Tulip Frenzy

We went back to maybe the best book ever written about the Stones — Stanley Booth’s Dance With The Devil: The Rolling Stones & Their Times — to get a clue about where exactly in the set list “Under My Thumb,” “I’m Free” and “Satisfaction” flowed during the Stones’ set at MSG in ’69.  After all, now that we have more songs, we want to create our Ya-Ya‘s playlist as the set unfolded, right?

One problem is that the orignal Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out seems to have “Midnight Rambler” and “Sympathy For the Devil” out of sequence.  Near as I can tell from Booth’s descriptions of the shows, you should put “Sympathy” after “Carol” and before “Stray Cat Blues.”  Then, after “Love In Vain,” put in four of the new entrants in sequence: “Prodigal Son,” “You Gotta Move,” and the “Under My Thumb/I’m Free” medley. “Midnight Rambler” now goes straight into “Live With Me,” followed by “Little Queenie” and  “Satisfaction.”  “Honky Tonk Women” sets up “Street Fighting Man” as the traditional closer.

Makes sense: so much more powerful to go from “Midnight Rambler” into the blitzkreig bop of that finale crescendo.  By ’72, following Altamont, they’d stopped doing “Sympathy,” and I do recall then that after “Midnight Rambler” the whole show speeded up…

Of course, going back to Booth’s book brings to the scene later that Thanksgiving night when in the Plaza Hotel, Keith turns Booth on to heroin for the first time.  Keith went onto being… Keith.  Booth went on to a lost decade.  Dance with the Devil, indeed.

This entry was posted on November 5, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Music with tags Get Yer Ya-Ya's 40th Anniversary, Stanley Booth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.