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July 9, 1972: Kiel Convention Hall, St. Louis, MO, USA (2 shows)
Mick Jagger, during the show: “On this tour, the audiences have been good, haven’t they? In Knoxville and such it might be a bit quiet, but they have listened and gotten up at the end and responded when we wanted them to… what can you say, good audiences. A bit of crying now and then for Sympathy for the Devil, which I can’t remember anymore. Of course, we might do a long version of it for Nixon.”
From The Selvedge Yard: The Rolling Stones embarked on their 1972 American tour to support the release of Exile on Main Street— which in and of itself was a push into new territory for the band, both musically and commercially. What followed rewrote the game for The Stones and the music industry, and basically set the stage for a decade of big, balls-out tours that went from being simple promotional vehicles the pop culture events. Nothing like this had been done in Rock ‘n’ Roll prior and all subsequent tours would follow the ’72 tour blueprint for scale, attempted musicality, logistics, legal entanglements, drugs, women, hilarity, hangers-on, and general debauchery.
The Stones’ STP Tour brought together a blend of high and low society, almost unthinkable in rock music a mere 10 years earlier. Mick Jagger and wife Bianca were members of the global jet set. While there were other famous and glamorous frontmen, Mick was by this point at another level and his ego and paranoia grew along with it. The tour had a traveling press core– Truman Capote (by this point a total drunk and addicted to tranquilizers), Terry Southern, and Robert Greenfield all covered the tour for various news outlets.
Even the Kennedys, who seem to pop up at every moment of cultural importance, followed the tour. Lee Radziwill and her husband, the artist Peter Beard, were after-party regulars. Capote, after focusing on New York society ladies, must have felt he had gone to Mars with this assignment, and left the tour (along with his own entourage) in New Orleans only to reappear at the final shows at Madison Square Garden. Southern, and especially Robert Greenfield, gave a more complete accounting of the tour and wrote some fine stuff.
