The Rolling Stones announced their 1975 tour “with the shy diffidence for which they are famous,” said The New York Times — by playing “Brown Sugar” on a flatbed truck driving down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Their Tour of the Americas, which saw the band play 45 dates in three months, included a stop in Cleveland, as the featured act in the second World Series of Rock series of concerts at Cleveland Stadium in 1975. The mammoth stadium became home to a series of mammoth rock concerts the year before. Daylong rock concerts were in style at that point, and Belkin Productions was able to bring in the biggest acts of the day.
The opening acts for the Stones included the J. Geils Band. And then at 7:13 p.m., to the strains of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” the Stones took the stage with a lineup that included Ronnie Wood, the guitarist for Faces (he would become a member of the Stones the following year after Faces’ breakup) and Billy Preston, who’d become known as “The Fifth Beatle” for his collaboration with the Fab Four.
Some 82,000 fans showed up as the Stones rocked Cleveland Stadium for more than two hours, with a show that included a custom-built stage and 22 tons of electrical equipment. Cleveland’s grande dame of rock, The Plain Dealer’s Jane Scott, called them “the last survivors of the 1964 Golden Age of Rock.”
As the now 60-year-old band visits Cleveland Browns Stadium on June 15, they remain the undisputed holders of that title.
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