PARENTAL ADVISORY: If you’re a young person, don’t let your parents catch you reading these reviews, because there are occasional references to the illicit use of cannabis, LSD, PCP, quaaludes, meth, cocaine and/or vast quantities of alcohol. The other warning is this: If you consume these things, you will forget a great deal of the fun you had, and that’s no fun.

The Rolling Stones show at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens on July 15, 1972, was my first “big” concert, and what an introduction. In fact the show itself was almost anti-climactic for me because I’d been swept up in Stones mania several weeks earlier when the tickets went on sale. Now that was a rock’n'roll experience!

The Stones’ American Tour 1972, aka STP, for Stones Touring Party, was a zoo on wings. “Exile on Main Street”, which, like many people, I regard as their best album ever, had just come out in May, and this was the band’s first trip back to North America since they stood by and watched a fan get killed at Altamont in 1969. “The Greatest Rock’n'Roll Band in the World” were on their way and the media and the fans went nuts.

Well, I certainly did. The deal was you had to line up for tickets, otherwise you couldn’t see the show. (Man were we naive back then!) So I and a few friends spent a rather chilly night on the pavement outside the Gardens that took on a life of its own thanks to an ill-considered dose of subversively potent windowpane acid. The stuff had so much speed in it that I walked up and down half of Yonge Street (Canada’s longest street, remember) a couple of times and was still vibrating, sleepless, two days later.

And our reward for the ordeal — which as I recall involved every scary-looking person and place in downtown Toronto and a visit to a photobooth that was almost as scary — was a few seats in the greys, the uppermost deck of the mammoth barn built for the glory team of Canadian hockey, the Toronto Make Believes. Greys, the ticket seller told us at about 8.30am, not long after he opened his window, were “all that was left”.

Naturally, almost every other Canadian citizen managed to get better seats than we did, the prime minister, for example, personally distributing golds, reds and blues to voters in the Atlantic provinces who had never even heard of the Stones. On the day of the concert we could have bought much, much better seats from people who did not spend a night queued up for tickets.

Came the big day, and I was primed without dope. I had a ticket for the Mariposa Folk Festival the next day out on Toronto’s Centre Island, and there were some big names in town for it. (It turned into a madhouse too. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell showed up, then Gordon Lightfoot was seen strolling among the unwashed masses with some little guy under his arm. Holy shit, it was Bob Dylan! Mayhem ensued. Evidently Dylan was prepared to perform, too, but we scared him off.)

The Rolling Stones, thank God, aren’t nearly so skittish. The ‘72 tour has been called the Stones’ “masterpiece speedball of indoor triumph, outdoor maelstrom and backstage debauch”. The maelstrom was set in motion in Vancouver on June 3. With people like Truman Capote covering the proceedings for Rolling Stone and Terry Southern for the Saturday Review, with Dick Cavett waiting in the wings and Bianca Jagger and Anita Pallenberg getting into catfights backstage, there was much to keep track of.

In Vancouver 30 cops were treated for injuries when 2,000 fans tried to crash the Pacific Coliseum. Police kept busy in San Diego, Tucson, Washington and Detroit, and in Montreal the day after the twin Toronto shows, somebody blew up the equipment van outside the Forum and fans rioted when it was discovered that 3,000 forged tickets had been sold.

The day after that, the mayor of Boston had to bail Jagger and Richards out of a Rhode Island jail after a punch-up with a photographer. The mayor didn’t want a riot if the Stones were unable to play Boston. Meanwhile the Hell’s Angels, the band’s congenial co-hosts at Altamont, had a hit out on Jagger, so both Jagger and Richards were carrying .38s.

There were between 40 and 50 concerts in the US and Canada, depending on who’s remembering. The band flew into Toronto from Detroit for their third and fourth gigs in three days, back to back Saturday shows scheduled for 5.30 and 9. They supposedly earned $100,000 for the day’s work, which sounds absurd now, but “earned” remains the operative word, because it was 100 degrees Fahrenheit inside the Gardens (or 150, according to Jagger) and they worked their butts off for the fans, 16,000 or 19,000 of them, depending on who’s remembering.

Here’s what I remember: The honestly great thing about being way up with the gods in the greys of Olympus is that you could watch the chaos below uncoil, both on and offstage, and the stage happened to have these seriously freaky serpents snaking across it. So when Jagger started hammering the stage on the beat with one of his long scarves during the most blissfully dynamic rendition of “Midnight Rambler” ever performed, I was feelin’ it! People down lower could not see what I was seeing. Those crimson dragons took a pounding.

The song would slow right down and Jagger sang, “Well ya heard about the midnight –” then WHAM! on “ram” (fol- lowed by “bler” of course). It was a blur, but he kept doing it, boosting the tension every time, so the goosebumps had plenty of time to cover every centimetre of your skin and force your hair to stand up.

I also vividly remember Stevie Wonder’s warm-up act, which was wicked good. He was high on “Superstition” at the time and cookin’, plus a hell of a lot better keyboard player than I’d expected.

Here’s what else happened: Stuff I remember now that somebody else mentions it. Mick Taylor! Oh, yeah! He was still a Stone then, and lifted the roof off the place with his solos on “Love In Vain” and “Sweet Virgina”.

Helping out the band were Bobby Keys on sax, Jim Price on other horns and Nicky Hopkins on piano. The band’s usual keyboard guy, Ian Stewart, was there, but only as the road manager.

They also played “Brown Sugar”, “Bitch”, “Rocks Off”, “Gimme Shelter”, “Happy”, “Tumbling Dice”, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, “All Down the Line”, “Honky Tonk Woman” and Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny”, finished off the show with a full-throttle and thanks-for-the-coke “Rip This Joint” and then came back out and did “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man”, the last one with Jagger flinging rose petals all over the place.

What they didn’t play was “Sympathy for the Devil”, which was still a no-no in North America because it had been “the knifing theme” at Altamont.

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The 1975 Tour of the Americas didn’t quite make to the other America, the South one, as planned. I think the band ran out of coke and didn’t realise it came from Peru in the first place. But they did make it as far as Toronto again and had another go at demolishing the Gardens on June 17. Mick Taylor had quit so they asked a Face to fill in, Ron Wood, and he did well enough that in December they asked him to stop being a Face and start being a Stone.

The tour started half a year after “It’s Only Rock’n'Roll” came out. No one was buying the album so they decided to inflict a little salesmanship, beginning with a “press conference” in Manhattan that was actually a matter of the Stones riding down Broadway on the back of a flatbed truck, playing “Brown Sugar”. A bit of old hat now, but that was the first live-concert publicity gimmick by a major band, so there you go.

Not satisfied with buggering up the traffic, Jagger had sent for one of those mail-order giant inflatable cocks, which wouldn’t stay erect all the time,so he he affectionately nicknamed it “Tired Grandfather” while sharing it with the fans at every opportunity. Keith thought it was stupid; so did I.

Cancelling the planned gigs in Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela (or perhaps it was mere forgetfulness) gave the lads a couple of free days, and they spent one of them putting 76,000 bums in the seats at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York, and then getting the owners of the bums to stand up again and dance around.

On board for this tour, along with Ian Stewart and percussionist Ollie Brown, was Billy Preston, who’d been a Beatle for a while and now wanted to be a Stone. (The Who later told him to fuck off.) Before anyone played a note onstage, though, Mick had “Fanfare for the Common Man” blaring out across the arenas and football fields. Pomp again, of course, but I’d love to know which common man he had in mind.

And the show went a little something like this: “Honky Tonk Women”, “All Down the Line”, “If You Can’t Rock Me” mixed into “Get Off of My Cloud”, “Star Star”, “Gimme Shelter”, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”, “You Gotta Move”, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, “Happy”, “Tumbling Dice”, “It’s Only Rock’n'Roll (But I Like It)”, “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)”, “Fingerprint File”, “Angie”, “Wild Horses”, Preston taking the lead on “That’s Life” and “Outa-Space”, then “Brown Sugar”, “Midnight Rambler”, “Rip This Joint”, “Street Fighting Man” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. Not bad!

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* See #5: Reggae Sunsplash
* See #6: Neil Young
* See #7: David Bowie
* See #8: The Tubes
* See #9: Pink Floyd
* See #10: Bob Marley
* See #11: Bob Dylan
* See #12: Heatwave
* See #13: Watkins Glen
* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory