The Rolling Stones: A History of Last Tours and Endless Comebacks

From the novel, the musicians arrived for the songs Angry, Sweet Sound of Heaven and Mess It Up. He was surprised to include Little T&A, sung by guitarist Keith Richards. The Rolling Stones haven’t played it live since 2016.

At the same time, this should not have happened for decades. The first “last tour” of the Rolling Stones was supposed to be in 1975. Jagger had assured everyone that he never wanted to play. However, his vision did not come true. He will be eighty-one years old in July and his band is still touring.

In the sixties, it was already clear that the Rolling Stones were not just a temporary movement that the audience would forget after a year. Thanks to strong songs and growing popularity, they strengthened their position and were not stopped even by excessive drugs and alcohol, which they always promised.

However, the end of the decade was not pleasant. In early July 1969, guitarist Brian Jones died, and although he was no longer a member of the group at the time, his bandmates were deeply hurt.

In December of the same year, a festival was held in the American Altamont, which was supposed to be the opposite of the previous Woodstock and whose main star was the Rolling Stones.

During the performance, there was a fight between the security, which included members of the biker gang Hells Angels, and the fans. During it, one of the security guards stabbed Meredith Hunter, who was eighteen years old. The festival was canceled and the Rolling Stones still consider the event as a dark day in their history.

“I’ll leave when I’m thirty-three. This is the time when one has to start doing something else. I can’t say what it will be, it is in its infancy, but it will definitely not be anything in the entertainment industry. I don’t want to be a rock star all my life. I don’t want to be like Elvis Presley, singing in Las Vegas to all the ladies and old ladies who come to the concert with handbags. It’s a terrible idea,” Jagger told The Independent in 1972.

He should have reached the thirty-three years announced in 1976, so the media believed that the Rolling Stones tour was announced as the last possible tour. But in the end it was different.

On May 1, 1975, journalists were invited to the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. They suspected that the band would announce a big tour in every corner of America. But nothing happened in the living room where the press conference was supposed to take place. Until there was a great noise outside.

Journalists and guests ran out into the street and in the frenzy of New York, they saw members of the Rolling Stones with keyboardist Billy Preston on the back of a slow moving truck. After a while, a version of the song Brown Sugar emerged from the sound they were making.

The performance lasted eight minutes. Jagger then reached for a garbage can and began taking out and throwing flyers promoting the upcoming tour. It was not only journalists who fought for the printed papers, but also fans, who also came because they had heard through whispers that “something was going to happen”. The musicians finished the song, went to the end of the street, got into limousines there and disappeared. The press conference is over.

Drummer Charlie Watts came up with the idea of ​​announcing the tour from the back of a truck, who remembered that this was how Harlem jazz groups used to invite people to evening concerts. Even in later years, the band announced their tours in a manner that resembled entertainment.

After a successful concert campaign, Jagger did not fulfill his vision. But the Rolling Stones used the phrase “this is the last time” several times.

In the second half of the 1970s, they played in Europe and America and lasted until 1982. They then took a break when communication between Jagger and Richards went down. Besides, they all had to get along a bit, because there was a lot of drugs and alcohol in their lives after all.

After various places, they returned to the tour in 1989. They started the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle Tour and in August 1990 they also stopped in Strahov, Prague.

As the latter, the Rolling Stones talked about the Lick Tour, which took place in 2002 for the forty years of its existence. But that wasn’t the final round, apparently also because each new series of concerts of the band were better confirmed technically, which the musicians liked. In addition, each tour made more money than the previous one. And to top it all off, the world began to regard the Rolling Stones as an elusive musical legend.

It belongs to that standard that the band sometimes throw in something about the last round. In reality, however, it seems that the Rolling Stones are not just going to leave the scene voluntarily.