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pmk251

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Zotz
Rolling Stones - Midnight Rambler - Altamont Speedway Dec 6th 1969

The last performance of this song on the tour. They played it every night, but it still has that delicious feeling of the band winging it. Perhaps they did not know what they had in Taylor or what he was going to do or play. Keith keeps the structure of the songs intact (who else is going to do it?) and you can feel the confidence of the band (and in Taylor) grow during those weeks. There must have been a OMG moment (or two) when they realized we are playing at a new level, even if we are winging it across the country. I love this tour. There is nothing like it. By '72 it was something different, impressive, but different.

"Well, it was Mick Taylor," Charlie Watts told me in 2015, assessing the Stones' late-'69 peak. "We'd never had a virtuoso in the band like that before. He'd play so well that you'd just go on! That was the period when the player was as big as the song." Quote from the MOJO article.

It is unclear whether Charlie meant "go on playing" or "go on stage." The '69 tour feels like he meant both.

Charlie's last line made me think about when Taylor joined the band on stage in more recent years. The whole thing made me uncomfortable. I did not know if Taylor would fit in; or if the band would let him fit in; or if Taylor would do something odd. But one thing struck me as I watched the videos: The audience was listening to what was being played. Perhaps many of them did not know know who Taylor is, but I got the sense that he gave them something to listen to. Hence Charlie's last point.

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5strings
Hi everybody,
Does a vinyl bootleg LP of Baltimore exist ?

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hbwriter
So interesting. With this tour in particular I find myself so locked in to get your Yaya‘s out after living with it for so long, but then every bootleg I hear is so different than what they ended up with. It always becomes more obvious how much post-production they did when you hear a raw version like this but honestly, I’ll take anything from this tour. They were still figuring things out as a live entity, in a way they were starting over, and I feel like this tour was truly the modern Rolling Stones being born.