Stones News Articles
February 27, 1993
By Bobby Hall of the Memphis Commercial Appeal
M. N. 'Nat' Baxter has spent much of his adult life putting out fires, but he's no firefighter. A quarter century as a Memphis Park Commission administrator provided frequent opportunities.
There was the time in 1975 when Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones wanted to begin a concert in Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium by riding five elephants onto the stage.
"After (promoter) Bob Kelley had brought the elephants from Virginia or someplace, Jagger decided they didn't need the elephants," said Baxter, adding the rock concert was wild enough without elephants.
Baxter, 69, who retired Friday as a consultant for the Coca-Cola-Dr Pepper Bottling Co., supervised construction of the stage.
The wildest time for Baxter was the July 4, 1975 concert with the Rolling Stones, which attracted about 51,000.
An estimated 12,000 jammed onto the playing field of the stadium, sitting for hours in 95-degree heat.
"People were pouring in here two days before the concert and sleeping over in the cattle barns (at the fairgrounds) and in cars and trucks," Baxter said.
"On the day of the concert, we ran out of concessions and ice, and we ended up turning on water hoses to let (spectators) spray each other. . . . The next morning we went down to the field and you wouldn't believe some of the things we found - shoes, glasses, bras, panties. It took us three days to clean up the field."
August 18. 1994
By Michael Donahue
Stones' tickets came easy in '78
Gaye Davis can sit back and laugh when she reads about numbered wristbands, long lines and everything else connected with trying to see the Rolling Stones Sept. 27 at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium.
She didn't have to go to any trouble to see the Rolling Stones play at the Mid-South Coliseum in 1978. Mick Jagger gave her tickets.
Davis, executive secretary at the Port of Memphis, was working at the Hyatt-Regency (now the Adam's Mark Hotel). She spotted Jagger and his bodyguard entering an elevator.
"He asked me if I knew a good place to eat," she said. "I hadn't lived in Memphis very long. I told him Bombay Bicycle Club (a restaurant that was in Overton Square). That was pretty stupid. I should have offered to go with them and show them where to go."
Jagger then told her where to pick up a couple of free tickets.
A seamstress at the hotel wanted to go, too, so that afternoon Davis called Jagger's suite. She got two more tickets.
September 28, 1994
By Larry Nager
If after all these years, rock and roll is still about breaking the rules, then Tuesday night at the Liberty Bowl the Rolling Stones shattered the original taboo - that sexually charged, gut wrenching rock is only for the young.
After more than 30 years as a band, the Stones know how to put on a show, that much was obvious from the stage, a spectacular, futuristic set with a huge, cobra-shaped lighting tower, a giant video screen and massive metallic netting at either side of the 220-foot-wide stage.
But while opening act Blind Melon was completely dwarfed in that setting, when the Stones took the stage, they made the stadium seem downright cozy, just another night at your friendly neighborhood Voodoo Lounge for a sellout crowd of 40,211 regulars.
And if the stage was an exercise in high-tech, the band was as satisfyingly raw and unslick as one could wish.
That perfect balance of concert spectacle and real, live rock and roll was set up from the start, as green spotlights washed the stadium from the lighting tower and flashpots flamed up in the bleachers behind the stage, making Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium look like a scene out of a sci-fi prison flick. But then the music started as Charlie Watts's right hand pounded out a Bo Diddley beat on his tom-tom, Mick Jagger, the Prince of Prance, flounced onto the stage and the band lurched into Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away.
That set the theme, as the Stones and the crowd, mostly thirtysomethings and up, rocked on through more than three decades of hormone-driven hits, from Satisfaction to the songs on the band's new "Voodoo Lounge" album.
There was Honky Tonk Women, enhanced by a video montage of females from Mae West and Marilyn Monroe to Shirley Temple and Queen Elizabeth; Street Fighting Man that featured a Mardi Gras's worth of inflatable snakes, skeletons and Indians; and a host of effects from computerized graphics to state of the art lighting.
But the most spectacular effect was the Stones. This was a band that knows how to play together. And while Darryl Jones, replacement for departed bassist Bill Wyman, played a bit too busily, guitarist Keith Richards kept things as loosely tight as ever, alternately pumping out his trademark rhythm guitar and his jagged solos.
Along with the expected classics, there were plenty of surprises, including a bit of Memphis in the Al Green arrangement of the Temptations' Can't Get Next To You and such obscure Stones tunes as Monkey Man.
The supporting cast helped as well, particularly Bobby Keys, who stepped out of the four-man horn section to blow his famous tenor sax solo on Brown Sugar.
"Start me up and I'll never stop," Jagger sang almost two hours into the show. And when the band returned for their encore, Jumpin' Jack Flash, there was no reason to doubt him.
That seems to be the Rolling Stones' secret. With the three original Stones - Jagger, Richards and Watts - all fiftysomething and having survived everything from disco to punk rock, they know what they do best and they do it, playing raunchy, totally unself-conscious blues rock, Hell's own house band with an eternal gig at the Voodoo Lounge.
MEMORIES OF '75 ROLL IN WITH STONES TOUR
September 25, 1994
By Larry Nager
The Rolling Stones' "Voodoo Lounge" rolls into the Liberty Bowl Tuesday night, and though it's the band's most massive undertaking to date, it's one smooth-rolling, well-oiled machine.
The 220-foot-wide stage, complete with giant inflatables and airplane
lights, takes four days to assemble, requiring a 250-member crew, 56 semitrailers, nine custom buses and a Boeing 727 for the band. Budweiser, the tour's national sponsor, is helping pick up the tab for mobilizing those forces, as the tour calls into action a fair portion of the national concert industry.
But unlike the Stones' last Memphis stadium date, this one doesn't require trained elephants or bluesman Furry Lewis, so local promoter Bob Kelley isn't too worried.
"This date is so organized, so controlled, so contracted, so specific," said Kelley, president of Mid-South Concerts, which is producing the show in conjunction with the national promoter, Toronto-based CPI. "In those days it was just, 'Stop complaining, you've got the best date in the country.' "
That "best date" was July 4, 1975, when the Rolling Stones played the Liberty Bowl, then known as Memphis Memorial Stadium. It was a wild time that remains infamous in Memphis concert lore, a brutally hot show day that found many concertgoers stripped to the buff, a time when marijuana consumption was so conspicuous that hemp plants could be seen growing out of the stadium turf a few weeks after the concert.
Today, many of those fans are respectable, fully dressed adults who'll be bringing their children to Tuesday's concert. But it was a different world in 1975 and, not surprisingly, Kelley had a rough time securing the date, as some in the city felt a rock and roll show on Independence Day was a form of treason. But while others had plans for patriotic fireworks displays to begin the Bicentennial year, Kelley had secured his bid in first.
Still, the holiday did trip him up a bit, as a few days before the show, the Stones decided they wanted to do something special for the occasion.
"So we got this elephant call," Kelley said. "They said that on the day we took the colonies back from them they wanted to ride onstage on elephants."
The Stones' production team had scoured the country, securing elephants
from a Ringling Brothers troupe in Minnesota. "That afternoon or the next morning, eight elephants come sauntering into the stadium grounds," Kelley said, still sounding a bit exasperated. "So not only do we have elephants for them to ride onstage, but we have elephants to take care of. Three days before the show, these elephants are hanging around dumping on everything."
But the biggest problem was figuring out how to get them onstage. Every time they tried to get the lead elephant onstage, the wooden ramps were turned into piles of kindling. They reinforced the ramps again and again. "We had that ramp at least 2-, 2 1/2-feet thick and every elephant would go right through."
The solution, so they thought, was to use a swing like those used to maneuver large boats into the water and simply hoist the elephants onstage. The stage was rebuilt on show day, using more than 20 carpenters (all working at inflated holiday rates, Kelley recalled), and the first elephant was placed in the boat swing. "This elephant got about six inches off the ground and he starts freaking because he doesn't like being a boat," Kelley said. The pachyderm was tranquilized and slowly raised up to the stage, which had earlier withstood rigorous weight tests with heavy machinery.
"We took this elephant, swung him around, put him on the stage," Kelley said, pausing for effect before pounding his fist on his desk. "Right through the . . . stage. That was it. That's when I said, 'Enough, it's not gonna work.' "
But the Stones' American manager, Peter Rudge, refused to tell Mick Jagger. That was Kelley's job, he insisted. Jagger arrived the day of the show by private plane and when he got to the stadium, Kelley, who was being held in place by a terrified Rudge, approached the head Stone. "I said, 'Mick, the elephant thing didn't work out. Nothing we can do will hold them.' And he just said, 'Oh (expletive) it, then. Where's me makeup man?' That classic line, and he just walked right into the dressing room. We spent $45,000 trying to make a stage that would be able to hold elephants."
Furry Lewis did make it to the stage, but just barely. Lewis booster Knox Phillips had landed the octogenarian Memphis bluesman the gig of playing for the Stones when they arrived at Memphis Aero a couple days earlier.
"Furry set up on whisky cases on the runway playing, just as they got off and everybody else walked by except Keith (Richards) and (Ron) Wood," said Memphis musician-producer Jim Dickinson, a longtime friend of the Stones who played piano on the "Sticky Fingers" sessions that produced Wild Horses. ''And Keith literally sat at Furry's feet."
The band decided they wanted Lewis to open for them, but Kelley, thinking that the J. Geils Band, the Meters and the Charlie Daniels Band were enough, figured they'd forget about Lewis, according to Phillips. But as Knox enjoyed a Fourth of July at his father Sam's house, "I get an emergency call and Bob says, 'Knox, the Rolling Stones will not go on unless you bring Furry out here.' "
Phillips called Lewis and told him he'd be picked up at his house and Kelley dispatched a limousine and two motorcycle officers to bring Lewis and his girlfriend Fredonia to the show.
"I was there when he got there," Phillips said. Everybody was very kind to Furry, very respectful. But it was really surreal. Here he was, playing guitar, this old man standing there with Mick Jagger in major-league makeup."
Phillips said Lewis, who died in 1981 at 88, was paid $1,000 for playing onstage in front of the 51,000 Rolling Stones fans, the biggest crowd of the bluesman's lengthy career. But when he was done, Lewis was ready to leave. ''Fredonia said, 'Don't you want to see the Rolling Stones? They're the biggest rock and roll band in the world.' And he said, 'I don't care nothing about it.' "
But after Lewis left the stage, the crowd still had to wait for the band. ''The Stones waited until sundown to come on," recalled Walter Dawson, former music critic for The Commercial Appeal and now managing editor of the Monterey County Herald. "There was a long gap before the Stones. People were hot and things were getting a little tense. There was no trouble, but things were getting a little tense."
Kelley says Jagger delayed the show because he'd taken a private plane to visit a girlfriend in Virginia. "He delayed the show about two hours," Kelley said. "And the crowd was not getting unruly, but it was an extremely hot day and they were getting very, very tired. There was a huge amount of tension. And they came on about two, two-and-a-half hours late, and Jagger just pranced onstage with a parasol, like absolutely nothing was wrong and just said some snide remark to Memphis and then the band proceeded . . . and it was like nothing ever happened. The show was unbelievable."
The Stones made $275,000 from the Memphis date, which Kelley recalls paying in cash (he also bought his house shortly after, paying for it, he said, mostly in cash). Memphis did well, also, stadium manager Nat Baxter estimating the city earned $112,000 in rental, parking and concessions.
But the Stones' adventures in the Mid-South weren't over yet. The following day, at Dickinson's suggestion, Richards, Wood and a bodyguard decided to drive to the Dallas concert through Arkansas. But they got no farther than Fordyce, where they were arrested after officers said they smelled marijuana. Richards was later charged with reckless driving and possession of a knife. Bodyguard Fred Sessler was charged with possession of a controlled substance.
Kelley took part in a conference call with the Stones' attorney and the sheriff of Fordyce to try and get Richards and Wood freed. "And he (the sheriff) said, 'We don't need this kind of stuff down here in Fordyce, all this press, getting calls from all over the world. We don't need no Rolling Stones bringing attention to Fordyce, we don't need that.' And I said, 'Why is that, sir?' 'We're already famous. Bear Bryant was born here.' "
Years later, when Dickinson was touring England with Ry Cooder, he stopped in to see Richards and apologized for sending him off to Arkansas.
'I said, 'I'm so sorry. I had no idea that you would have that kind of hassle. And he looked at me, and sometimes he completely drops his accent. Keith thinks of himself as an American, which is the big difference between the two of them (Richards and Jagger). And his accent completely went away
from him and he got this mysterious look on his face and he said, 'Man that was the most fun I ever had in my life.' "
Though the times have changed and rock and roll is much more of a business nowadays, Dickinson says the Stones' music hasn't changed much. Even with Darryl Jones replacing original bassist Bill Wyman, Dickinson said of the band's recent MTV Awards appearance, "It was the only real music anybody played."
In that, Kelley, who later promoted the Stones' 1978 Mid-South Coliseum appearance, agrees.
"When you see the Stones live, you see how good they are," said Kelley, more hard-core fan than veteran promoter. "Once that band hits the stage, it's like all the stress, all the problems, everything that's been associated with the show melts aways and you just stand there and watch in awe."
