| September 11th, 2005 04:22 PM |
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from the Sunday Star Ledger
ALLOW THEM TO INTRODUCE THEMSELVES
Sunday, September 11, 2005
GUY STERLINGS
Star-Ledger Staff
Forty years ago, the Rolling Stones weren't just one of the hottest acts on a rock 'n' roll scene they'd helped to reinvigorate, they were an unqualified entertainment bargain. At least by today's standards.
A grand total of $4.50 covered the cost of a front-row seat to see the group's first concert in New Jersey in 1965. That's $28 in current buying power, a fraction of the $450 the best seats are going for at the band's shows this week at Madison Square Garden and Giants Stadium. Ticket prices start at $62.
The Stones' initial appearance in New Jersey -- two shows, actually -- was at Symphony Hall in Newark on Nov. 7, 1965, a Sunday afternoon. Tickets (priced from $3.00 to $4.50) were still available at the box office the day of the concerts.
The first performance was advertised for 1 p.m., the second at 3:30 p.m. But both were delayed when the Stones got to Newark an hour and a half late. Singing groups Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles and the Vibrations, backed by the Rockin' Ramrods, appeared as opening acts, as did several local amateur groups.
"Up to that point in my young life, it was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen," recalled E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, who was 14 at the time and sat in the first six rows for one of the shows. "I never got to see The Beatles, but I made sure I saw the Rolling Stones."
Weinberg had already been playing drums for a number of years and was living with his family in South Orange, near the Newark border. As he did for other shows in Newark, he took a bus back and forth from Symphony Hall to see the Stones.
Weinberg, 54, still remembers the excitement he felt listening to Stones drummer Charlie Watts warm up before the performance, sight unseen.
When the curtain finally opened, the Stones "looked exactly as they did on the Ed Sullivan Show," he said, a reference to the band's appearances in 1964 and 1965 on the popular and influential Sunday evening TV variety program.
What impressed Weinberg most was how relaxed the Stones seemed, with their casual dress and "scruffy" appearance that was in direct contrast to the clean-cut image and starchy look-alike attire preferred by many bands of the day.
"They looked like five guys who'd gotten together that afternoon," Weinberg said. "There was nothing theatrical about them. I came away thinking that my pipe dreams about being a professional musician maybe weren't pipe dreams after all."
He recalled the Stones segment of the show lasting no more than 25 minutes.
"They played eight or nine songs lasting two-and-a-half to three minutes each and that was it," he said.
The next time Weinberg saw the Stones was at the Garden in 1969 and by then, he said, the show's production and crowd had grown so much that "everything had changed dramatically."
Musical history
The Stones' concerts in Newark came at a time when the 2,800-seat Symphony Hall was the most popular concert venue in New Jersey. Opened in 1925 as the Mosque Theatre, the building changed names in the mid-60's when it was sold to the city of Newark.
Appearing there around the same time as the Stones were Bob Dylan; the Dave Clark Five; Peter, Paul and Mary; a jazz "jamboree" with Ramsey Lewis, Count Basie and Lou Rawls; a "Country Music Cavalcade" starring Eddy Arnold, and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, featuring cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.
Singer Marian Anderson had made a stop at Symphony Hall on her 1964-65 farewell tour as well, and Van Cliburn performed the week after she did. The facility remains open today, looking much the way it did back then -- but nowhere near as busy.
With the British invasion in full swing, the Stones also enjoyed a hectic schedule in 1965 -- touring, recording and making personal appearances on both sides of the Atlantic.
That summer, with their English rivals the Beatles playing Shea Stadium and releasing "Help," their second film, the Stones released "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," their first No. 1 single in the United States. "Get Off of My Cloud" topped the singles chart for the week ending Nov. 6, 1965.
The Stones were constantly on the road, and Newark was an early stop when they set out on their fourth tour of North America in the fall of 1965. Shows at 37 venues in 20 states over 38 days began in Montreal on Oct. 29 and ended in Los Angeles on Dec. 5.
For a typical nine-song concert, the Stones charged $30,000, an unmatched sum in those days, author Christopher Sandford wrote in "Satisfaction," his biography of Stones rhythm guitarist Keith Richards published last year.
The set list typically included "Get Off of My Cloud," "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," "That's How Strong My Love Is," "Mercy Mercy," "The Last Time," "Not Fade Away," "Play with Fire," "Cry to Me" and "Satisfaction."
In Rochester, a week before the Newark show, the local police chief halted the concert seven songs into the performance when he deemed the music too loud and the audience too rowdy. The tour's opening show in Montreal ended after only two songs when the crowd stampeded the stage.
Brush with fame
The audience in Newark was just as primed to see the Stones and, in Symphony Hall, promoters had picked a perfect place for the show.
For days, the Stones' appearance had been touted on Disc-o-Teen, a teenage dance program that was broadcast live Monday through Friday from Symphony Hall on Channel 47, a UHF station. An extra show was taped for Saturday broadcast.
Emceed by Zacherley -- the horror movie host -- the program was to North Jersey what Dick Clark's "Bandstand" had been to Philadelphia, though Disc-o-Teen's viewing audience was substantially smaller because many TV sets didn't pick up the UHF signal.
In conjunction with the concert, Disc-o-Teen ran a contest to select the best amateur bands in the area, with a promise each of the semi-finalists would open for the Stones (two at each show) and the overall winner would get a recording contract as an additional prize.
The winning group was Herald Square from Bergenfield and, while the band never did follow through on the record deal, it did play one song ("You're Not Me," an original) to open the early Stones show in Newark.
Doug Scrivani, one of Herald Square's guitarists, looks back on the concert as the thrill of a lifetime, even though the Stones gave him and his bandmates the cold shoulder in an upstairs dressing room the two groups shared briefly before the show.
He recalled watching the Stones pull up to a side door of Symphony Hall in a limousine that was quickly mobbed by teenagers trying to touch or get a glimpse of band members Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and Richards.
Within moments of getting hustled into the building, the Stones lost themselves in tuning their instruments and mostly ignored everyone outside their own circle, said Scrivani. But before long, Herald Square was informed the Stones wanted the space to themselves, he recalled.
At one point, however, Herald Square's lead singer was able to get in a word with Jagger and then dutifully reported back to his cohorts that Jagger smelled of alcohol.
"Drinking was a big deal to us because we were still in high school," said Scrivani.
Only Watts was friendly, stopping to pose for pictures, he said. By the time the Stones closed out the first show, the members of Herald Square were in their seats down in front of the stage watching the performance.
A symphony of shrieks
Zacherley said he'd never experienced anything quite like the pandemonium that erupted when the curtain rose on the Stones. The screaming was so loud that it pushed him to the back of the balcony to watch most of the show, he said.
The Newark News reporter who covered the event noted that fans unfurled banners, stood on their seats and set off flash cameras the moment they caught sight of the Stones. They also "threw all sorts of rubbish at the singers, presumably as marks of affection," Alan Branigan wrote.
"It was an astonishing sight," Zacherley recalled recently from his apartment in New York. "The screaming was much as it had been for the Beatles at Shea Stadium. It was hysteria."
"Amplifiers turned up to a roar, the Stones rolled through their repertoire," Branigan added in his story. "One of the most popular bits featured Mick Jagger with a tambourine. Instantly, tambourines appeared in many hands all over the hall, with a beat the Spaniards never conceived."
According to Scrivani, the audience rushed the stage when the Stones broke into "Satisfaction" late in their set, bringing the show to a sudden stop. This, despite heavy security that included police officers positioned on and in front of the stage.
At least one girl broke through police lines and got on stage, making a beeline for Jones. To keep the crowd at bay, the heavy fire curtain hanging above the stage was dropped as an extra measure of security, said Scrivani, 57, a professional musician living in Saddle Brook.
Almost all of the tour's early performances were marked by uncontrollable crowds, but things simmered down once the tour moved down the East Coast and headed west, recalled Len Cirelli, keyboard player with the Boston-based Rockin' Ramrods.
"We had to hide in our dressing room in Montreal," he said.
Cirelli, 58, remembered the Stones were very conscious of their image as the misfits of rock 'n' roll, refusing to cooperate during the tour with any media outlet that bashed them or refused to play their songs.
While they might not otherwise have been so inclined, the Stones decided to go along with having amateur bands open the concerts in Newark because the metropolitan area had been supportive of their music, he added.
Between shows or on days off, Jagger and Richards usually went off by themselves, often writing songs, Cirelli said, while Jones, Wyman and Watts spent hour upon hour listening to the records of Howlin' Wolf and other American blues artists.
Rock 'n' roll rebels
If Jones appeared nervous when surrounded by police in Newark, it was not without good reason.
In his 2001 biography of the band, "Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of The Rolling Stones," Stephen Davis wrote that Jones was worried he was about to be arrested for slashing a man's face with broken glass in a club fight in New York two days earlier.
However demanding the Newark shows may have been, the Stones returned to New York almost immediately afterwards and Jones supposedly was in the studio that night with Bob Dylan.
But before taking off to resume the tour in the South several days later, the Stones joined millions of others forced to endure the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 on Nov. 9.
The band returned to New Jersey the following year for shows at two other celebrated venues -- the Marine Ballroom in Atlantic City on July 1 and Convention Hall in Asbury Park on July 3.
After that, the Stones did not come back to New Jersey for another concert until June 14, 1978, when they put on a small-venue show at John Scher's Capitol Theater in Passaic. By that time, Jones was long dead, having died in his backyard swimming pool in 1969, and the Stones were one of the biggest draws in all of show business.
Scher said the call from the Stones' management for the concert at the 3,500-seat facility came from out of the blue. As they have done so often to enjoy the intimacy of an audience almost on top of them, the Stones played Passaic as one several theaters at the start of their 1978 tour.
The positive publicity the show generated not only further cemented the building's reputation as one of the country's premier rock 'n' roll theaters, it also improved his long-strained relations with Passaic's town fathers almost overnight, Scher added.
"From that point forward, they figured the Capitol was a good economic stimulus for the city," he said.
After the Capitol, the Stones made the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford a regular stop on their North American tours, playing the Brendan Byrne Arena in its first year of operation in 1981 before moving to Giants Stadium for dates in 1994, 1997 and 2002. The group also returned to Atlantic City for three nights in 1989.
But many of those who've followed the Stones over the years believe they witnessed something special and distinctly personal that Sunday afternoon in Newark at the dawn of an era when popular music became the driving force behind momentous cultural changes.
"The music was pure, comparatively speaking," said Charlie Dluzniewski, a New York educator who grew up in Harrison and saw the show from Symphony Hall's balcony as a 16-year-old. "But from a social and psychological point of view, the Stones reflected the changes I was undergoing at the time. They were the ones who broke the mold, and I identified with that."
The Rolling Stones
WHERE: Madison Square Garden, 7th Avenue between 31st and 33rd St., New York City; Giants Stadium, Route 3, East Rutherford.
WHEN: Madison Square Garden, Tuesday; Giants Stadium, Thursday.
HOW MUCH: Madison Square Garden: $64.50 to $454.50; Giants Stadium: $62 to $452
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