Gillian's Found Photos #17

This week's edition of Gillian's Found Photos carries on last week's look at the Murray The K holiday shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theater. That's the Rolling Stones onstage. Playing in front of the curtain, which is drawn, I find that a bit odd. Brian looks rather lonely all the way over on the left. Can anyone date this? Does anyone know what songs they played? Generally the acts only did 2-3 songs. I assume this was before Satisfaction which really changed things for the Stones. Until Satisfaction they weren't all that big a deal in the States. They were well known, appeared on all the big TV shows: Ed Sullivan, Dean Martin (he made fun of them), Shindig, but certainly they were nowhere as big as the Beatles. In fact, the way I remember it, the Dave Clark 5 and Herman's Hermit's were bigger than the Stones in 1964. History tells us the Stones were the second biggest group of the British Intrusion, but as we know history is often wrong. And in the case of rock'n'roll, controlled and written by morons and hacks. The Rolling Stones struggled for a year and a half to make it in the States, only grabbing the #2 slot after Satisfaction went to #1 in the summer of '65, leading off an incredible string of hit singles that would last nearly eight years. Up until then, It's All Over Now and Time Is On My Side were their biggest hits, both were covers, and neither of them went to #1. I do remember The Last Time, issued a few months before Satisfaction as totally blowing my six year old mind with it's guitar sound. I'd been following the Stones since I got their first album for Christmas 1964,

but nobody else I knew seemed to care that much about them until the following summer. Not that I had a wide social circle at age six, but I knew they were cooler than Herman's Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers, or the Monkees. It's almost forty years since Brian Jones died, I've been thinking about him a lot. More on the subject to come. Here's the Dean Martin clip: