Tuesday, July 17, 2012

40 Year Itch : Bomb Strikes The Stones Tour


Just over six weeks after the Rolling Stones began their STP tour of North America with a full blown riot in Vancouver , a bomb placed under a ramp at the Montreal Forum explodes in one of the Rolling Stones' equipment trucks. Thirty speakers are destroyed. Replacement gear is flown in from Los Angeles.

Montreal radio stations receive no fewer than fifty calls from would-be bombers claiming responsibility, but it's never determined just who planted the dynamite, or why. History suggests its the paramilitary Quebec Liberation Front but there are also some concerns that The Hells Angels want to send Jagger a message after he blamed them for the tragedy at Altamont.

 Mick Jagger's only comment: "Why didn't that cat leave a note?"

There's another problem: more than 500 counterfeit tickets were sold to the show. It is oppressively hot for the 20,000 fans who show up at the Forum. The Montreal Gazette reporter writes "In the top galleries of The Forum the temperature must have reached 120 degrees though outside it was a cool 75." In the video below you see Jagger tossing buckets of water on the crowd. Firecrackers go off and at one point a 40 ounce bottle is tossed at the stage:

Weekend Magazine  reports:

Ninety seconds later, a bottle sailed out of the crowd and hit him on the leg. He winced...Jagger didn’t know it wasn’t aimed at him. His truck had been bombed. People were shouting. The firecrackers sounded like shots. A bottle had just hit him. He wound up the song, giving Richards his end-it look.

Later, there was a party in Jagger’s room. He looked tired and washed out. ‘Not good, man,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t good.'

 

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