Rolling Stones- Honky Tonk Women- London 3-14-71

Eras in music no more follow the calendar than Mother Nature does. Thus fifty-five years ago in mid-March 1971, in effect the last live performance of the Sixties  may actually have gone down when the Rolling Stones ended their brief UK tour at London’s The Roundhouse with this final performance of “Honky Tonk Women”.

Then the Stones were UK tax exiles off  to make their first post-Beatles era album in the Seventies, changing everything. For the first time, the resultant album Sticky Fingers  would not in any way be cast in the long shadow of their rivals. It would be released on the band’s own label imprint. Young guitar phenom Mick Taylor was by now fully integrated into a rapidly expanding band and would be utilized spectacularly on another batch of  timeless songs, produced by American Jimmy Miller, who would turn out to be the Stones’ secret weapon for this four album run.

After this performance at The Roundhouse, in Sticky Fingers the Rolling Stones would record an album in 1971 which  would sound better than any preceding Stones album and, notoriously then, be packaged more memorably ( thanks to the Andy Warhol artwork on the cover, with actual working zipper, as well as the debut of easily the most famous band logo in history) than practically anything in the following golden half-century of the Rolling Stones’ reign as “World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band”. –Redbeard