The 45th anniversary of a classic rock moment: The Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden
Excellent article in today's NY Daily News - paper and online edition.
Jagger and Taylor on stage, November 28th, 1969 - Photo: Walter Iooss Jr/Getty Images
The 45th anniversary of a classic rock moment: The Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden
The 1969 shows at the Garden were a high point for the band, produced the classic album 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out' and helped push rock concerts into a new eraNEW YORK DAILY NEWS- Sunday, November 23, 2014, 2:00 AM
Last night, the Rolling Stones were scheduled to wrap a world tour that brought them to 21 countries in 10 months. As with all the band’s road shows of the last quarter century, the bulk of the material planned for Saturday’s concert in Auckland, New Zealand, dated from the ’60s and ’70s. Meaning nostalgia provided the draw and reverence ruled.
That’s been true at Rolling Stones shows for so long, it’s hard to remember that this family-friendly group of preservationists used to be seen as satanic revolutionaries, hell-bent on shredding every aspect of the social and moral order.
This week, we’ve got an ideal excuse to recall all that.
Thursday and Friday mark 45 years since the Stones gave a series of shows at Madison Square Garden that hold a towering place in the history of both music and New York culture. The concerts presented the Stones at the pinnacle of their beauty and threat. They also yielded one of the greatest live albums of all time, “Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out,” released in 1970. More, they helped usher in a new era of rock staging and scale.
The Stones that invaded New York in the fall of 1969 bore no relation, either physically or sonically, to the band that had last played America three summers before. They couldn’t appear in the U.S. from 1966 until the decade’s close because of visa problems caused by the drug arrests of three of the band’s members — Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones.
Jones died of “misadventure” in July of ’69, shortly after being replaced by Mick Taylor. The latter guitarist, just 20 at the time, was making his New York debut at the November MSG shows. And what a debut it was.
Taylor remains the most expansive, and fleet-fingered, guitarist the Stones have ever had. And never have his skills been more faithfully recorded than on “Ya-Ya's.” His long solo on “Sympathy for the Devil” ideally balances exploration with fire. He’s just as revelatory in the terse breaks and licks in songs like the opener, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” or “Honky Tonk Women” (a single that ruled the summer of ’69).
The view from the stage
Together, the band’s fierce work ranks “Ya-Ya's” with the greatest concert albums ever cut in New York, including James Brown’s “Live at the Apollo” in ’63 and the Allman Brothers’ “At Fillmore East” from ’71.
Then-new Stones’ songs, like the rape fantasy “Midnight Rambler” and the call to arms “Street Fighting Man,” moved far beyond the pop-friendly singles of the band’s ’66 tour, like “Get Off of My Cloud” and “Paint It Black.” They shot the Stones’ original bad-boy persona to the sky.
A deluxe version of “Ya-Ya's” adds five songs from the shows to the mix. It also features parts of the opening sets from B.B. King and Ike and Tina Turner.
From Turner, Jagger learned many of the dance moves you can witness in the deluxe set’s DVD component. The DVD lets fans bask in the Stones’ cool new look, which found them with longer hair, sunken cheekbones and a satiny take on the devil by Jagger.
The shows also came at a pivotal time for the Garden. The hall had just opened at 33rd St. and Seventh Ave. in 1968. The Stones were one of the first rock acts to play there, following bands like Cream and The Doors.
1969 became a transitional year for rock concerts in general. After Woodstock, which took place in August, promoters saw the scope of the audience and started to think big. The days of rock theaters, like the Fillmore, were numbered. Arenas became the new headliner norm, to be followed in the mid-’70s by — shudder — stadiums. The Stones’ debut at the Garden helped escalate the expectations of scale for live rock.
Six days after the Stones’ shows at the Garden, they headlined a horrific event at Altamont Speedway outside of San Francisco. Four people would die there and, some thought, the Woodstock dream died with them. Of course, all that truly ended was an idealized view of youth culture. The music itself lived on — long enough to make this coming anniversary well worth celebrating.
jfarber@nydailynews.com[
nydn.us]