Summer Friday: Moment of Zen from El Mocambo

At last, an official version of Rolling Stones' legendary 1977 shows

Ah 1977. It was the year Elvis Presley died (aged 42) and Studio 54 opened. The punk rock tsunami was in full ascent, trampling every status quo in popular music. Established acts like the Rolling Stones didn’t just have their dominion threatened; they appeared stuck on the Down escalator (see the patchy, erratic 1976 studio album Black and Blue.) The biggest news in Stonesland was that Keith Richards (and girlfriend Anita Pallenberg) were busted at the Canadian border with heroin.

Shortly after that, in March, Toronto’s 300-capacity El Mocambo did a last-minute two-night run with Canadian band April Wine, featuring opening act the Cockroaches. The Cockroaches were, of course, the Rolling Stones, with mobile recording truck in tow. The band’s objective was to document some of its more recent repertoire for a live album; in the liner notes of the first-ever official release of this material, Richards suggests that the performances, which have been endlessly (and poorly) bootlegged, had an invigorating effect on the veteran band. “Everybody’s going around talking doom and disaster, and we’re up on stage at the El Mocambo, and we never felt better.”

This is breathtakingly audible. The band — with guitarist Ron Wood as a new permanent member and hired guns including keyboardist Billy Preston — blasts through moody recent works (“Fool To Cry”), inventive arrangements of arena classics like “Tumbling Dice” and blisteringly swinging versions of the blues and early rock that were crucial to the Stones’ development.

So much to savor. Start by focusing on relentlessly steady drummer Charlie Watts — introduced here by Mick Jagger in a rare moment of candor as “a jazz drummer who’s only doing it for the money” — on tunes like “Route 66” and Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around.” In this club setting, it’s clear that Watts is the law; the band peaks are directly derived from (and dependant on) his patterns.

To hear just one example of this, check out the first instrumental break on “Around and Around,” starting at roughly 00:49. It’s not a solo, rather one of those addictive singsong riffs from the overstuffed Chuck Berry book. On the first chorus, Wood and Richards agree on a glinting, treble-forward attack. On the second, they add a synchronized, swooping pitch-bend phrase that is pure magic. It’s an ordinary almost rockabilly shout chorus, an everyday Charlie Watts backbeat with guitars, and as it rolls, it distills all the twitchy disruptive promise of rock and roll into something beautiful, visceral, and time-scrambling. The past and the present and the future in 12 still-astonishing-after-all-these-years measures.

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