He’s not joking: He and Wood had locked into the two-guitars-sounding-like-one tag team Richards had enjoyed with Brian Jones in the band’s early days the eternally underrated Bill Wyman’s paradoxically low-key and flashy bass playing zooms and swoops and Charlie Watts drives the band with the uptight laid-backness that is the foundation of their greatness. Everybody’s going around talking doom and disaster, and we’re up on stage at the El Mocambo, and we never felt better. It immediately felt the same…it was one of those weird things in Toronto. (Four of those songs were previously released on the 1977 album “Love You Live.”) As Richards says in the liner notes, “The minute I got onstage, it felt just like another Sunday gig at the Crawdaddy. too many) tracks from “Black and Blue,” the band went straight for the jugular, replacing most of their standard ballads or arena-sized epics like “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Midnight Rambler” with club-era from their very earliest days, like “Around and Around,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Route 66” an even Big Maceo Merriweather’s “Worried Life Blues,” many of which they’d rarely played in the previous dozen years if at all.
Along with the stage show, the group’s setlist was downsized for the venue as well: Apart from several (i.e. But by the second show, they’d shaken off the cobwebs and were in classic form. The group - with Ron Wood having replaced Taylor on guitar in 1975 - hadn’t played live in several months and the first night was shaky. Musically, that make-or-break vibe was exacerbated by the recent rise of punk rock, which had placed bands like the Stones squarely in its sights, even though every punk rock band owed a huge debt to a group that more than any other had shaped the genre’s attitudes a dozen years earlier.īut as they’ve showed time and time again, having their backs to the wall brings the best out of the Rolling Stones. While ultimately a deal was reached and Richards received only a suspended sentence, that outcome was far in the future during these dramatic shows. Seeking to spice up a forthcoming live album with some clubbier tracks, the Stones had booked two secret shows at Toronto’s legendary, 300-capacity El Mocambo nightclub - and just days before the concerts, Richards and longtime paramour Anita Pallenberg were busted at the border with heroin. Their concerts had suffered as well, with their 1975-’76 sets meandering toward the three-hour mark, loaded with subpar songs from the above albums and even a dozen-minute, de facto intermission set from Preston (who, although a fine singer and one of the greatest keyboardists of the era, had taken an outsized role in the band).īut if one thing can snap a band out of a daze, it’s the prospect of its guitarist, co-songwriter and musical cornerstone - Richards - facing many years in a Canadian prison on drug charges, which is exactly the circumstances under which this unusual and remarkable concert was recorded in March of 1977. Consequently, those albums - “Goat’s Head Soup,” “It’s Only Rock n’ Roll” and “Black and Blue,” the latter of which many fans consider a nadir in the band’s career - at times sounded more like fusiony rock or ‘70s funk than the Stones. After the generation-defining singles of the ‘60s and the stellar string of albums running from “Beggars Banquet” to “Exile on Main Street,” they’d eked out three comparatively uninspired sets that, due to Keith Richards’ formidable heroin addiction and its multiple accompanying legal problems, found Mick Jagger seeking musical foils in guitarist Mick Taylor and then guest keyboardist Billy Preston. Like virtually every major rock act in the mid-1970s, the Rolling Stones had become bloated and overblown.
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