VIP

The Rolling Stones - L.A. Friday (Live 1975)

Third in the Stones’ own digital-only downloads of their bootleg performances, this 1975 concert was recorded on Sunday – not Friday, go figure - at the end of their 5 day Los Angeles Forum swagger and is notable for Ronnie Wood’s replacement of Mick Taylor as guitar compadre of Keith Richards. There are some slick licks to reflect this.

It is a performance full of sass, with Jagger indulging in another one of his linguistic chameleon acts, here sounding like an LA gansta a la 70s style. What a wonderful fraud. The performance opens with a great rendition of Honkey Tonk Woman. There’s a superb Gimme Shelter [I should just state now it’s all superb, but I still have favourites], Billy Preston gets two spotlights with That’s Life and Outta Space, Brown Sugar soars, there’s a 15 minute You Can’t Always Get What You Want filled with some great sax by Trevor Lawrence, two emotive Jagger-slanged offerings of Angie and the beautiful ‘sad sad song’ Wild Horses, and the concert finishes on a penultimate, stonking Jumping Jack Flash with that great Richards/Woods interplay, and final Sympathy For the Devil who will have been listening throughout with glee.

Only saw the Stones live once* in 1995, twenty years after this recording, at Wembley and on their Voodoo Lounge tour. Apart from simply being a special experience in its own right, my family and I also got VIP parking and were allowed to enter the stadium before anyone else to select our seats: the result of a letter of complaint about a previous visit to the Freddie Mercury Memorial Concert, and that’s another story.

[*] Well, that's wrong - senior/other moment - as I of course saw them in '69 at the Hyde Park concert, though technically I didn't 'see' them as my friend and I arrived late, having hitchhiked up from Ipswich, and it was rather crowded so we only ever managed to hear them in the distance. But I was there.....