The Stones roll in
For days, the temporary, electric signs near N.C. State’s Carter Finley Stadium flashed the message: “Concert July 1, expect delays.”
For thousands of concertgoers, the delays won’t involve traffic, but time. It’s as if the years have stuck and haven’t passed. The first time the Rolling Stones played a concert in Raleigh was 1965. They came back in 1989 and 1994. But now they are returning for what feels like it may be the last time.
After 50 years, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both 71, will take up their guitars. And in the audience will again be many who saw them here in 1965, teens who’ve turned overnight into people in their 60s and 70s and for one night will be back where they were, expectant and impressed as they witnessed one of history’s greatest rock bands early in a career that would become one of rock’s longest. For a night, they’ll revisit their youth and forget, “What a drag it is getting old.”
In a remarkable collection of memories gathered by News & Observer music critic David Menconi, people who attended the Stones’ 1965 concert at N.C. State’s Reynolds Coliseum recall vividly what they saw and how it affected them.
“I remember it was loud, and sold out,” wrote Joan Clark, 67, of Garner. “Our seats were on the floor and when the Stones came out, everybody in back ran to the front. It was just chaos, nobody sat the whole time. But it was great.”
Claire Slaughter, 64, of Raleigh recalled going in a group of ten girls. “My big memory was chasing Mick Jagger down a hall in the bowels of the building and into the men’s room. Being 15-year-old Southern girls, we didn’t go in after him!,” she recalled. “However, I wrote an essay on the evening for English class called ‘Anatomy of a Rock Concert’ and I got an A+.”
Dennis Bottoms, 67, now retired to Surf City, said that 1965 experience began a tune that’s run through his life. “I took my my girlfriend at the time and we ended up getting married in 1967, and we are still married and listening to the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band,” he wrote. “We named our house in Surf City, ‘emOceanal Rescue.’”
The recollections capture the flavor of a lost time and city. Some fans wore shirts and ties, others dresses. One had to leave the concert to make curfew at Raleigh’s St. Mary’s boarding school. Local DJ Ed “Charlie Brown” Weiss, 73, remembers picking up band members Richards and Brian Jones at the airport and taking them to WKIX for an interview followed by a trip to the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Hillsborough Street for a bucket of chicken.
The Stones return to a much different Raleigh today with prices to match. At Reynolds, it was $4 for a prime seat on the floor. At Carter Finley, seats on the field are $300, $400 and more. But while inflation and fame have spiked the cost, the music and the moment will compress the years for those there at the beginning.
Time, like the Stones, rolls on. But in memory, the musicians in their 70s are the skinny, long-haired rockers from England singing, “Time, time, time is on my side, yes, it is.”
And, yes... yes it was.
This story was originally published June 30, 2015 at 5:14 PM.