How jazz inspired The Rolling Stones’ promotional trick
No other rock band epitomised rock and roll quite like The Rolling Stones. Although The Beatles may have ushered in a new style with the band as the main focus, the dirty connotation that comes with the genre is something The Stones helped invent, with one seductive lyric after another coming from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. While the 1960s were extremely kind to them in the wake of The British Invasion, The Rolling Stones started to expand their ideas in the ‘70s.
Coming after the loss of Brian Jones and their turbulent times working with Mick Taylor, The Stones were looking to deconstruct their traditional blues-infused roots. Across albums like Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St, Jagger and Richards had a field day putting different influences under one roof, marrying blues, rock and country together to create a gloriously filthy noise.
Having lost Taylor after a falling out, the band began 1975 with new guitarist Ronnie Wood out of The Faces, who would become their main guitarist alongside Keef until today. When the band started to take to the road in support of their latest records, though, a different kind of market was at play.
Not wanting to promote the tour in the traditional way of monster shows, the Stones ended up making a huge departure thanks to a few nicks from the world of jazz. As the tour was set to begin, Wood remembered the band announcing their run of shows by playing on a flatbed truck in the middle of New York City, recalling in his book Ronnie, “A few mornings later, we gathered at the Plaza, went out the rear door, and went downtown to the corner of 12th Street and 5th Avenue. A flatbed truck was waiting for us, all set up with amps and instruments”.
The stunt began in the mind of Charlie Watts, who had seen jazz musicians do something similar when he was growing up. Though it made for a major publicity stunt for the group, it ended up annoying the journalists surrounding them to no end.
According to Wood, the massive show on a flatbed was also marred by various journalists showing up complaining about the stunt, saying, “Journalists raced after the flatbed, yelling at us, complaining that we’d promised them interviews. And the more they yelled at us, the more we yelled back, ‘Fuck you’”.
Although the Stones had become bigger than almost any other rock band going at that point, their mentality behind the stunt makes perfect sense. Just like the old bluesmen that came before them, the idea of songs like ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Midnight Rambler’ blasting out of an old flatbed as the band drives across the street is keeping in the communal spirit that the Stones helped pioneer.
The communal spirit didn’t stop there, either, with the band already renting out a mobile recording studio and having various artists rent it out to use on their classic albums. Even with millions upon millions of dollars in the bank, The Rolling Stones were still the same old drifters, willing to play to anyone that would have them.
