Inside the Rolling Stones’ New Stadium Tour: Hot Rocks and Deep Cuts

“Thank you very much, San Diego, you were bloody wonderful!” Mick Jagger shouted from the stage at Petco Park on May 24th. The Rolling Stones had just finished the first night of their 15-date Zip Code stadium tour, delivering well over two hours of rock & roll – from the raucous “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” that opened the show through the encore of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (assisted by a California choir) and “Satisfaction,” with a handful of deep cuts unearthed along the way – and it had all gone off without a hitch. “I was enjoying myself,” Jagger says when he calls two days later. “It’s hard to fake it if I wasn’t.” Keith Richards agrees. “Usually, the first two or three shows, the band feels they’re not quite on,” he says. “And sometimes it’s the truth. But this one, right out the gate, it sounds great.”

Four nights before the San Diego show, the Stones faced a different test: playing every song from 1971’s Sticky Fingers, some of which they haven’t touched in a decade or more, during a last-minute club gig at Los Angeles’ 1,200-capacity Fonda Theatre. “We’re all high on the fact that we actually did it,” says Ronnie Wood. (The Stones have also reissued the classic LP in a deluxe new edition.) Tickets for the L.A. show, which went on sale that day for just $10, sold out in minutes; when fans arrived at the venue, they were refunded their money in another surprise. Jagger says the band put in extra effort in rehearsals, knowing that the gig was being filmed for potential release. “We had to revisit tunes that we don’t do very often, and we had to make sure they worked really well,” he says. “We worked quite hard on ‘Sister Morphine’ and ‘I Got the Blues.’ They’re not actually that easy to do – it’s not simple 12-bar stuff.” In the end, though, the club date was a piece of cake. “Small gigs in the beginning are almost a tradition to the Stones,” says Richards. “We go, ‘Well, we started in places this size. If we can do this, the rest of it is just magnification.'”  

Next came San Diego, the Stones’ first U.S. stadium gig since 2006. With Petco Park in constant use thanks to baseball season, the band was unable to rehearse there until a brief soundcheck the day of the show. “Baseball stadiums can be a little bit tricky, because they’re so wide,” Jagger says. “It can be difficult to get the feeling of whether we’re reaching the audience or not. You just have to do the best you can.” He says he knew the show was going well about 20 minutes in, during “Tumblin’ Dice,” when he walked out into the middle of the floor-section crowd on a long, thin catwalk. “Every time you get onstage in a stadium, you go, ‘I forgot how big it was,'” adds Richards. “You can’t not be excited when you have that many people in the audience. It’s an exchange of adrenaline.”

The set peaked with a show-stopping “Moonlight Mile,” which the Stones last played in 1999 before the L.A run-through. “You don’t really know if that’s right for a stadium, because it’s a bit intimate,” Jagger says. “But it seemed to work. I felt really good about it. I make mistakes when I get carried away, but I didn’t screw it up!”