Music
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Longevity Rocks!
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Early on Wednesday, July 26, 1978, Mick Jagger was about to turn 34. In other words, he was about to go all old on us. Though we already knew that we shouldn’t listen to, much less trust, anyone over 30, we had let Old Mick slide for a few years—and maybe for a few more hours. We were on our way to a birthday party at the Oakland Coliseum among 60,000 of Mick’s closest friends.
The concert was billed as the last stop on the Stones’s “Farewell Tour of America,” and there was no reason to doubt it. It wasn’t just Mick’s terrifying, advancing age. We had just seen the 1970 movie, Performance, in which Mick played a reclusive rocker in his late 20’s who proclaims that he had no intention of being a faded rock star in old age. Our tickets were a wedding gift from my husband Jack’s best man, Chris. He also bought two for himself and invited my best friend Sharon to join us. We left San Francisco that morning as early as we could—which was saying something because Sharon rarely rose before noon on her days off and never left her Haight-Ashbury apartment without full makeup. At 7:30 a.m. the San Francisco BART subway platform was as packed as any I’d ever seen in New York. The crowd was a colorful mixture of wide tie and polyester-suited working stiffs and us tie-dyed concertgoers who were barely awake and just as barely dressed. Already, the 11a.m.-to-whenever concert had snarled the morning commute. We dove into our pot brownies. It took the edge off our anxiety about our “Lawn Seating,” better known then as “sit where you want” tickets. We knew that hundreds of other fans had spent two cold, foggy nights outside the Coliseum gates to get as close to the Stones as possible. No one in our party could afford to miss an extra day of work—however awful our first jobs in San Francisco were. I sold overpriced gold and silver cable car and Golden Gate Bridge charms to tourists. As expected, thousands stood in line ahead of us by the time we arrived at the Coliseum parking lot a few minutes after the gates opened. Cuts from Beggar’s Banquet blared out of the stadium speakers as we filed in. From Mick’s flappy lips to our taut ears:
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Despite our relatively late arrival, we were able to spread a good-sized blanket over the cloud soft grass in the Oakland A’s outfield. We would still be about a half-mile from Mick when he greeted his worshipers at the edge of the thrust stage about seven hours later.
A giant, nylon-curtain version of the Rolling Stones’s trademarked black, red and white mouth framed the stage. It fluttered in the gentle breeze—all that was left of the frigid fog we had left behind in San Francisco. The long, red tongue was a center curtain that was pulled away when the live music started, and closed after each act finished. The music started about 11:30 a.m. It is downright blasphemous to refer to what followed as “opening acts,” so I won’t. I believe Peter Tosh opened. Eddie Money followed, then Santana and Taj Mahal, who I swear was there, but was not on the publicized line-up. My bad? Or a last-minute guest to an auspicious birthday party? Anyway, whoever played last played the longest—close to two hours—because the Stones were running as late as Sharon ever had. Everyone in “lawn seating,” and anyone clever enough to sneak onto the field from the stands, gradually stormed the outfield in anticipation of the Stones’s arrival. Anyone who dared to remain seated on the grass risked getting trampled, or worse—missing the entrance of our aging rock god. Mick, Ronnie, Keith, Bill and Charlie finally arrived, by copter, about 4 p.m. Not long after that, the Stones’s giant, red tongue moved to the right with the beginning chords of “Honkey Tonk Women.” Mick took the stage in bright orange parachute pants, prancing out from behind a cloud of equally orange balloons. A small plane trailing a “Happy 34th Birthday Mick” banner flew over the field, dropping hundreds of t-shirts (or was it more balloons?) bearing the same message. My husband swears it was just balloons. He claims to have caught one and brought it home. We have no physical proof of this, however. What I do remember is that Chris somehow snagged one of the free t-shirts in the frenzy, and the rest of us were jealous. It was beautiful. The front had a multi-colored silk-screened dragon on it, its face adorned with the official Stones’s mouth and Mick’s lips. The back displayed the lineup and the birthday message. Fortunately, physical proof of this exists, because it wasn’t long before traveling vendors fearlessly snaked through the crowd with the shirt on crossed poles bearing a $7.50 price tag—expensive at the time, but well worth it. Little was said during each transaction: The cash was forked over. Shirts were scored, and the brave caravan of commerce disappeared into the steamy sea of sweaty, wriggling, nearly naked bodies. Our snapshots caught me in a tube top, and very, very short cutoffs. I was barefoot by the time Mick came to the edge of the stage to sing “Some Girls,” the title song of the album they had just released. Risking not getting as sunburned as I could on my day off, a habit of mine at the time, I put my “Happy Birthday Mick” shirt on so I wouldn’t lose it. |
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Jack and I were just over a month married and had lived in San Francisco for only a year, but we were already well into its vibe. A resurgence of country music was just beginning to emerge. Naturally, Mick was way ahead of all this with “Far Away Eyes”; its slow, twangy musical narrative has always reminded me of a long drive across the Mohave Desert on a summer day without any air-conditioning.
The Stones played for almost two hours. Wikipedia accounts mention some Chuck Berry covers. I think I remember these, but who’s to say? If you remember, you weren’t there, right? I know they performed all of the Some Girls album, and most of their earlier masterpieces. We had been in the outfield at the Coliseum for almost 10 hours, but I don’t remember ever leaving our spot to go to the bathroom. I must have been afraid that if I left, I would never find my husband and friends again. I was probably woefully dehydrated because it was one of those hot days when the morning’s breeze quickly disappeared with the fog over San Francisco Bay. I don’t remember drinking anything, or if we had brought any fluids with us. And, by the time the Stones arrived we had run out of brownies. Passed joints, however, got us through the encores—three, I think. When it came time to clear out, the blanket we brought and my sandals were nowhere to be found so we left them behind. Fortunately, just before we hit the hot pavement outside, an abandoned pair of faded, red flipflops a size or two too big magically appeared and saved me from scorched feet. I didn’t hear the alarm clock the next morning or my husband’s “goodbye” when he left for work. But I was still so wired I walked from our apartment in the Tenderloin to my job on Union Square. I bought a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle with the headline: “60,000 help the Stones Celebrate.” Below the headline was a huge shot of prancing Mick in his parachute pants. I made a mental note to find a pair of those pants for myself. Fortunately, I never did. That day at work was as fuzzy as my hearing. At lunch I read the front page, top of the fold, Chronicle article proclaiming, “Rolling Stones Fans Got What They Came For.” It only confirmed what I already knew. Nonetheless, I carefully snipped the account out of the paper. Below it was the headline, “Congress Votes to Ban Rhodesian Products.” I don’t know why that headline caught my bloodshot eyes, but it has haunted me ever since—especially when I recall the concert. I didn’t then know where Rhodesia was, much less had any idea about what was happening, and would continue for decades, there. Nor could anyone have predicted the equally gruesome events that would involve Oakland and San Francisco just a few months later in November 1978. All that I was sure of that day has since turned out to be wrong. It wasn’t the Stones’s final U.S. concert (I threw out the Chronicle article long ago). Some Girls would not be the last and greatest Stones album ever. And Mick would not only become an “aging rock star,” he would redefine the term for 41 years to come and counting. He had no way of knowing that he’d still be alive in 2019, let alone getting back to his perfected prance a few weeks after heart surgery at age 75. None of us could have guessed that Chris wouldn’t live long enough to read this. And I did not yet know how often I’d recall the lyrics to “Sympathy for the Devil” whenever I watched cable news. Or that life could be as brutal as it is wondrous. |
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Denize Springer’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various publications and literary journals including the Marin IJ, East Bay Express, Pearl, Estero, Vistas & Byways and Ocean Realm. Her short story, “The Way We Say Goodbye,” was named a semi-finalist in the 2019 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award and will appear in the online journal Please See Me in early 2020. Her plays and adaptations have been presented in New York and San Francisco venues including the New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. She earned an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and has taught creative writing courses at OLLI at SF State.
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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University.
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Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University (OLLI at SF State) provides communal and material support to the Vistas & Byways volunteer staff.
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