chicago blues luminaries Buddy Guy, Junior Wells and Dizz.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on Nov. 22, 1981

Nov. 24, 1981

Another local blues musician, Sugar Blue, makes an appearance at the Horizon with the Stones to blow harmonica on “Miss You,” as he had on the 1978 studio version from the “Some Girls” album. Continuing the Stones tradition of strong opening acts, the Neville Brothers usher in the evening.

Sept. 8, 9, 11, 1989

After a rocky decade in which Jagger and Richards both make solo albums, the Stones reconnect for their biggest tour yet, including three straight sold-out shows at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wis. The core quintet is backed up by 12 additional musicians and singers. The capacity audience for the final show includes Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on Sept. 8, 9, 11, 1989

Sept. 11-12, 1994

After longtime bassist Wyman quits the band, Chicagoan Darryl Jones is his replacement and makes his hometown debut with the band at Soldier Field. Revenues top $4 million for the two sold-out shows.

Sept. 18, 1997

The Stones break up rehearsals for their upcoming stadium shows with a set at the Double Door. Tickets are $7 and the Stones play 13 songs, including Berry and Jimmy Reed covers.

Sept. 23, 25, 1997

Back to Soldier Field, and this time the take is $6 million to perform 48 songs over two nights.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on Sept. 23, 25, 1997

April 23, 1998

United Center acoustic mini-set includes a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Rolling Stones in Chicago on April 23, 1998

March 26 and April 12, 1999

Two dates weeks apart at the United Center.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on March 26 and April 12, 1999

Sept. 10, 13, 16, 2002

The Stones shake up the formula by playing shows at Soldier Field, Comiskey Park and the Aragon Ballroom. The latter boasts one of the Stones’ most adventurous set lists in decades, including deep cuts such as “Hand of Fate,” “Torn and Frayed” and “Worried About You.” The opener is Dr. John.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on Sept. 10, 13, 16, 2002

Sept. 10, 2005

Back at Soldier Field, this time with a top ticket price of $450! For the price, fans get a three-story stage that resembles a futuristic high-rise, with a set list largely made up of songs the band could’ve drawn up for a 1981 tour: “Start Me Up” to start it off, “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It)” to finish and “Brown Sugar,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Satisfaction,” “Shattered,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Bitch,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Tumbling Dice” and “Honky Tonk Women” in between.

Jan. 23, 25, 2006

Two more nights, same old songs at the United Center.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on Jan. 23, 25, 2006

May 28, 31, June 3, 2013

A three-night residency at the United Center pockets the Stones juggernaut $16 million in revenue, with the best seats going for $600. Ex-Stones guitarist Taylor joins for “Midnight Rambler” and ’60s crony Taj Mahal sings on the country standard “Six Days On the Road.”

Rolling Stones in Chicago on May 28, 31, June 3, 2013

April 15-July 30, 2017

“Exhibitionism,” the first major Stones exhibit, arrives at Navy Pier. It brings together 500 items spanning the band’s 50-year career, as well as replicas of the band’s first flat in London and one of its recording studios. The memorabilia includes the Epiphone guitar that Richards played at the first Stones sessions at Chess Studios in 1964.

Rolling Stones in Chicago on April 15-July 30, 2017

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Twitter @gregkot

Created by the Chicago Tribune Dataviz team. On Twitter @ChiTribGraphics

Sources: Chicago Tribune archives and reporting

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The 50 Greatest Concerts of the Last 50 Years

The list below was born out of some pretty serious arguments. Was Bruce Springsteen better in 1975 or 1978? When did Kanye hit his stride? Which was more awesome, “The Joshua Tree” or “Zoo TV”? The concerts and tours that made the final cut weren’t just huge spectacles, they deepened the power of rock & roll itself – from Neil Young thrashing out 20-minute jams with Crazy Horse to Beyoncé turning stadium glitz into a personal outpouring. “You’re almost levitating on the energy from the audience,” says Keith Richards. “And I miss it when I’m not doing it.” Here are the people who’ve done it best.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience Worldwide Tour

The Jimi Hendrix Experience (live at Golden Gate Park, June 25, 1967)

Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 debut album, Are You Experienced, established his genius. The 200-some shows he played to support the album assured his legend. Backed by his ecstatically indulgent English rhythm section — bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell — Hendrix did nothing short of liberate the electric guitar, turning each show into a pyrotechnic exploration. “I thought, ‘My God, this is like Buddy Guy on acid,’ ” Eric Clapton later recalled. For the U.S., the coming-out party was the Monterey Pop Festival, where Hendrix set his guitar ablaze, terrifying the fire marshal while leaving the crowd spellbound. As the Experience toured that year, they played alongside Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens in every type of venue, from theaters to biker bars. “We also did a graduation ball in Paris in March 1967, a really plush place,” Mitchell recalled. “There was an oompah band on before us, and they would not leave the stage. I remember one of our roadies, in a final act of desperation, pushing the trombonist’s slide back into his mouth – blood and teeth everywhere.” When the shows went right, however, Hendrix was a tour de force. His sense of showmanship went back to his years as a sideman with Little Richard; dressed in radiant psychedelic frills, he banged the neck of his guitar, bit its strings and played it behind his head. “With Jimi, it was a theater piece,” Soft Machine drummer and onetime Hendrix tourmate Robert Wyatt once observed. “The drama, the pace, the buildups and drops.” The peak Summer of Love moment came in early June, when the Experience played London. With the Beatles in the crowd, Hendrix opened with the title track from  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had been released just two days earlier. “1967 was the best year of my life,” he declared later. “I just wanted to play and play.”  Kory Grow

James Brown at Boston Garden

James Brown Boston Garden 1968

On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. In the aftermath, America burned. There were riots in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Chicago; Kansas City, Missouri; and other cities. In Boston, city leaders expected more violence to come. Amid this tension, James Brown, the most explosive African-American musician of the era, pulled off a miracle. Brown and his band were booked to play Boston Garden on April 5th. The city considered canceling all public events that night, but the concert’s promoter, local City Councilman Thomas Atkins, convinced Mayor Kevin White that calling off a show of that magnitude might lead to even more anger and violence. “If [his] concert had not occurred,” recalled local radio DJ James “Early” Bird, “we would have had the biggest problem in the history of Boston since the Tea Party.”

Frustrating to Brown was the decision to televise the show, a way of keeping people out of the streets that would also drive down ticket sales. “But he had an obligation to honor Dr. King,” says Brown’s saxophonist and bandleader Pee Wee Ellis, and after Brown obtained the fee he wanted, everything was set.

“The show went on just as it had in all the other places we had played,” says trombone player Fred Wesley. “It was a regular show.” Of course, in 1968, the “regular show” meant a display of raw energy and dynamic power unlike anything else in music. Dressed in a black suit, hair in a tight pompadour, Brown moved with lightning quickness, his screams rattling the rafters, as he drove the band through his hits. They did “I Got You (I Feel Good)” in a double-time blur, and “Cold Sweat” featured an incredible solo showcase for “funky drummer” Clyde Stubblefield.

Still, Wesley, who had only recently become a part of Brown’s band, remembers a palpable sense of fear among the band members, and tension in the arena: “We didn’t know if there was a war against black people, or if a race war was happening. As we got to the stage, we were still wary about what might happen.”

But what ended up impressing him most was what amazed him about James Brown every night: his ability to hold and command a crowd. As the set reached its climax during Brown’s dramatic “cape act,” young fans began rushing the stage, and white police officers ran in to restore order. Shoving ensued, and the moment of mayhem many had anticipated seemed to have finally arrived.

But Brown quickly interceded. “You’re not being fair to yourself and me or your race,” he told the crowd. “Now, are we together, or we ain’t?” Turning to Stubblefield, he ordered, “Hit the thing, man,” and the band launched into a furious version of “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me).” Brown was even joined onstage by Mayor White, whom he announced as a “swinging cat.” Brown exited the stage shaking hands with the people up front, as much like a political leader as a soul star.

In the weeks to come, requests for Brown to appear elsewhere poured in, including one to travel to Washington, D.C., to speak to rioters. In August that year, he’d release his monumental message record, “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.” “I was able to speak to the country during the crisis,” he later said, “and that was one of the things that meant the most to me.” Almost 50 years later, Ellis is still moved by the moment. “I’m proud to have been part of that,” he says. “I’m pleased that it came off the way that it did.” Jon Dolan

Big Brother and the Holding Company American Tour

Big Brother and the Holding Company

Like so much of Janis Joplin’s career, the tour to support Cheap Thrills, her 1968 album with Big Brother and the Holding Company, was a triumph wrought from chaos. On the eve of the tour, the ­singer announced she was leaving the band, leading to screaming fights with some of the musicians. Yet that very tension — combined with grueling album sessions that tightened what, as drummer Dave Getz admits, “wasn’t a tight band” — made for a riveting farewell. The combination of her wild-child rasp and Big Brother’s wailing blues rock proved transformative. “By the end of ’68,” says Getz, “I don’t think there was a singer in rock & roll who could touch her.” David Browne

Elvis Comeback Special

Elvis Comeback Special

“Elvis was hardly ever nervous,” says drummer D.J. Fontana, remembering the NBC special that relaunched Presley’s career after years in Hollywood. “But he was then.” The highlight: an intimate sit-down set with his band, Fontana and guitarist Scotty Moore, that was almost like catching Elvis at the Louisiana Hayride back in 1954. “Performing with Elvis was amazing,” remembers Darlene Love, who sang backup for Presley on the show, “because we didn’t really know what to expect from him.” K.G.

Cream Farewell Tour

Cream Fillmore 1968

Eric Clapton ended Cream in 1968 after only two years, burned out and sick of keeping the peace between bandmates Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. But even as they were breaking up, Cream pushed the boundaries. “It had nothing to do with lyrics or ideas,” said Clapton. “It was much deeper, purely musical.” At Madison Square Garden, they played a wild, nearly 20-minute “Spoonful.” At San Francisco’s Fillmore, they played under the venue’s psychedelic light shows as Clapton, Baker and Bruce soloed simultaneously. As Roger Waters, who saw them at the time, put it, “It was an astounding sight and an explosive sound.” K.G.

Johnny Cash at San Quentin Prison

Johnny Cash at San Quentin Prison

“I remember walking through two sets of iron gates, and when I heard them close, I thought, ‘Man, I hope we get back out of here,’ ” Johnny Cash’s guitarist Bob Wootton recalls of his visit to San Quentin prison on February 24th, 1969. San Quentin was (and remains) California’s oldest prison, as well as the largest death-row facility in the country.

That day, as Cash stood onstage in his usual black suit, he was greeted by a sight that might have frightened a different performer: 2,000 hollering, charged-up inmates. But Cash, who always felt a special connection to prisoners, seemed to realize the gravity of the moment. “John was very solemn that day,” Wootton says. “We all were. It reminds you how much you take for granted. John connected with [the prisoners] in a way I never saw him connect with another audience.”

Cash had played prisons before – including an earlier San Quentin gig and, famously, California’s Folsom Prison. His show at San Quentin in 1969 was a full-on revue featuring the Carter Family, the Statler Brothers and Carl Perkins, and was shot for British TV. He performed with steely intensity, when he wasn’t cracking jokes to his audience. In a sense, he became one of them.

Cash treated his set list more as a guide than as a hard-and-fast program, but ended up catering to the inmates with songs like “Starkville City Jail” and Bob Dylan’s “Wanted Man.” Cash also wrote a song for the occasion – the twangy, brooding “San Quentin.” Its first line – “San Quentin, you’ve been livin’ hell to me” – prompted hooting and cheering from the crowd. “One more time!” they called out. “All right,” Cash said. “Hey, before we do it, though, if any of the guards are still speakin’ to me, can I have a glass of water?” The crowd laughed, then booed the guard.

One of the show’s standout moments was “A Boy Named Sue,” which made its world premiere before everyone in the prison, including the band. “I didn’t even know he had the song,” drummer W.S. Holland says with a laugh. “Back then, we didn’t have monitors and couldn’t hear all that much onstage. John just started doing it. The first time I actually heard the song was [later] in the studio.”

“A Boy Named Sue” became a Number One country single and crossed over to the pop charts, clearing a path for greater success, much to Cash’s amusement. “I’ve always thought it was ironic that it was a prison concert, with me and the convicts getting along just as fellow rebels, outsiders and miscreants should,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “that pumped up my marketability to the point where ABC thought I was respectable enough to have a weekly network TV show.” K.G.

Ike and Tina Turner American Tour

Ike and Tina Turner American Tour

The Rolling Stones’ return to America in 1969, after three years away – a period that included Beggars Banquet and the death of guitarist Brian Jones – was what critic Robert Christgau described as “history’s first mythic rock & roll tour.” But on the 17-date spin through the States, time and again they were upstaged by their handpicked opening act, old friends Ike and Tina Turner and their combustible R&B revue.

The Stones met Ike and Tina among Phil Spector’s orbit in England. “I’d always see Mick in the wings,” Tina remembered of performances in the mid-Sixties. “I’d come out and watch him occasion­ally; they’d play music and Mick would beat the tambourine. He wasn’t dancing. And lo and behold, when he came to America, he was doing everything!” Jagger later admitted he “learned a lot of things from Tina.”

In the U.S., Ike and Tina won over a new audience with wild, sweat-drenched covers of the new rock & roll canon, including a brassy burst through the Beatles’ “Come To­gether” (“I said to Ike,” recalled Tina, “ ’Please, please let me do that song onstage’ ”). They spun through Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” and a high-octane version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” that, by 1971, would become their biggest hit. Their take on Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” garnered its share of attention too, thanks to an orgasmic bridge that eventually got even raunchier. “I don’t think it can go any further,” Tina said in 1971, “because, as they say in New York, it’s getting porn­ographic.”

At Madison Square Garden, Jop­lin herself stopped by to assist on “Land of 1,000 Dances.” By the tour’s end, writers couldn’t control their enthusiasm. “ Vogue said it best,” said Tina. “ ’They came to see Mick Jagger, but they saw Ike and Tina, and they’ve been comin’ ever since.'”  Christopher R. Weingarten

Led Zeppelin World Tour

Led Zeppelin World Tour

Before the private planes, mountains of cocaine and allegations of black magic, Led Zeppelin were four blokes tearing a path through America for the first time. They hit the U.S. in late December 1968, just before their debut LP hit shelves. “I remember pulling up to a theater and the marquee said, ‘Vanilla Fudge, Taj Mahal and support,’ ” Robert Plant said in 2005. “I thought, ‘Wow, here we are: support!’ ”

Everyone knew their name soon enough. A month in, they unleashed a four-hour set at the Boston Tea Party. “We’d played our usual one-hour set, using all the material from the first album,” John Paul Jones said. “The audience just wouldn’t let us offstage.” Over 168 shows that year, as they unveiled new songs like “Whole Lotta Love,” Zep’s live fury and future promise came into view. “This group could become one of the biggest bands in history,” Jones said. “I hope we don’t blow it.” Andy Greene

Black Sabbath American Tour

Black Sabbath 1970

When Black Sabbath landed at JFK Airport for their first U.S. tour, Ozzy Osbourne scrawled “Satanist” as his religion on the immigration form. Many who saw their shows – opening for the Faces, Alice Cooper and the James Gang – didn’t know what to make of the shaggy Brits. A turning point came at New York’s Fillmore East. “I tore my floor tom off the riser and threw it at the audience,” says drummer Bill Ward. “I was like, ‘Fucking move! Do something!’ Soon everyone was headbanging.” Relentless touring in Europe had turned Sabbath into a brutal assault force. “It was primal,” says Ward of the tour. “There’s a lower self that went onstage, and it was just dynamite.” A.G.

The Who at the University of Leeds

the who live at leeds

After 1969’s rock opera Tommy , the Who wanted to return to their raw roots with a live album. Pete Townshend hated the recordings they made on their U.S. tour so much he threw them onto a bonfire. But everything clicked back home in England, in front of 2,000 ravenous fans at the University of Leeds, where the band tore through 38 songs, including a nearly 15-minute “My Generation.” Townshend later called it “the greatest audience we’ve ever played to.” A.G.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse Winter American Tour

Neil Young and Crazy Horse Winter American Tour

In early 1970, Neil Young had finally become a star thanks to the huge success of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. During a quick break from that band and from recording his third solo LP, After the Gold Rush, Young decided to introduce his new fans to his other band, Crazy Horse – whose garage-rock thrash sounded the complete opposite of CSNY – on a run of clubs, theaters and the occasional junior-college auditorium. “When Neil plays with Crazy Horse, he goes into this other place and plays deep from inside,” says drummer Ralph Molina. “He becomes Neil Young, the real Neil Young.”

It was a sound no one had heard before. While other early jam bands like the Allman Brothers played with virtuosic professionalism, Crazy Horse produced raw chaos. Each night began with a brief solo acoustic set before Crazy Horse came onstage. Songs like “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” sometimes stretched to nearly 20 minutes, Young trading unhinged solos with guitarist Danny Whitten. “Danny had a strong musical presence, probably just as strong as Neil,” says bassist Billy Talbot. “We started doing songs longer, which Neil had never done before.”

In March, Bill Graham booked them at the Fillmore East for four shows in two nights, where they shared a bill with Miles Davis and the Steve Miller Band. Each night, Whitten sang “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” a song about scoring heroin, which he’d started using heavily around this time. One night backstage, Young wrote down the phrase “I’ve seen the needle and the damage done” on a sheet of paper. Within two years, Whitten was dead, and Young’s song about him, “The Needle and the Damage Done,” would appear on Harvest, the best-selling album of 1972. “It was such a loss,” said Young. “[It taught me] you can’t count on things. You just can’t take things for granted. Anything could go at any time.” A.G.

Elton John at the Troubadour

Elton John Doug Weston's Troubadour

When Elton John took the stage at Los Angeles’ Troubadour for the first night of his six-date residency, he was a little-known 23-year-old pop singer with thick glasses and greasy hair who had only recently changed his name from Reginald Kenneth Dwight. When the show was over, Elton was a sensation. The stakes couldn’t have been higher: His debut LP, which had come out that spring, wasn’t selling. After what he called a “crisis meeting” with his label, it sent him to the States. The label made sure to pack the 300-capacity club with big names like David Crosby, Graham Nash and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. “The second night, Leon Russell was in the front row, but I didn’t see him until the last number,” Elton recalled. “Thank God I didn’t, because at that time I slept and drank Leon Russell.”

Neil Diamond introduced Elton. “I’m like the rest of you,” he said. “I’m here because of having listened to Elton John’s album.”

But those who had heard his album had no idea what they were in for: a poetic singer-songwriter with the flamboyance of a rock star. Album tracks like “Take Me to the Pilot” and “Sixty Years On” were played with a punk-like energy, Elton falling to his knees like Jerry Lee Lewis and knocking the piano bench over. The set also mixed in standards like “Great Balls of Fire” and “Honky Tonk Women.” And the rapturous reception he received encouraged him to experiment with even more adventurous stagecraft. “He seemed like a very quiet, subdued person,” says drummer Nigel Olsson. “All of a sudden, in front of an American audience, he started wearing Mickey Mouse ears and jumping up and down. That’s where all the strange gear started.” Unlike Elton’s debut album, which was packed with lush strings, harp and a synthesizer, he performed that night accompanied only by Olsson and bassist Dee Murray. “We just made a lot of noise,” Murray told Rolling Stone in 1987. “It was new. Elton was experimenting. Plus, we had to make up for the orchestra. We just socked it to them.”

Elton played five more nights as word started to spread around town: “His music is so staggeringly original,” Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn wrote. In the coming weeks, “Your Song” began climbing the charts, eventually hitting Number Eight in January 1971.

Forty-seven years later, Elton still looks back fondly on that first trip to America. “It was just all systems go,” he says. “Nothing was impossible. You’re working on adrenaline and the sheer fact that you’re a success. I still love what I do, and I’m 70 years old. I love it even more.” A.G.

Aretha Franklin at the Fillmore West

Aretha Franklin Fillmore 1971

When promoter Bill Graham booked the Queen of Soul for his San Francisco venue for three nights in March 1971, no one was certain the matchup would work, including Aretha Franklin herself. “I wasn’t sure how the hippies reacted to me,” she said. As Franklin’s drummer Bernard Purdie recalls, “She’d been doing what you’d call Vegas-type shows. But this was a whole different audience.” No one needed to worry. With saxman King Curtis leading a band that included Billy Preston on organ, Franklin remade pop and rock classics in her own image — turning Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” into call-and-response gospel and reworking “Eleanor Rigby” as a funky stomp. The weekend of shows (portions of which were released a few months later as Live at Fillmore West ) had an appropriately glorious finale: On the last night, Franklin pulled Ray Charles out of the crowd. Though they’d just met that day, the two traded piano and vocal parts on an epic 19-minute version of “Spirit in the Dark.” “She turned the thing into church,” Charles said later. “I mean, she’s on fire.”  D.B.

B.B. King at the Cook County Jail

B.B. King at the Cook County Jail

B.B. King was playing a regular club gig on Chicago’s Rush Street in the late Sixties when he was invited to do a show at the local Cook County Jail. “I knew the inmates would enjoy it,” said warden Clarence English. “And that would be something they’d be beholden to us …  If you give extra ice cream or let them stay up late at night, [they] don’t fight and destroy each other.”

King’s new manager, Sid Seidenberg – who was helping King score a career resurgence by booking him at venues like the Fillmore West – saw an opportunity. He told King to take the gig, and invited press and a recording engineer for a future live album (Johnny Cash had released the successful At Folsom Prison two years earlier). But what began as a commercial move became something much deeper. “I couldn’t help but feel the oppression,” King said later. “My heart was heavy with feeling for the guys behind bars.” With a full big band behind him, King belted burning takes on “Every Day I Have the Blues” and “How Blue Can You Get?” with a fury the loud assembly evidently connected with. The inmates booed when he took the stage, but by the end they were hypnotized. The show was released on 1971’s Live at Cook County Jail, a document of an electric-blues master at the top of his game. “There were tears in people’s eyes,” English recalled. “In mine, too.” Will Hermes

The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East

The Allman Brothers 1971

The Allmans were still young, hungry Georgia rockers when they booked three nights at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York in early 1971 with the idea of recording a live album. “My brother always believed a live album was what the Brothers needed to do, and the record company finally agreed,” Gregg Allman recalled. “The Fillmore was just the logical choice. I don’t think we even discussed another venue.” The LP they made there, At Fillmore East, became their defining statement.

The Allmans were initially slotted into a bill headlined by Johnny Winter. But they came out guns blazing the first night, and when the hall emptied out after their set, they were promoted to headliner. With the band order duly shuffled, the Allmans had time to stretch out on spectacular journeys — “On those long jams, you climbed in and there was no tomorrow, no yesterday,” said drummer Butch Trucks. The gigs were hardly trouble-free. On the last night, a bomb scare delayed the start of the second show until the wee hours (“Good mornin’, everybody!” someone announced before “Statesboro Blues”). That early-a.m. set ended up becoming the keeper: “Whipping Post” sprawled over gorgeous melodic terrain for 23 minutes; “Mountain Jam” ascended for more than a half-hour. Atlantic Records engineer Tom Dowd oversaw the taping; unlike most live albums, nothing needed to be redone in the studio besides a few vocal overdubs. The LP went gold on October 25th, four days before guitarist Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident. “It’s the best-sounding live album ever,” said the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. “It’s just fuckin’ awesome.” W.H.

The Band at the Academy of Music

The Band at the Academy of Music

The Band’s 1978 farewell movie, The Last Waltz, is the greatest concert film of all time. But even that performance didn’t reach the heights of the Band’s four-night stand at New York’s Academy of Music at the end of 1971. The shows, which were released as a box set in 2013, captured the Band at their tightest and funkiest, injecting New Orleans R&B swagger into their harmonious folk rock. It was a period of high morale and expert musicianship for the sometimes volatile group, the result of a decade of hard touring, with Ronnie Hawkins, Bob Dylan and finally on their own. “There was a spell that everybody was doing really, really good,” the Band’s Robbie Robertson told Rolling Stone in 2013. “It was a roll of the dice after that. You just didn’t know what condition somebody was going to show up in.”

It was a moment the Band needed. Three years on from their groundbreaking debut, Music From Big Pink, their two most recent studio albums, Stage  
Fright and Cahoots, 
  had been greeted with 
lukewarm reviews.
 Aiming for some fresh 
energy, Robertson re
cruited veteran New
 Orleans band lead
er Allen Toussaint to 
put together a horn 
section for their holi
day gigs at the Academy of Music. It almost 
didn’t work out. To 
everyone’s horror,
 Toussaint’s briefcase 
full of horn arrangements was stolen on his way from New Orleans to the band’s Woodstock headquarters, where he was forced to rewrite the charts from memory. He wrote them in the wrong keys, and the Band had to relearn their songs in entirely new keys. Robertson recalled thinking, “We’re doomed.”

That anxiety lifted when they took the stage. “A chill ran through me,” Robertson said. “I thought, ‘OK, I’m feeling some magic in the air here. …’ As soon as we kicked off the first song,” he added, “we weren’t even touching the ground.”

The group set the tone with a taut, funky cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It,” and gracefully moved through its canon. The Band played with intensified warmth on “Unfaithful Servant” and “Get Up Jake” and jittery energy on deep album cuts like “Smoke Signal.” “We only did it once or twice,” said Robertson. “Levon [Helm] did an amazing job on it.” They turned “Chest Fever” and “Rag Mama Rag” into the stuff of a Crescent City street party, and returned to their roadhouse roots on Chuck Willis’ 1958 deep cut “(I Don’t Want to) Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes.”

The Band saved their biggest surprise for last. During their New Year’s Eve encore, they invited out their old friend Dylan, who had been out of the spotlight for years. Looking like his mid-Sixties self with aviators and a Telecaster, Dylan howled fiery takes of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” pausing only to talk through the arrangements. “We were being a little bit bold,” said Robertson. (The horns didn’t accompany Dylan, though: “He looked over and saw us, jumped back from the microphone and glared over his shades,” says tuba player Howard Johnson. “I told everyone, ‘OK, let’s just get offstage.'”)

Months later, highlights of those shows comprised the dazzling live double LP Rock of Ages , which critics immediately called one of the best live albums of the Seventies. For drummer Helm, it was simply “the most fun I ever had making a Band record.” D.B.

The Rolling Stones North American Tour

The Rolling Stones North American Tour

Mick Jagger has a clear memory of being onstage in the summer of 1972, singing “Love in Vain,” the Robert Johnson song the Rolling Stones had recently reworked into a soul ballad. Jagger still marvels at the live version – particularly Mick Taylor’s searing lead guitar, which slowly took over the song and culminated in a minute and a half of mournful, melodic virtuosity. “He was playing beautifully at this point,” says Jagger. “It was chilling. It was so sad and haunting. And the horns were really just subtly there. The beats and stops were usually perfect. That was one of my favorites.”

The Rolling Stones were at the peak of their powers in the summer of 1972: Keith Richards was playing the most fearless rhythm guitar of his career; Taylor stretched out their music to improbable peaks; and Jagger stalked the stage, whipping his belt and perfecting his ability to turn music, as critic Robert Greenfield observed, into a psychodrama.

It was the band’s first North American tour since Altamont, the disastrous, deadly California festival in December 1969. Shaken by that debacle and the death of Brian Jones, the band hunkered down in the studio, recording three masterpieces: 1969’s Let It Bleed, 1971’s Sticky Fingers and 1972’s Exile on Main Street . Their Sixties peers – the Beatles, Bob Dylan – were less prolific, withdrawing from public view. In their absence, the Stones had only grown in stature. “After 10 years of playing together, the Stones had somehow become the number-one attraction in the world,” Greenfield wrote in his chronicle of the tour, A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones . “The only great band of the Sixties still around in original form playing original rock & roll … They were royalty.”

Both Jagger and Richards remember the excitement they felt ahead of the eight-week run. If the prospect of getting back on the road weren’t enough, the opening act on tour was a 22-year-old Stevie Wonder, whom Jagger made a habit of watching side-stage. “It was exciting, the feeling of anticipation – getting back in touch with what it is we did,” says Richards. Adds Jagger, “We were trying to get out of the studio, out of the South of France, and Keith had all these drug problems – so it was kind of good to get out on the road.”

The Stones’ office was overloaded with requests for tickets, priced at $6.50 (some fans sent in as many as 60 postcards each). A Dick Cavett TV special on the tour described the strange new phenomenon of scalping (plus the new concept of groupies). On opening night in Vancouver, 2,000 fans tried to force their way into the Pacific Coliseum, leaving 31 policemen injured – the first of several violent incidents. “That was in the day when people who didn’t have a ticket would show up,” says Jagger, “and be like, ‘OK, we’re here, we’re fucking going in.'”

Unlike the 1969 tour – which featured slow, slogging rhythms – the band played at breakneck speed. “Keith was doing that,” says Jagger. “I’m not trying to blame him for anything. He kept starting it.” Says Richards, “That was probably trying to catch up with lost time.” Songs like “Street Fighting Man” ran several minutes longer than the studio versions as the band ripped away. “We were probably searching for the ending,” Richards jokes.

For Richards, the highlight was playing the new songs from Exile on Main Street, recorded the previous summer. “Playing the Exile stuff for the first time was a real turn-on,” says Richards. After opening with “Brown Sugar,” the band tore through several Exile classics: “Rocks Off,” “Rip This Joint,” “Sweet Virginia.” Unlike later tours, Jagger hung around during Richards’ songs, howling away “Happy” into the same mic. “I always enjoyed doing that,” Richards says.

There were also a few throwbacks, including a horn-fueled version of “Satisfaction,” and “Bye Bye Johnny,” a Chuck Berry song that the Stones had been doing since 1963. According to Richards, they picked the deep cut for its rhythm: “There’s an interesting reverse beat going on that always intrigued us.”

On the road, the Stones encountered an older audience – one that ranged from about age 15 to 30. “There always used to be screamers, and they didn’t seem to worry much about the music,” Bill Wyman told Cavett. As a result, the band played with more focus. It helped that arena sound had improved: “Now you hear everything and you see everything, and there’s so much tension,” said Wyman.

For all the onstage professionalism, the backstage scene was as wild as any rock & roll tour before or since. The band traveled with the largest entourage in rock history up to that point – including a physician, label president Marshall Chess and a press corps Richards compared to a political campaign. The press included photographer Annie Leibovitz, and authors Terry Southern, Robert Greenfield and Truman Capote, who reluctantly joined for a Rolling Stone cover story. “For him, it was a social occasion,” says Jagger, who recalls Capote saying he hated the fact that Jagger wore the same clothes every night. “He would’ve liked it better now – I have such a bigger wardrobe.” (Capote never wrote his piece, claiming it “didn’t interest me creatively.”)

Jagger admits that the traveling party was “a bit distracting.” He had to watch his drug intake in order to perform. “I wasn’t on meth, out of my mind or anything,” Jagger says. “But I was having a lot of fun.” Richards’ favorite story “has got to be Bobby Keys and me nearly burning down the Playboy mansion,” he says. Staying at Hugh Hefner’s home, Richards and saxophonist Keys accidentally set fire to one of the bathrooms. “We were going through a doctor’s bag and we knocked over a candle,” says Richards.

At the same time, Jagger remembers “all these dark moments” on the tour. On the morning of July 17th in Montreal, dynamite exploded beneath one of the band’s vans, destroying equipment. “It was kind of scary because it was during the separatist movement of Quebec,” says Jagger. “I mean, it wasn’t just some random guy trying to blow up a truck.” The show, remarkably, went on that night, but a riot ensued when 500 fans with counterfeit tickets were turned away.

The following day, the band flew to a small airport in Rhode Island. As the entourage cleared customs, Richards took a nap on the side of a parked firetruck. He woke up to the flashing lights of a local newspaper photographer. “I just reacted,” Richards says. “I got up and hit in the general direction of the light and busted the guy’s camera. Things escalated from there. Then the fucking FBI got involved.” The photographer claimed he was assaulted, and Richards and Jagger were arrested and placed in a jail cell, while an unruly audience at Boston Garden waited. Fearing a riot, Boston Mayor Kevin White organized their release, and the band took the stage after midnight. “There was never a dull moment,” says Richards.

The offstage chaos was documented by the legendary photographer Robert Frank, who brought along a camera for a documentary that, as Jagger understood, would be “about playing and about music.” Instead, Cocksucker Blues was a cinéma vérité experiment full of lurid scenes: naked groupies having sex on an airplane, Jagger snorting cocaine, and groupie heroin use. The band blocked its release (though it became a popular bootleg). “[Robert] would initiate things,” says Jagger. “Most documentary filmmakers kind of get you to do things that you perhaps wouldn’t do if they weren’t there.” Jagger cites the famous scene where Richards and Keys threw a TV out of a Hyatt Hotel window: “Robert would probably say to Keith, ‘Keith, throw the TV out the window.’ They probably weren’t going to do that that morning.” But Richards disagrees. “Bobby Keys and I engineered that,” he says. “We called the cameraman ’round when we dismantled the TV. So that scene was directed by Bobby Keys and Keith fucking Richards.”

The tour wrapped with four shows at Madison Square Garden. Though the Stones had played 48 shows in only 54 days, they didn’t hold back. The July 25th show featured a sentimental sing-along of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and perhaps the fiercest “All Down the Line” ever played. “You almost feel like you’re levitating on the energy from the audience,” says Richards. “It’s a strange experience.” The tour ended the following night, on Jagger’s 29th birthday. Wonder joined the band for a raucous medley of “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and a revved-up, horn-fueled take on “Satisfaction” (Wonder said he wrote “Uptight” with “Satisfaction” in mind). A cake was rolled onstage, and the show ended with a pie fight among bandmates. The afterparty, thrown by Ahmet Ertegun, included Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

It was the end of an era. Afterward, Richards slid further into addiction, and was arrested on heroin and gun charges the next year. In 1974, after only five years, Taylor left the band to go solo. The Stones’ next North American tour, in 1975, featured stage props like a giant inflatable phallus, and little of the ragged charm of the 1972 tour. “There were no sort of guidelines,” Richards says. “You sort of made it up and you went along. It was a good feeling, that tour. A bit frenetic and a little blurry, like an old movie, you know? It was a bit jerky.” Patrick Doyle

David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars World Tour

Bowie Ziggy Stardust Tour

“I wanted the music to look like it sounded,” said David Bowie, who reigned over the moon-age daydream of his greatest tour as a crimson-haired, sparkly, makeup-slathered rock & roll space god. The music, thanks to the savage elegance of the Spiders From Mars, was even wilder, with an intense symbiosis developing between Bowie and chunky-toned guitarist Mick Ronson. “There was magic there,” says keyboardist Mike Garson. Ziggymania broke out across the world, and even as Bowie moved on, it never really stopped. A.G.

Van Morrison North American Tour

Van Morrison

It takes an extraordinary band to top the studio versions of songs like “Domino” and “Cyprus Avenue,” but with the 10-piece Caledonia Soul Orchestra, Van Morrison pulled it off night after night. With horns, strings and blazing jazz chops, the band was ready to “take the songs anywhere Van wanted to take them,” says guitarist John Platania. “Every performance of each song was different.” Morrison was, as usual, lost in the music, getting so into it that he gave himself backaches – the platform shoes he was favoring at the time probably didn’t help. He rarely addressed the crowd, and kept his band on its toes with subtle gestures that sparked dynamic shifts worthy of James Brown. “He had these signals behind his back,” says Platania. “He would flash his hand and spread his fingers out. We knew instantly we had to bring it down and then build it up again.” Morrison was stretching out, toying with his phrasing, elongating syllables like a jazz singer. The band ended when the tour did – but it lives on in Morrison’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now, one of the most essential live albums of all time, recently released in a gloriously extended version. “We were sad to see it end,” says Platania. “But in those days, he would say stuff like, ‘The show doesn’t have to go on.'” D.B.

Patti Smith Group and Television at CBGB

Patti Smith CBGB 1975

Over a two-month-long residency, the Patti Smith Group went from art project to formidable band – and lower Manhattan’s CBGB was well on the road to becoming one of the most famous rock clubs in the world. Much of the material that ended up on Smith’s debut, Horses, came to life at CB’s, with Smith improvising poetic chants as the band brutalized simple chord patterns. “CBGB was the ideal place to sound a clarion call,” Smith wrote. Television, meanwhile, had just begun emphasizing the guitar-weaving tapestries they would immortalize on Marquee Moon . Rock history was being made at a club with no dressing rooms and an incontinent dog in residence – and the musicians knew it. “I remember one night standing outside CBGB, in the doorway of the derelict hotel next door, smoking a joint,” says Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, “and realizing that this was the kind of gathering of psychic energies I’d always dreamed of when, say, I would read about the San Francisco scene in 1966.” W.H.

Bob Marley at the Lyceum Theatre, London

Bob Marley at the Lyceum Theatre, London

Bob Marley’s two concerts at the Lyceum Theatre in London in July 1975 were more than just musically transcendent shows: They were the triumphant peak of Marley’s first proper tour as a solo artist and would elevate him from cult act to international icon – in part thanks to Live! , a concert document from the shows that gave him his first international Top 40 hit, “No Woman, No Cry.”

“Lyceum was magic,” recalls Marley’s friend Neville Garrick, the Wailers’ lighting designer and art director at the time. “It was an old theater, so the acoustics were proper. … They took out all the seats, and people were going from the very first song.” Booked in a small room to drive up ticket demand, the Lyceum shows sold out in a day, and roughly 3,000 ticketless hopefuls mobbed the streets outside the venue on Marley’s first night there, along with a phalanx of cops. Some fans nevertheless managed to tear the fire doors off their hinges and rush in, packing the room tighter still, shoulder to shoulder. It was so hot, condensation was dripping from the ceiling, and roof hatches had to be opened to let air in. Marley appeared before the crowd like a prophet in a denim work shirt, dreadlocks bobbing, and few moments in pop are as spine-tingling as the opening of “No Woman, No Cry,” the audience chanting the chorus like a hymn before Marley had even sung a word. Recalled bassist Aston Barrett, “Everyone onstage [got] high from the feedback of the people.” W.H.

Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue North American Tour

Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue North American Tour

Bob Dylan could have played arenas when he toured to support 1976’s Desire . Instead, true to form, he did the unexpected: He booked tiny theaters with just days’ notice, charged less than $9 per ticket and took along a gaggle of friends – including Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Joan Baez. Dylan had started hanging around his old West Village haunts with buddies from his folkie days, and he wanted to take that nostalgic spirit on the road. “We all sing and sing and sing and laugh until we pass out,” Baez told Rolling Stone . “For us, it makes no difference if we just play for 15 people or 15,000.” Backed by one of his best bands ever (including guitarist Mick Ronson), Dylan stretched out shows for as long as five hours – with help from McGuinn, Elliott and others, who would do their own sets and join his. New tracks from Desire were mixed with 1960s classics (“It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Just Like a Woman”) and covers (“Deportees”). The shows were full of raw, spontaneous intimacy: Dylan duetted with his ex-lover Baez, did scorched-earth versions of “Idiot Wind,” and pleaded for the release of jailed boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. As Rolling Thunder participant Allen Ginsberg said, “Having gone through his changes … Bob now has his powers together.” A.G.

Grateful Dead North American Tour

Grateful Dead North American Tour

“Our second coming,” says Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart of the band’s 1977 North American tour. Everyone knew the Dead could jam out infinitely. But that year they were discovering something new: that tight, songful concision could transport a crowd just as easily. “We had a lot of new songs and wanted to get at ’em,” says singer and guitarist Bob Weir. “And the only way to get at the next song was to finish the one you were doing.” Ironically for a band that had little use or patience for studios, it would be recording sessions that strengthened its live approach. Terrapin Station , the group’s most recent LP, was recorded with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen, who’d helmed their self-titled 1975 breakthrough; he forced the Dead to prep and rehearse more than they ever had. “Going in with Keith and having him organize and arrange all this stuff,” says Weir, “that gave us a solidity.” The results of Olsen’s whip-cracking became clear as soon as the Dead went back on the road — they tore into old favorites like “St. Stephen” and tried new combinations, like going from the fast-paced “Scarlet Begonias” into the churning “Fire on the Mountain,” and proved their newly honed chops could help sculpt jams such as the 10-minute “Terrapin Station.”

“We felt like rock gods,” Weir says. It helped that the band was in relatively good shape physically as well. “Jerry was healthy,” says Hart. “That was a big thing.” The high point took place on May 8th at Cornell University’s Barton Hall, regarded by Deadheads as the band’s greatest show ever. In the end, the 1977 tour completely changed the Dead’s sense of connection with fans, and their own musical purpose. “That was an era where it started to creep up on us that people came to hear the songs,” says Weir. “It finally dawned on us: ‘Oh, that’s what it’s all about.'” D.B.

The Ramones European Tour

The Ramones European Tour

The Ramones arrived in England with something to prove. The punk revolution had broken out in London in 1977, with the Sex Pistols getting wall-to-wall press and causing havoc. But no one in the nascent U.K. punk scene was ready for the precision-strike arrival of the Ramones. In his memoir, Johnny Ramone wrote that at a Pistols show on their first night in town in December ’77, “Johnny Rotten asked me what I thought of them, and I told him … they stunk.”

Three days later, the Ramones unleashed a furious assault on the audience in Glasgow, opening with “Rockaway Beach” and not taking a break until 26 songs later. Playing to a punk-crazed English audience pushed the Ramones to play their most intense shows. The tour wrapped on New Year’s Eve at the Rainbow Theatre, their 148th show of the year. “Probably the best show the Ramones ever did,” said Johnny. Amazingly, Joey had been singing through incredible pain; he’d suffered third-degree burns on his neck when a makeshift humidifier exploded on him. Said Ramones co-manager Linda Stein, “[Johnny] came to me and said … ‘Put me in a wheelchair and get me on a plane before I go insane.'” He wanted to be sedated. A.G.

The Eagles U.S. Tour

The Eagles U.S. Tour

The career-defining two-year stretch of shows that followed 1976’s Hotel California saw the Eagles become a stadium band. Yet in an era in which rock shows were growing bigger and more impersonal, the Eagles’ studio perfectionists, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, found a way to recreate the feel and detail of their albums onstage, with every harmony and guitar lick seamlessly in place decades before backing tapes and Auto-Tune made that process easier. Hits like “Life in the Fast Lane” and “Take It to the Limit” were given almost impossibly pristine treatment. The tour itself was chaotic; at one point, bassist Randy Meisner and Frey got into a fistfight when Frey called Meisner a “pussy.” But you wouldn’t have known it watching their sets. “Some critic said we used to go out onstage and loiter,” Henley said. “I think we accomplished a great deal.” D.B.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band American Tour

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band American Tour

It had been three very long years since Born to Run made Bruce Springsteen a national star. A bitter lawsuit filed against his former manager in 1976 left him legally unable to enter a studio for two years before making Darkness on the Edge of Town . “Prove It All Night,” his new single, stalled at Number 33 on the charts. Anything radio-friendly, like “Fire” and “Because the Night,” was held off Darkness to maintain the starker atmosphere Springsteen wanted for his set of songs about the reality of everyday working life. To many, all of this was evidence that Springsteen was in decline. So he did the thing he could do better than almost anyone alive: He went on tour. “With the burden of proving I wasn’t a has-been at 28,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, “I headed out on the road performing long, sweat-drenched rock shows featuring the new album.”

Springsteen and the E Street Band played 115 shows across North America, the longest series of dates they would ever play in a single year. Even the soundchecks were grueling. “Literally, we would play ‘Thunder Road’ for a half-hour and Bruce would walk around and sit in every section and make sure the sound was as good as possible,” says drummer Max Weinberg. “Look, Bruce took his fun very seriously.” Not everyone thought it was so much fun. “I thought it was a little self-indulgent and a little bit silly,” says bassist Garry Tallent. “We would do four-hour sound-checks and then a three-and-a-half-hour show. We were younger then.”

Sets featured the majority of the new album, a big chunk of Born to Run and favorites off the first two discs, like “Spirit in the Night” and “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).” After so much time off, the band played with a stunning mix of pent-up energy and technical precision. “Anyone can be great on any given night,” says Weinberg. “To really be great every night takes a lot of willpower, a lot of dedication, a lot of self-confidence, a lot of respect for your audience – tremendous respect for the audience.”

Live, the songs completely transformed from their recorded versions. For “Prove It All Night,” the band added a piano and guitar intro that built to a furious climax, and “Backstreets” developed an emotional spoken-word interlude about lost love that eventually morphed into “Drive All Night,” from The River. “Even at that point, the whole thing was ‘You have to see them live – you can’t go by the record,'” says Tallent.

As the tour crisscrossed the nation, with five shows getting broadcast on the radio and quickly hitting the bootleg market, a new respect for the album took hold. “Night after night, we sent our listeners away, back to the recorded versions of this music,” Springsteen wrote in Born to Run, “newly able to hear their beauty and restrained power.”

One particularly great show took place at the tiny Agora Ballroom in Cleveland. Opening with a ferocious cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and wrapping up three hours later with a wild “Twist and Shout,” it became one of the most coveted bootlegs in rock history. “It was really hot,” says Weinberg. “Just sweltering. It was incredibly exciting. Then you just get on the bus and go to the next gig. It was like that about five nights a week with two days off.”

Word of Springsteen’s glorious return prompted CBS Records to mount a huge billboard of his image on the Sunset Strip, advertising the album and tour but making no mention of the band. “It was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” Springsteen told a radio DJ. One night, Springsteen snuck up to the roof of a nearby building with Tallent and saxophonist Clarence Clemons. Armed with cans of black spray paint, Springsteen hoisted himself onto Clemons’ massive shoulders and wrote “Prove It All Night E Street” across the entire thing. “We didn’t deface it,” says Tallent with a laugh. “We corrected it. That was our way of letting people know to not expect the next coming of Christ. It’s just a rock & roll show.”

Darkness on the Edge of Town still wasn’t a commercial hit by the end of the run, but critics across the country hailed the tour as the best of the year, and the album remained at the core of Springsteen’s set list for decades to come. “[They] are perhaps the purest distillation of what I wanted my rock & roll music to be about,” Springsteen wrote. “[On the last stand of the tour] an exploding firecracker tossed by an inebriated ‘fan’ opened up a small slash underneath my eye. A little blood’d been drawn, but we were back.” A.G.

The Clash North American Tour

The Clash North American Tour

They called it the Pearl Harbour Tour, and they opened each night with a slashing version of “I’m So Bored With the USA.” For an English punk band trying to break through in the States, it was an interesting marketing approach. “England’s becoming claustrophobic for us,” Joe Strummer told Rolling Stone . “I think touring America could be a new lease on life.” With a touring budget of just $30,000 from their record label (most of which they gave to opening act Bo Diddley), the Clash stormed the heartland and made converts wherever they went. During downtime on their tour bus, they watched a VHS copy of Star Wars over and over. They hit the Palladium in New York in February, blowing away a crowd that included Andy Warhol and Bruce Springsteen. “Every country has one thing in common, which is they all listen to shit music,” said co-leader Mick Jones. “We’re here to alleviate that.” A.G.

Pink Floyd ‘The Wall’ Tour

Pink Floyd 'The Wall' Tour

Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera, The Wall, was their most ambitious album to date, and when they took it on the road the next year they knew a traditional stage show would simply not do it justice. Pushing the limits of concert technology, they built an actual wall during the first half of every show, then played the bulk of the second half behind it, obscured from the audience. “Not much spontaneity,” said drummer Nick Mason, “but we’re not known for our duck-walking and gyrating around onstage.”

The logistics were so daunting that they staged it only 31 times across 16 months, hitting just four cities: Los Angeles; London; Dortmund, Germany; and Uniondale, New York. The most dramatic moment of the show happened near the end, when the wall came tumbling down. “The first couple of bricks would terrify people in the front rows,” said guitarist David Gilmour. “The audience would think they were going to be killed.” A.G.

Talking Heads ‘Speaking in Tongues’ Tour

Talking Heads 'Speaking in Tongues' Tour

It was an image that defined Talking Heads for a generation of music fans – skinny, nervous David Byrne on the Speaking in Tongues tour, struggling to dance in a cartoonishly huge white suit. “What I realized years before,” Byrne says, “is I had to find my own way of moving that wasn’t a white rock guy trying to imitate black people, or bring some other kind of received visual or choreographic language into pop music … I just thought, ‘No, no, you have to invent it from scratch.'”

Since forming in the mid-Seventies, Talking Heads had gone from CBGB New Wavers to one of the biggest bands in America. For the tour to support 1983’s Speaking in Tongues, their most popular album to date, they reinvented themselves, growing from a quartet to a nine-piece funk mob that included P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell, Brothers Johnson guitarist Alex Weir and vocalist Lynn Mabry. Byrne also took cues from the experimental visual-art world, projecting abstract slides onto a spare backdrop, creating a stark aesthetic to match the band’s driving, uncluttered funk. The suit was inspired in part by Japanese Noh theater.

What emerged was arty dance-party transcendence. Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz recall the two-night run at New York’s Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in August as a highlight. “Madonna had just released her first record; she was walking around barefoot,” Frantz says. “I saw Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall off to the side of the stage – she was dancing, Mick wasn’t.” The Greek Theater in Berkeley the following month was a similar bacchanal. “We’d begun to get the Deadhead crowd,” Frantz says, laughing.

In late 1983, the band decided to document the tour with a concert film, and teamed up with director Jonathan Demme (who would later win an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs ). “We didn’t want any of the bullshit,” says Frantz of the band’s initial idea for Stop Making Sense. “We didn’t want the clichés. We didn’t want close-ups of people’s fingers while they’re doing a guitar solo. We wanted the camera to linger, so you could get to know the musicians a little bit.”

Shot over three nights at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, Stop Making Sense may be the greatest concert movie. It begins with Byrne walking onto a deserted stage with a boombox, setting it down, pressing “play,” then reimagining “Psycho Killer” for acoustic guitar and 808 drum-machine beats. His bandmates and backing musicians join him incrementally, song by song. “It’s cut down,” Byrne notes, comparing the film to the two-hour shows, “but there were no other substantial changes.”

The effect was so real, people actually got up and danced in movie theaters. “I’d never seen that before,” Frantz says. “Or since.” W.H.

Fela Kuti at Glastonbury

Fela Kuti at Glastonbury

If anyone at the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival didn’t already know Fela Kuti, they soon learned why he was one of the planet’s most electric artists. Before his biggest international crowd to date, Fela played big-band Afrobeat that owed as much to James Brown’s funk as to the high life of his native Nigeria. Fela managed just two songs in two hours – but the grooves were so intoxicating, no one minded. “The love the audience gave was fantastic,” recalls son Femi Kuti, who backed him on sax that day. He left a legend in his wake. W.H.

Prince ‘Purple Rain’ Tour

Prince 'Purple Rain' Tour

On each night of the Purple Rain tour, Prince and the Revolution huddled backstage for a prayer. “It was a meaningful ritual,” says bassist Mark Brown. “The crowds were so loud, and it was so crazy, that we needed each other because that was the only thing you had: each other for support.” With Prince’s movie Purple Rain  catapulting the singer toward megastardom, the 98 shows he did in support of the soundtrack album were like Broadway productions. Prince began the show ascending from beneath the stage on a hydraulic lift, and went through five costume changes. “He had all these visual cues,” recalls keyboardist Lisa Coleman. “He’d throw a hankie into the air, and when the hankie hit the ground, that’s when we would stop.” At the Los Angeles Forum, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna joined Prince for the encore, which included a nearly half-hour-long version of “Purple Rain.” “He wanted to tower over everybody,” says keyboardist Matt Fink. “He was the Muhammad Ali of rock.” D.B.

Run-DMC ‘Raising Hell’ Tour

Run-DMC

“There was no concept of charts and no concept of airplay,” says LL Cool J, describing the landscape for Run-DMC’s 1986 tour, which featured LL, the Beastie Boys, Whodini and others as openers. That underground status changed two months into the tour, when Run-DMC had a breakout MTV hit with their Aerosmith collaboration “Walk This Way,” from their Raising Hell album. “Motherfuckers in the front row started looking like the Ramones and Cyndi Lauper,” says DMC of the new white fans who came to check out their shows. “We got a bunch of Madonnas asking for autographs.” DMC also noticed that cross-cultural appeal working the other way as a predominantly black audience embraced the tour’s beer-spraying opening act, the Beastie Boys, then months away from releasing their debut LP, Licensed to Ill. “The Beasties were crazy,” recalls rapper Ecstasy of Whodini. “They created an illusion that they were happy-go-lucky and careless, but they were on top of their shit. They were the white Run-DMC.” Competition among the artists was fierce. “I wanted to chain-saw the audience,” says LL Cool J, who was 18 years old at the time. Toward the end of the tour, a riot at a show in Long Beach, California, provided fuel for negative media coverage. But Raising Hell’ s positive legacy is undeniable. As DMC says today, “When Obama first got elected, all my white friends said, ‘That’s because of what Run-DMC did.'” C.R.W.

Metallica Damaged Justice Tour

Metallica Damaged Justice Tour

In 1988, Metallica released their pivotal album … And Justice for All and went from thrash-metal renegades to mainstream stars. But when their manager suggested an arena tour to support the LP, the band wasn’t convinced. “I was like, ‘Seriously?'” drummer Lars Ulrich recalls. “We knew we could do L.A., New York, San Francisco, but the American heartland didn’t seem like a great idea. No band as extreme as ours had ever done a full arena tour. So we used Indianapolis as a yardstick. If we were cool there, we were cool almost anywhere. When the tickets went on sale in Indianapolis, we ended up doing 13,000 or 14,000, which in 1988 was an insane victory.”

On the Damaged Justice Tour, Metallica learned just how many authenticity-starved headbangers were really out there. The band got the first taste of its transformative power in the summer of 1988 when it was booked onto the Monsters of Rock Tour, opening for Van Halen and Scorpions. At the L.A. Coliseum, fans responded to Metallica’s set by flinging their folding chairs at the stage to create a football-field-size mosh pit. “It was bonkers,” says bassist Jason Newsted, who had recently joined the band, replacing the late Cliff Burton. “For a kid coming off a farm and jumping into my favorite band, it was very dreamy. I didn’t sleep. Every day was another dream coming true.” He also got a lesson in how to conduct himself on the road. “I’d walk on the crew bus of a big band and there’s a pile of blow on the table in the front lounge,” Newsted recalls. “I look over there at my heroes, all red and swollen, and I’m like, ‘Guess what I’m not gonna do? That!'” The kickoff of the Damaged Justice Tour coincided with the success of Metallica’s anti-war-themed video for their new single, “One,” which quickly became an MTV hit. At the peak of bloated hair metal, Metallica were playing jagged seven-to-nine-minute-long thrash odysseys. But the crowds at their shows kept growing. “The kids know that at the end of the day there’s something very real and honest about what we do,” Ulrich told Rolling Stone in 1989. “You can’t take that away from us.”  K.G.

Madonna Blond Ambition Tour

Madonna Blond Ambition Tour

As Madonna’s career was taking off in the mid-Eighties, most of her tours were relatively straightforward affairs, based around her singing and dancing. But for the stadium blowouts that supported her 1989 classic, Like a Prayer, she wanted to up her game. In the process, she reinvented the pop megatour itself. “I really put a lot of myself into it,” she said. “It’s much more theatrical than anything I’ve ever done.” That year, Madonna had caused a nationwide controversy with the video for “Like a Prayer,” which daringly mixed sexual and religious imagery. Blond Ambition extended that provocation and upped the spectacle.

The show opened with Madonna climbing down a staircase into a factory world inspired by German expressionist filmmaker Fritz Lang. She sang in a giant cathedral for “Like a Prayer” and under a beauty-shop hair dryer in “Material Girl.” And, most infamously, she simulated masturbation while wearing a cone-shaped bustier on a crimson bed during “Like a Virgin.” “The Blond Ambition Tour was what really catapulted her into the stratosphere,” says Vincent Paterson, the tour’s co-director and choreographer.

Madonna took a hands-on approach to the show, working with her brother, painter Christopher Ciccone, to design sets, and creating the costumes with fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier. “I tried to make the show accommodate my own short attention span,” she said. “We put the songs together so there was an emotional arc in the show. I basically thought of vignettes for every song.”

Starting out in Japan in April 1990 and hitting the U.S. the following month, the tour grossed almost $63 million. But it didn’t go off without any complications: Madonna had to ditch the blond-ponytail hair extensions she wore early in the tour because they kept getting caught in her headset microphone. And in Toronto, the masturbation sequence almost got her and her dancers arrested in what became a bonding moment for her entire crew.

Madonna’s close relationship with her collaborators would be a major theme in the blockbuster 1991 tour documentary Truth or Dare, especially in memorable scenes where she invited her backup dancers into her bed. Today, Blond Ambition’s over-the-top intimacy is a staple of live pop music, from Lady Gaga to Miley Cyrus. In 1990, it was a revolution. “It was a kind of turning point,” says Darryl Jones, who played bass on the tour. “A lot of young girls were watching.” Steve Knopper

Public Enemy Sizzling Summer Tour

Public Enemy Sizzling Summer Tour

For the tour to support their groundbreaking LP Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy wanted a show to match their music’s combative assault. “OK, if we’re gonna fill a stage, everything’s gotta be moving,” leader Chuck D recalls of the band’s approach. They’d built their live rep on short, explosive sets. Now they packed an hour with Chuck as bullhorn MC and Flava Flav as his firecracker comic foil, leaping across the stage and diving into the crowd. In Houston, Ice Cube joined them to perform his guest verse on “Burn Hollywood Burn,” a song that became each night’s incendiary high point. “We didn’t need to use pyro,” says Chuck. “When I see acts use pyro, I’m like, ‘What lazy fucks.'” C.R.W.

Sonic Youth and Nirvana European Tour

Sonic Youth and Nirvana European Tour

In the summer before they released Nevermind,  Nirvana were still a largely unknown band. They booked a series of European festival dates, opening for their friends Sonic Youth — and witnessed for the first time their power to convert and ignite huge crowds. “It was passionate. It was reckless,” says Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, who also astounded audiences with their New York noise-rock. “[Nirvana] were going on at 2:00 in the afternoon, playing a 20-minute set. But there was this massive amount of pogo’ing going on.” With drummer Dave Grohl on tour with the band for the first time, and the new Nevermind material, Nirvana were received almost like headliners. Kurt Cobain biographer Charles Cross called it Cobain’s “happiest time as a musician.” Recalls Grohl, “Everything was still very innocent.” A documentary of the tour, 1991: The Year Punk Broke, captured Cobain spraying champagne all over a dressing room and Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic gleefully tearing through a backstage cheese plate. The high point for Moore was in Brussels, where security tried to stop Nirvana’s nightly ritual of smashing their gear, and Novoselic had to be pulled down as he tried to climb up the closing stage curtains. “It was,” says Moore, “the most perverse, deconstructed, psychedelic freakout concert I’ve ever seen.” J.D.

U2 Zoo TV Tour

U2 Zoo TV Tour

For its first tour of the Nineties, the biggest rock band in the world had one simple goal: to completely reinvent itself as a live act. U2 had just given their sound a full-scale makeover with 1991’s Achtung Baby – a groundbreaking fusion of rock, pop, electronic dance grooves and krautrock – and they needed a tour that reflected their sleek, challenging new music. “We were drawn to anything that was going to give us a chance to get away from the Joshua Tree earnestness,” said the Edge, “which had become so stifling.”

The notion of U2 as the inheritors of rock’s social mission had been central to their Eighties stardom. But as the band was well aware, it was increasingly out of step with an era defined by groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who cast a skeptical eye at sweeping Joshua Tree– style rock heroism. For the Achtung Baby tour, U2 were ready to loosen up and throw a dance party, albeit a subversive one, packed with multimedia images that were a clear break from the stark purity of their Eighties stage sets. “The tour was being conceived at the same time as the album,” Bono recalled in 2005. “Zoo radio was a phenomenon before reality TV, with so-called shock jocks such as Howard Stern. It was aggressive, raw radio, the precursor to The Jerry Springer Show. The world was getting tired of fiction. … We wanted to make a tour that referenced this zoo/reality phenomenon.”

Extensive cable news coverage was a fact of life by the early Nineties; during the Gulf War, images of Scud missiles raining down on Iraq became dinnertime entertainment. U2 essentially turned the Zoo TV set into a postmodern art installation that reflected the numbing cacophony of the cable-TV era, playing in front of a mosaic of TV screens that mashed up war footage with old sitcoms, cooking shows and everything in between.

Bono, meanwhile, came up with a new, sly persona to match the new stage set. He donned an Elvis-style leather jacket, wraparound sunglasses and leather pants that evoked Jim Morrison. He took this rock star amalgamation and created a character called the Fly. “When I put on those glasses, anything goes,” Bono told Rolling Stone . “The character is just on the edge of lunacy. It’s megalomania and paranoia.”

Zoo TV opened in Florida on February 29th, 1992. If the staging and Bono’s wild get-up weren’t enough indications this was a new U2, the band kicked things off with eight consecutive songs from Achtung Baby. “People went for it,” Bono said to Rolling Stone later that year. “The first show, you just didn’t know. ‘How is this going to go down?’ And they went for it. I think our audiences are smart and that they expect us to push and pull them a bit. They had to swallow blues on Rattle and Hum, for God’s sake! They can take it.”

The tour’s first leg coincided with the 1992 presidential race, and every night from the stage Bono called the White House and asked to speak with President Bush. “Operator Two and I had a great relationship,” Bono said. “She tried not to show it, but I could tell she was very amused, as we rang her night after night.”

Bush never took the call, but a young Arkansas governor was all too happy to talk to the band. U2 met with Bill Clinton in Chicago in September 1992 during the tour and forged what became an enduring relationship. The sitting president was unmoved. “I have nothing against U2,” Bush told a crowd in Bowling Green, Ohio, that month. “You may not know this, but they tried to call me at the White House every night during their concert. But the next time we face a foreign-policy crisis, I will work with John Major and Boris Yeltsin, and Bill Clinton can consult with Boy George.”

For opening acts, U2 chose artists who enhanced the idea of the band as a gathering point for pop music in an increasingly fragmented era – from Public Enemy to the Ramones, Velvet Underground and Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder was initially skeptical about the scale of Zoo TV, but he came around. “[I eventually] understood that these weren’t decisions they were making out of fashion or simply being clever,” Vedder said. “It was like an edict they’d created as a new philosophy for the group, to really explore the avenues of connecting to people on a large level.”

During a break in early 1993, U2 recorded Zooropa, which took the experiments of Achtung Baby further. When the tour resumed, Bono devised a new character: MacPhisto, a devilish figure with white face paint and horns. “The character was a great device for saying the opposite of what you meant,” said the Edge. “One highlight was calling the minister of fisheries in Norway, young Jan Henri Olsen, to congratulate him on whaling, which was forbidden by the European Union but legal in Norway. He actually took the call and invited Bono to come and have a whale steak with him.”

Those phone calls became a major part of each performance – some nights Bono ordered pizzas for the crowd; on another he rang Madonna on her cellphone (she didn’t pick up). As venues got bigger, U2 kept things intimate by adding a miniset to the show, playing on a tiny stage.

The wall-to-wall video screens also set the scene for every pop spectacle that followed, from Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball to Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark Tour. “Zoo TV wasn’t a set piece, it was a state of mind,” said the Edge. For Bono, the experience was life-changing: “I’ve had to stop ‘not drinking.’ I’ve had to smoke incessantly. I’ve learned to be insincere. I’ve learned to lie. I’ve never felt better!” A.G.

Radiohead at Glastonbury

Radiohead Glastonbury 1997

The scene Radiohead encountered at 1997’s Glastonbury Festival looked more like a war zone than a concert. It had been pouring rain for days, forcing the 90,000 fans at the remote field in Somerset, England, to live like refugees in a monsoon. Two stages sank into the mud, and some fans actually came down with the World War I–era malady trench foot. Early in Radiohead’s set, Thom Yorke’s monitor melted down. The lighting rig was shining directly into his face, meaning he couldn’t see in addition to being unable to hear himself play. “If I’d found the guy who was running the PA system that day,” Yorke told a journalist , “I would have gone backstage and throttled him. Everything was going wrong. Everything blew up.”

Weeks after releasing their career-defining album, OK Computer , it looked like Radiohead might flop during a headlining set at the world’s biggest music festival. Instead, the chaos inspired one of the band’s greatest performances. Rage poured through Yorke all night long, giving extra fire to eight songs from  OK Computer, plus nearly all of The Bends —  and even a crowd-pleasing version of their first hit, “Creep.” It was a transcendent performance, even if Yorke didn’t realize it at the time. “I thundered offstage at the end, really ready to kill,” he said. “And my girlfriend grabbed me, made me stop, and said, ‘Listen!’ And the crowd were just going wild. It was amazing.” In 2006, Q magazine voted it the greatest concert in British history. A.G.

Sleater-Kinney American Tour

Sleater-Kinney American Tour

In early 1997, the most exciting new band in rock was a trio of young women driving their own van across the country, with only their friend Tim along as a roadie. “We’d get to the club,” recalls Sleater-Kinney singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, “and the sound man would be like, ‘Wait. You’re the band? You? You girls?'” But playing songs from its album Dig Me Out, the group bulldozed the staid indie-rock scene with unbridled punk-rock exuberance. “In Atlanta, 10 women got onstage and took their shirts off and danced with us,” says co-leader Carrie Brownstein. “I don’t know if they’d ever felt that freedom before, and I was really proud to provide the soundtrack for that.” J.D.

Pearl Jam American Tour

Pearl Jam American Tour

By the mid-Nineties, Pearl Jam were in serious danger of imploding, thanks to intraband tensions and a self-defeating war against Ticketmaster that had left them almost unable to tour. But they started over with 1998’s aptly named Yield, their most collaborative album yet, and when they hit the road with a new drummer, Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron, the shows fulfilled their promise as one of rock’s all-time great live acts. New tracks (“Given to Fly,” “Do the Evolution”) were instant crowd favorites, and classics like “Alive” sounded bigger than ever. “We’re making up for lost time here,” Eddie Vedder told the crowd one night. “Thanks for waiting.” A.G. 

Phish at Big Cypress

Phish Big Cypress

For Phish’s Trey Anastasio, this colossal one-band festival, at a South Florida Native American reservation, was “the culmination” of the band’s first run. “Eighty thousand people came from all over,” he said, “and virtually nothing went wrong.” The fest’s final set began around midnight, and went on for more than seven hours, displaying every side of peak Phish, a singular mix of in-joke quirks and ESP-level improv. Toward the end came an unforgettable take on the “Sunrise” section of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” played as the sun actually rose. “I will never listen to that tape because I know what a letdown it would be compared to what it was actually like,” Anastasio said. “When that sun came up, and the sky was blazing pink, it was an indescribable moment.”  W.H.

Brian Wilson at the Royal Festival Hall

Brian Wilson at the Royal Festival Hall

For decades, Brian Wilson avoided even talking about Smile , the psychedelic follow-up to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds he shelved under the stresses of drug abuse and psychiatric problems. At a 2002 Pet Sounds show in London, though, someone said to the promoter, “How can we possibly top this?” The idea of a Smile tour came up. “We all kind of chuckled,” says Wilson keyboardist Darian Sahanaja. But 20 months later, after poring over the old Smile tapes, Wilson walked onstage and finally delivered on his decades-old promise of a “teenage symphony to God,” bringing rock’s most famous unheard album back to life. From the first celestial harmonies of “Our Prayer” much of the audience was in tears. Backstage afterward, Wilson was exultant, shouting, “I did it!”  A.G.

Daft Punk Alive Tour

Daft Punk Alive Tour

In the early aughts, electronic-dance live “performances” were rarely more than one or two dudes nodding their heads around laptops. All that changed at Coachella on April 29th, 2006, when Daft Punk unveiled their genre’s most dazzling musical spectacle. In the overheated, overcrowded darkness of the festival’s Sahara Tent, two helmeted, robot-like figures – Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo – stood inside a 24-foot aluminum pyramid covered in high-intensity LED panels and performed their catalog as a megamix to nearly 40,000 fans. “It was the most synced-up we ever felt,” Bangalter said. What might have been a legendary one-off became a 2007 tour that blew minds across Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia, inspiring the likes of Skrillex and untold others . W.H.

Leonard Cohen Worldwide Tour

Leonard Cohen Worldwide Tour

It started as a financial rescue mission. After Leonard Cohen learned, at age 70, that his manager/sometime-lover had absconded with most of his life savings, he realized that his only chance of replenishing his funds was to go on tour. Cohen wasn’t sure how many fans he had left, so he first agreed only to a test run of theater dates in far-flung Canadian towns.

Though he’d never
 much enjoyed touring,
 Cohen was a unique
ly charismatic live performer. Even those first shows stretched past the two-hour mark, mixing elegant rearrangements of 1960s classics like “Suzanne” and “Bird on the Wire” with more recent tunes like “Waiting for the Miracle” and “Boogie Street.” His voice had deepened considerably, but that only gave it more authority and character. “It’s like he was whispering into your ear,” says longtime backup singer Sharon Robinson.

The shows were spectacular, and word-of-mouth spread quickly. By 2009, Cohen was selling out arenas all over Europe, and eventually he hit 20,000-seaters in America, including Madison Square Garden. The tour eventually ran for 387 shows across five years. Even as he neared his 80th birthday, he kept adding new songs and stretching the running time to three and a half hours, even skipping offstage before the encores. “Leonard was really good at conserving his strength and blocking out distractions and prioritizing his energy,” says Robinson. “He lived an almost monastic lifestyle even though he wasn’t a real monk.”

By the time he played his final show, in Auckland, New Zealand, Cohen had gone from cult favorite to cross-generational icon. After he closed that performance with a sprightly “Save the Last Dance for Me,” he doffed his hat, took a deep bow and walked off the stage, smiling. “I want to thank you,” he said to the audience. “Not just for tonight, but for all the years you’ve paid attention to my songs.” A.G.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert

The idea was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with no less than the most important multi-artist concert in history. “I knew the anniversary had potency,” said Hall of Fame Foundation chairman (and Rolling Stone founder) Jann Wenner. “I thought that we had earned the right and responsibility to do this thing. It was an opportunity not to be missed.”

The organizers were determined to put on a show that was far more ambitious than any of the previous megashows, while capturing the intimate, collaborative spirit of the annual induction ceremonies and telling the story of rock & roll. “[I kept saying], ‘If this is just miniconcerts of greatest hits, I’m bored,'” recalled co-producer Robbie Robertson. “‘What do we have to offer that you can’t get anywhere else?'”

The shows, held over two nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, were a rock fan’s dream, with all the artists delivering blistering, unforgettable sets, no doubt inspired by the presence of so many of their peers and the event’s grandeur. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, who closed the first night, performed at their absolute peak, turning themselves into a soul revue as they backed Billy Joel, John Fogerty, Tom Morello and Darlene Love. U2 brought Springsteen back the next night, but the biggest moment came near the end of their set, when they kicked into “Gimme Shelter,” and – out of nowhere – an unbilled Mick Jagger appeared onstage to the stunned delight of the crowd.

The first night began with a nod to rock’s origins: Jerry Lee Lewis pounding out “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Next were Crosby, Stills and Nash (joined by Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and James Taylor), Stevie Wonder (with guests Smokey Robinson, John Legend, B.B. King, Sting and Jeff Beck) and a note-perfect Simon and Garfunkel. On the closing night, Aretha Franklin sang with Annie Lennox and Lenny Kravitz; Jeff Beck jammed with Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons and Sting; and Metallica backed Ray Davies, Ozzy Osbourne and Lou Reed.

“For a lot of us here, rock & roll means just one word: liberation. Political, sexual, spiritual liberation,” Bono said onstage, before Springsteen interrupted him with the other side of the equation: “Let’s have some fun with it!” A.G.

LCD Soundsystem at Madison Square Garden

LCD Soundsystem at Madison Square Garden

“It’s your show,” LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy shouted to a sold-out Madison Square Garden. The raging farewell by Murphy’s beloved group was a Last Waltz for New York’s early-’00s dance-rock scene. “I thought it would be really sad,” recalls keyboardist-vocalist Nancy Whang. “But it was just fun. The energy in the room was really charged.” Fans danced to near-exhaustion as LCD played songs from their entire catalog. With barely two months to prepare the nearly four-hour spectacle, featuring a choir, a horn section and a rickety spaceship, the band tackled a production scale beyond its experience. “It was held together with gum and string,” Whang admits. The night (captured in the 2012 film Shut Up and Play the Hits ) ended in a snowstorm of balloons, culminating the band’s dream of throwing “the best funeral ever.” W.H.

Jay Z and Kanye West ‘Watch the Throne’ Tour

Jay Z & Kanye West 'Watch the Throne' Tour

“I’m sorry if this is your first concert,” Kanye West said to a Los Angeles crowd on the Watch the Throne tour. “It’s all downhill from here.” Supporting their triumphal 2011 LP, Watch the Throne, Jay Z and Kanye convened the greatest superstar summit in hip-hop history. The pair performed on giant, rising cubes that projected video, and, when the tour hit Paris, encored with their hit “Niggas in Paris” 12 times in a row. “People just wanted more,” says the tour’s lighting designer Nick Whitehouse. “It made people crazy.” C.R.W.

Fleetwood Mac ‘On With the Show’ Tour

Fleetwood Mac 'On With the Show' Tour

The return of Christine McVie after 16 years brought the Mac’s live show to a whole new dimension. Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar solo on “Go Your Own Way” soared to new heights; Stevie Nicks seemed possessed during the nightly exorcism of “Rhiannon”; and all three voices locked seamlessly on “Little Lies.” It was all the magic of 1977 without the distractions of hard drugs and sexual soap operas . A.G.

Taylor Swift ‘1989’ Tour

Taylor Swift '1989' Tour

“You’re not going to see me playing the banjo,” Taylor Swift warned Rolling Stone at the outset of her 1989 world tour. On her Speak Now and  Red tours, she claimed her turf at the crossroads of country, pop and classic arena rock. But for 1989, Swift made her bold move into full-on dance pop. She turned up the glitz with new material like “New Romantics” and “Blank Space” (“blatant pop music,” as she put it), but she didn’t compromise on her trademark emotional overshares, whether opening up in confessional interludes or torching up ballads (“Clean”). Swift aimed for a glammier look onstage, reflecting the grown-up flair of the music, and she invited high-profile guests: In Nashville, she duetted with Mick Jagger; in L.A., she brought out Beck, St. Vincent, Justin Timberlake, Chris Rock and Alanis Morissette. It all summed up her staggeringly ambitious vision of modern pop. Rob Sheffield

Beyoncé Formation Tour

Beyoncé Formation Tour

Strutting in stacked heels across the turf of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, wrapped in golden bandoleers and flanked by a Black Panther–styled phalanx of dancers, Beyoncé performed “Formation” at the 2016 Super Bowl in a cameo appearance even fiercer than her 2013 Super Bowl triumph. It was the overture to a tour that redefined stadium-scale concert staging. “She had an overall vision of what she wanted,” says Steve Pamon, chief operating officer of Beyoncé’s label, Parkwood Entertainment. “Not only in terms of a business, but in the type of experience we want to give the fans.”

Four days before the tour began, Beyoncé surprise-dropped her instant classic Lemonade. British set designer Es Devlin, who had previously worked with Kanye West and U2, created a kind of spectacular intimacy that fit the album’s personal themes. At midstage was the “Monolith,” a video-screen centerpiece standing seven stories high that projected the show in 70-foot magnification, making every seat feel front-row. On opening night in Miami, Bey burned through “Crazy in Love” and “Bootylicious” in a fire-engine-red latex bodysuit and matching boots, looking like an anime empress. The shows also dialed it down for slow jams like the breakup meditation “Mine,” during which the Monolith split in two to reveal dancers suspended on cables while Bey and a squadron in lace bodysuits rose up from beneath the stage. At the end of the show, a moving catwalk connected the main stage to a huge wading pool, where Beyoncé and her dancers splashed around in a baptismal moment that reflected Lemonade’ s journey from betrayal to rebirth.

The Formation World Tour began around the time of Prince’s death. In Minneapolis, she performed his classic “The Beautiful Ones” before a rapt crowd, honoring a hero and placing herself in his epic lineage. “I would put that tour up against any performance,” Pamon says. “By any artist at any age.” Brittany Spanos  

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National Hotel is one of the oldest hotels in Moscow. It is situated in the heart of city, at the corner of Tverskaya and Mokhovaya streets, near with Red Square, Kremlin, and Aleksandrovsky Garden. Its history is connected with the history of Moscow and Russia.

The building of National hotel started in 1900 at the project of Aleksandr Ivanov architect. The most up-to-date stuff was used, fronts of National Hotel were decorated with stones, ceramic tile, modeling. The interiors of the hotel were amazing: marble stairs in lobby, stained windows, mosaic floors, atlantes figures near the elevators.

The furniture for rooms was made by special request, from red wood, light and fumed oak, and other sorts of wood. The most luxuries rooms, Ludovik the XV or Ludovik XVI were situated on the third floor, for people of high rank. Many rooms were equipped with bathrooms, safes. The building had the most up-to-date system of central heating, developed at San-Gally factory. The hotel was installed of telephones, it was a sign of luxury in those years. There were also reading-hall, restaurant, shops, bakery, and wine-cellar in National Hotel.

National Hotel was opened in 1903 and received the status of one of the best hotels in Moscow. Accommodation in this hotel was expensive, but there were always a lot of guests. Rich merchants, foreign diplomats, manufacturers, artist, and actors stayed here.

October Revolution influenced on the history of National Hotel. It served as a station of counter-revolutionaries. After Bolsheviks' victory all Moscow hotels were nationalized. National Hotel became the First Counsel house. In 1918 the members of new government stayed in National Hotels' rooms. Dzerzhinsky, Sverdlov, Trotsky lived there, in 107 room Lenin and Krupskaya stayed for a while. The rooms was furnished with green suite of furniture, on the massive writing-table, covered with green cloth, were marble ink-pot with paperweight; two bronze candlesticks and bronze lamp with green abat-jour also decorated the room.

For a long time National Hotel was Russian Central executive committee's hall of residence. In thirties was decided to return the former functions of the hotel. The building of the hotel was reconstructed, ground floors were tiled with granite. Furniture was from Anichkov and Great Palace. National Hotel was look like a museum, that influenced on price. The accommodation was expensive even for foreigners. So National Hotel brought losses, in 1950-60 partly restoration was carried out. But the popularity of hotel was lost.

In 1985 was decided to renew National Hotel totally. The part of furniture was sent to the museums, the other part was renewed. Austrian Rogner and Russian mosproekt-2 companies were the general providers.

There were three main directions in this work — replan of building, modernization of hotel facilities, renovation of room interiors. Health centre, attic with twenty extra rooms, cafe with winter garden were situated in the north front of National Hotel. All details in design were made under the past.

In 1995 new National Hotel placed the first guests. The new period of its history began. The hotel was rewarded with a category of five-star hotels. Present and past combined in the interiors of National Hotel. In 2000 National Hotel celebrated its centenary.

9th of December, 2003 was the mourning date in the history of National Hotel. Act of terrorism was committed in that day. Due to the explosion of Mercedes, parked by the hotel entry, six people were died, including two suicide bombers; more than 12 people were wounded. In July, 2005 a monument to the victims was set up there.

Nowadays National Hotel is one of the best hotels in Moscow. National Hotel has been rewarded with the Diamond star of USA Hospitality Academy for its achievements. General manager Ury Podkopaev, directed since 1985, was twice gave the rank of the best manager.

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  1. List of the Rolling Stones concert tours

    The Rolling Stones concert at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula, Montana on 4 October 2006. Since forming in 1962, the English rock band the Rolling Stones have performed more than two thousand concerts around the world, becoming one of the world's most popular live music attractions in the process. The Stones' first tour in their home country was in September 1963 and their first ...

  2. The Rolling Stones Concert History

    1,528 Concerts. The Rolling Stones is an English rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for six decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the rock era. In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones pioneered the gritty, rhythmically driven sound that came to define hard rock. Their first stable line-up consisted of vocalist ...

  3. Category:The Rolling Stones concert tours

    The Rolling Stones European Tour 1970; The Rolling Stones European Tour 1973; The Rolling Stones Far East Tour 1965; The Rolling Stones first concert in China; The Rolling Stones Irish Tour 1965; The Rolling Stones Tour of Europe '76; The Rolling Stones UK Tour 1971; The Rolling Stones US Tour 1978; The Rolling Stones' Tour of the Americas '75

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    Tour History. Date Concert; Wed Aug 03 2022: The Rolling Stones Waldbühne · Berlin, Germany : Sun Jul 31 2022: The Rolling Stones Friends Arena · Stockholm, Sweden : Wed Jul 27 2022: The Rolling Stones Veltins-Arena · Gelsenkirchen, Germany : Sat Jul 23 2022: The Rolling Stones HIPPODROME PARISLONGCHAMP · Paris, France

  5. List of the Rolling Stones concert tours

    The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972, also known as the "Stones Touring Party", shortened to S.T.P., was a much-publicized and much-written-about concert tour of the United States and Canada in June and July 1972 by the Rolling Stones. Constituting the band's first performances in the United States following the Altamont Free Concert in ...

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    Aerial view of the Stones' concert at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula, Montana, in October 2006. ... The Guardian ranked it 19 on their list of the 50 key events in rock music history. Before this tour the loudest sound at large-capacity shows was often the crowd, so the Stones used lighting and sound systems that ensured they could be ...

  7. The History of the Rolling Stones' Outrageous Tour Announcements

    In August 1989, to announce what essentially was a comeback tour that point, the Stones took to the rails. Steel Wheels would be the first Rolling Stones album since 1986, and to help promote the ...

  8. Top 7 Iconic Moments from The Rolling Stones' Tours

    2. Hyde Park, 1969. The Stones played a free show in Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. The Stones hadn't performed in more than two years and this concert was the first with their new guitarist Mick ...

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    Experience the Rolling Stones like never before - access the latest news, tours and music and delve deep in to past shows and albums through thrilling audio/visual events. Share. Exile On Main St. May 1972 album Tap to view. Rock'n'roll's most rock'n'roll album.

  10. The Rolling Stones' 10 most memorable concerts

    But, more than anything, The Rolling Stones' live concert history is a brilliant document of the various changes the band went through during their career: the influences they adopted and jettisoned, the songs that ensured and the ones that didn't. So, without further ado, here are 10 of the best performances by the immortal Rolling Stones . The Rolling Stones' 10 most memorable concerts:

  11. Rolling Stones concert history

    Steel Wheels Success. Just as the Rolling Stones were beginning their North America 'Steel Wheels' tour in 1989, they appeared on the cover of Time magazine, September 4th, 1989. Click for copy. The 36-city Steel Wheels tour started on August 31, 1989 in Philadelphia.

  12. The Rolling Stones American Tour 1969

    The Rolling Stones' 1969 Tour of the United States took place in November 1969. With Ike & Tina Turner, Terry Reid, and B.B. King (replaced on some dates by Chuck Berry) as the supporting acts, rock critic Robert Christgau called it "history's first mythic rock and roll tour", while rock critic Dave Marsh wrote that the tour was "part of rock and roll legend" and one of the "benchmarks of an era."

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    The Rolling Stones 1998 Tour Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow, August 11 Moscow, Russia See the official Rolling Stones web site in Russia, also having info in English! For the first time ever, the Rolling Stones will play Russia at the Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow on August 11, 1998. This page is dedicated to details of Moscow, how to get there, where to ...

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    The Rolling Stones have announced they are going back on the road with a brand-new tour performing in 16 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Fans can expect to experience Mick, Keith and Ronnie play their most popular hits ranging from "Start Me Up," "Gimme Shelter," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Satisfaction" and more, as well as fan ...

  18. The Rolling Stones US Tour 1978

    The Rolling Stones' US Tour 1978 was a concert tour of the United States that took place during June and July 1978, immediately following the release of the group's 1978 album Some Girls.Like the 1972 and 1975 U.S. tours, Bill Graham was the tour promoter. One opening act was Peter Tosh, who was sometimes joined by Mick Jagger for their duet "Don't Look Back".

  19. A walking tour of central Moscow—through both real and fictional history

    And, of course, more history in one street corner than in many entire towns. This tour of Moscow's center takes you from one of Moscow's oldest streets to its newest park through both real and fictional history, hitting the Kremlin, some illustrious shopping centers, architectural curiosities, and some of the city's finest snacks. Start ...

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    Museum of Moscow History. part of VisitRussia.com . Moscow +7-495-505-63-25. St. Petersburg +7-812-309 ... bronze and stone items tells about the most ancient period of Moscow history. The collection of maps and drafts shows how the city of Moscow changed from year to year. Numerous photos recreate the important occasions, celebrations and ...

  21. The Rolling Stones 1964 tours

    The Rolling Stones concert chronology. 1st American tour 1964. 3rd British tour 1964. 4th British tour 1964. The Rolling Stones' 3rd British tour was a concert tour by the band. The tour commenced on 1 August and concluded on 22 August 1964. It included a single concert in the Netherlands and concluded with concerts in the Channel Islands .

  22. National Hotel. Moscow Hotels history

    In 1995 new National Hotel placed the first guests. The new period of its history began. The hotel was rewarded with a category of five-star hotels. Present and past combined in the interiors of National Hotel. In 2000 National Hotel celebrated its centenary. 9th of December, 2003 was the mourning date in the history of National Hotel.

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    The Rolling Stones Tour of the Americas '75; Tour by The Rolling Stones: Start date: 1 June 1975: End date: 8 August 1975: Legs: 1: No. of shows: 46: ... History. After the departure of Mick Taylor, this was the Rolling Stones' first tour with new guitarist Ronnie Wood. Announced on 14 April as merely playing with the band on the tour, it would ...