The Rolling Stones have always had a relationship with the darker and stranger dimensions of their mythology that they have managed with deliberate ambiguity. They have not discouraged the associations — the satanic imagery, the occult references in song titles and album artwork, the specific atmosphere of menace that certain of their recordings carry. They have also not confirmed them. They have inhabited the mythology without endorsing its literal interpretation, which is the most sophisticated possible relationship to a reputation built partly on the supernatural.
There are five nights in their concert history that the people present — band members, crew, production staff, audience members — have described in terms that resist conventional explanation. The Stones have never addressed these nights directly in interviews. They have maintained, across decades of being asked, the equanimity of people who know something they have decided not to tell.
1. Hyde Park, 1969. The memorial concert for Brian Jones, two days after his death. The white butterflies released in his memory — thousands of them, intended to fly out over the crowd in a gesture of peaceful farewell — behaved in a way that nobody who was there has been able to fully account for. They did not disperse. For several minutes they moved as a collective, forming shapes above the crowd that people in different parts of the enormous field described independently as having a specific geometry. Then they dispersed. The band played. Nobody spoke about the butterflies afterward.
2. Madison Square Garden, 1972. A night during the Exile on Main St. tour where the recording engineer captured on the multitrack tape a sound that was not made by anyone on the stage or in the audience. A sustained tone — present for approximately forty seconds — that appears between two songs on the recording in the ambient track. The sound has been analyzed. It does not match any instrument, any piece of equipment, any frequency produced by the venue’s technical systems. It is on the tape. Nobody knows where it came from.
3. Los Angeles, 1975. During the setup for a show at the Forum, a member of the production crew observed that the lighting rig — a significant piece of equipment — had moved approximately three feet from where it had been secured the previous evening. The rigging had not been touched. The building had been locked. The security logs showed no entry. The rig was repositioned and the show proceeded. Mick Jagger, when told about the rig, said nothing and walked away.
4. Rotterdam, 1982. A concert during which the weather — which had been severe and threatening a cancellation — ceased precisely when the band walked onto the stage. Not improved gradually. Ceased. The rain stopped. The wind stopped. For the duration of the two-hour concert the sky above the outdoor venue was clear. When the band left the stage it began again. The meteorological records for Rotterdam that night show continuous rainfall throughout the evening with no gap corresponding to the concert period. The crew has its own records.
5. Havana, 2016. The historic Cuba concert. During “Paint It Black” — the song with the most explicit of the Stones’ dark associations — the lighting system produced an effect that the production team confirmed was not programmed into the show. A specific color and pattern in the light that had not been in the design documents and that the lighting operator confirmed he had not initiated. It lasted for approximately the duration of the guitar solo. Then the programmed lighting resumed. The footage exists. The lighting team has no explanation.
Five nights. Five things that should not have happened.
The Rolling Stones have never explained any of them.
They have the reputation they have for reasons. Some of those reasons are performance. Some of them are something else.
They know the difference. They have decided the difference is theirs.