On May 13, under the title Live at El Mocambo 1977, the official recording of one of the Rolling Stones’ most legendary performances – two concerts at the tiny El Mocambo club in Toronto in March 1977 – hitherto available only on bootlegs, is released for the first time. These concerts marked the beginning of the tradition of “secret” concerts of the great group that exists to this day.

On the morning of July 19, 1994, a small black board on a stand appeared on the sidewalk at the entrance to the RPM Club in Toronto, the kind often displayed in front of small cafes or modest restaurants to lure patrons. Handwritten on the blackboard was “Rolling Stones tonight. Admission $5.” There was no other information about the concert – neither in newspapers, nor on radio, nor on TV, nor in the Internet that had already appeared.

A few hundred lucky people who managed to pay attention to inconspicuous advertising packed a small club to capacity. They felt like they had won a winning lottery ticket – after all, one could only dream of listening to a great band not in a huge stadium, but in the cozy intimate atmosphere of a small club.

By the 1970s, after the death of their eternal rivals from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones deservedly gained the undisputed title of “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” – the greatest, most popular and most successful rock band in the world. That is how they were presented at the legendary concert in London’s Hyde Park in July 1969 in front of 250,000 spectators.

Since then, they have performed almost exclusively in huge stadiums around the world, invariably gathering tens of thousands of fans. The concerts turned into grandiose shows, most of the audience was hundreds of meters away from the stage, and they could see what was happening on the stage rather on huge television screens – live musicians from afar looked like small insects.

This megalomania, although it brought the musicians worldwide fame and made them multimillionaires, in a creative sense, suited them far from fully. After all, their musical roots went to the blues, almost chamber music, which was played in tiny cozy clubs, in direct, almost at arm’s length, contact with the listener, who could only create a real intimate atmosphere of live communication with the audience, through which they , having become megastars, they were very bored.

The appearance on a small stage at the RPM in Toronto was far from the only or even the first “secret” Stones concert. For some, long undisclosed reason, for such secret intimate performances, the group chose the largest city in Canada.

Three years later, on September 4, 1997, they played in the same Toronto in front of a very tiny by their standards – only 300 people – the audience of The Horseshoe Tavern club. This time, the same small inconspicuous poster appeared on the club door only at 7 pm, four hours before the band went on stage.

“The concert arose quite spontaneously,” Jagger recalled years later. “The day before, I just said:“ Let’s play tomorrow. Nothing was planned in advance, there was no publicity. We just wanted to play such a club gig.”

Eight years later, on August 10, 2005, the Stones opened their Bigger Bang Tour at the small Phoenix Club in Toronto.

There were many such concerts. They always arise spontaneously and an announcement about them appears on the club’s poster just a few hours before the start.

The tradition of “secret” concerts has continued to the present day. On December 6 last year, 2021, the Stones, changing the already familiar Toronto, played an unannounced concert in memory of Charlie Watts at the London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s – a favorite place of the jazz-loving drummer who died in the summer of 2021.

But this tradition goes back to the very first two “secret” concerts – March 4 and 5, 1977 at the El Mocambo club in Toronto. It was the recordings of these concerts that made up the “live” album Rolling Stones Live at El Mocambo 1977 coming out these days.

In February 1977, police found heroin during a search of Keith Richards’ hotel room in Toronto. The musician was arrested and charged with drug smuggling.

This was far from the Stones’ first encounter with the police in connection with drugs – the most famous happened ten years earlier, in the summer of 1967, when, during a police raid on the house of the same Richards in the vicinity of London, he and Jagger were arrested and released only thanks to an unexpected and the very striking intervention of an editorial by the respectable Times.

But then they were caught with marijuana, now Richards was caught with heroin. He faced a long prison term.

He was released on bail but had to stay in Toronto until April 1. In the end, he got off with a light sentence, the terms of which included his obligation to play a charity concert for the National Institute for the Blind of Canada and consent to treatment, already in the USA, where he was finally allowed to leave to continue the tour of the group. This treatment ultimately helped him get rid of drug addiction.

Forced downtime until the final court decision, from February to April, the Stones filled the only pastime available to them and their favorite pastime – playing music.

Jagger and the band’s then-manager Peter Rudge agreed to a series of secret shows at a small Toronto club called El Mocombo in order to use some of the footage from those shows for a live album they had in mind.

El Mocombo is a historical place for Toronto. The original building was built in 1850. At first, it served as a refuge for black slaves who fled to Canada from the United States, who laid the foundation for it as a music club. In the 1960s, Stones heroes and idols performed here – blues musicians Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, which made the club especially attractive to the British rock band. Marilyn Monroe sang here, Jimi Hendrix played, and the founders of the American punk Ramones, and the great jazzman Charlie Mingus, and many, many others.

However, the hall chosen by the musicians for performances could accommodate only 300 people, and announcing the appearance of the Rolling Stones, who were then at the top of their popularity, meant dooming the club to the defeat of a crowd of fans.

As a deceptive bait, the locally popular Canadian blues band April Wine was invited. And at the opening act, she announced a performance by unknown Cockroaches (Cockroaches). It was behind this unappetizing name that the Rolling Stones were hiding.

It was decided not to let the tickets go on sale. Instead, a competition was organized at a local radio station, the winners of which were determined by the Stones themselves.

One can only imagine the amazement of the lucky ones who got into the hall when the Rolling Stones took the stage – not as a warm-up, but as headliners instead of unknown Cockroaches.

The concerts, despite all the tension around Richards’ unfinished business, fully lived up to all expectations of restoring the club atmosphere so desired by the musicians, which they had not experienced for a decade and a half, since their first club performances in 1962-63 in London’s Crowdaddy club.

Here is how Keith Richards recalled El Mocombo: “From the very first minute on stage, I felt like I was back in Crowdaddy. As if nothing had changed, we hadn’t had such a feeling for a long time. We sounded just GREAT. Everyone, of course, was worried because of my case, we were endlessly asked: “Is this the end of the Rolling Stones?” In fact, it was a period of incredible activity for us, a period of confidence and uplift. “.

Among those who were in the hall and who worried about the fate of the Rolling Stones was Margaret Trudeau, the wife of then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Her presence at the concert and close communication with the musicians became the reason for all kinds of rumors about a love affair, either with the loving Jagger, or with Ronnie Wood, who had joined the group just two years earlier.

After the concert, the first lady of the country really spent the whole night talking, drinking and smoking in the company of musicians. Jagger, fearing unwanted publicity, tried to send her out, but she refused to leave for a long time. They parted only in the morning, and she never met them again.

Margaret and Pierre Trudeau divorced in 1984. Margaret has always denied a love affair with the Rolling Stones, but many years later, in 2008, having already become a famous writer, actress and TV presenter, she made a characteristic confession: “Looking back now, I think I should have slept with them all. it would probably be cool. But, unfortunately, I didn’t do it.”

As intended, four tracks from the El Macombo shows were included on the September 1977 double live album Love You Live, along with live recordings from the Tour of the Americas in Paris, London, Los Angeles and the massive Maple Leaf hockey stadium. Gardens in the same Toronto.

In addition to these four tracks, El Macombo’s concert recordings have so far existed only in a “pirated” bootleg version, and only now, 45 years later, the legendary concert in its entirety has become available to a wide audience of Rolling Stones fans.

Released by Polydor on May 13, 2022, the Rolling Stones Live at El Mocambo 1977 comes in two editions – a 4-LP box and a double CD. The vinyl edition, in turn, exists in two versions – standard black records and the so-called “neon” ones, iridescent with various shades of colors. The cost of the two editions differs significantly from each other: vinyl, depending on the seller, will cost you from 75 to 100 pounds, CD – from 18 to 25.

The album has 23 tracks. The majority are classic Jagger-Richards compositions: Let’s Spend the Night Together, Jumping Jack Flash, It’s Only Rock’n’Roll (But I Like It), Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Woman, Tumbling Dice and many others.

There was also room for the Stones’ much-loved and small-club blues classics: Willie Dixon’s Little Red Rooster, Muddy Waters’ Mannish Boy, Bo Diddley’s Cracking Up, BB King’s Worried Life Blues, Route 66″ Bobby Troopa.

Many tracks of the album were not included in any of the numerous bootleg editions of the legendary concert and are published for the first time.

20 out of 23 tracks – from the second of two concerts at El Macombo, March 5, 1977. The reason was explained in his memoir “Rolling With the Stones” by then-bass player Bill Wyman: “Musically speaking, the first concert at El Mocambo was not very successful. On the second day, we played out and sounded much better.”

Created by artist John Pasche and widely used since 1971, the band’s graphic symbol, a defiantly protruding red tongue, flaunts on the album cover.

Ahead of the release, the Stones have posted several tracks from the album online.

By the second half of the 1970s, the main body of the classical song heritage of the Rolling Stones had already been created, new albums from the point of view of the musical became less and less interesting. But the group more and more gained concert power, brightness and expressiveness. And Live at El Mocambo 1977 is a milestone in that growth.

The death of Charlie Watts on August 21 last, 2021, happened a month before the resumption of the No Filter Tour, which was interrupted for two years due to the pandemic. Watts was not among the founders of the group, but has been a permanent member of the group since 1963 and has merged with the image of the Stones no less than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

His departure seemed such a significant and even irreparable loss that many believed that without their legendary drummer, the band could no longer exist. Even Keith Richards admitted in an interview that at first he did not want to continue the resumption of the No Filter Tour, scheduled for September 2021 after the end of the pandemic. However, even before Watts’ death, during his illness, it was decided that drummer Steve Jordan would replace him for these shows.

“I thought I couldn’t play without Charlie,” Richards admitted at the time. “But Charlie convinced me:“ Everything will work out with Stevie, he will easily replace me. ”And he persuaded me.”

Moreover, last year’s No Filter Tour was not the last. As long as Mick Jagger (who turns 79 in July) can jump around the stage and sing, and Keith Richards (who turns 79 in December) can hold a guitar, the Rolling Stones live on.

On June 1 this year, the Stones kick off their next tour with a concert at the Wanda Metropolitano stadium in Madrid. It is called the Sixty Tour and is dedicated – as the name implies – to the 60th anniversary of the band. The tour will run for two months and will culminate in three shows in London’s Hyde Park on 21 and 25 June and 3 July. And even this tour no one announces the last.

What’s more, as Keith Richards revealed in an interview with New Musical Express magazine this March, the band is also working on a new studio album of original material, the first since 2005’s “A Bigger Bang” (released in 2016’s “Blue and Lonesome “was a collection of cover versions of classic blues).

“We have a lot of stuff that Charlie plays on. We were halfway through finishing the album when he died. Of course, if we want to finish it, we need a drummer, and that drummer will be Steve Jordan.”

The Rolling Stones refuse to die.