More than 50 years after the Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder wrapped up one of rock’s most celebrated package tours, Mick Jagger is looking back on the chaotic way it all ended.
Speaking in a new interview with The New York Times, the Stones frontman recalled the final night of the band’s 1972 North American tour at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where an encore with Wonder gave way to an all-out custard pie fight.
The 53-date tour, which ran from June 3 to July 26, marked an important moment for both artists. It was the Stones’ first U.S. outing since the ill-fated 1969 tour that ended with the Altamont Speedway Free Concert.
In the years between, they had released Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St., a pair of celebrated albums featuring the handiwork of their new electric guitar–slinger, Mick Taylor. Wonder, meanwhile, had successfully transformed himself from Motown child prodigy into one of pop music’s brightest young stars with hits like “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” and “If You Really Love Me.”
The pairing proved to be a natural fit.
He and Mick were dancing on stage together, then somebody came out and put a whipped cream pie in Mick’s face. It was crazy.”
— Marshall Chess
“Motown was trying to break Stevie bigger than he’d ever been,” Marshall Chess, the Stones’ executive manager, recalled. “It was a great thing for the Stones because Mick and Keith just loved Stevie. It was a great thing for Stevie because it showed him to this whole other white audience, the Stones’ audience.”
Although Wonder had yet to release the extraordinary trilogy of Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, he was already a dazzling live performer who could more than hold his own with the Stones. Night after night, he returned to the stage for the encore as he and the band tore through a mash-up of his 1966 hit “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
“That’s when Stevie was really young and full of energy, jumping up and down on stage,” Chess said. “He and Mick were dancing on stage together, then somebody came out and put a whipped cream pie in Mick’s face. It was crazy. The building was actually vibrating. You could feel it in the concrete.”
Jagger remembered that the final show took the spectacle one step further.
“We said come up and we’ll play a mash-up of ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Uptight,’ because they’re both the same beat,” he recalled. “And then someone — I can’t remember whose idea this was, it might have been mine — decides that we’re going to throw custard pies at the end, because it’s the last number of the show of the last day of the tour. It’s rather unfair for Stevie.”
Wonder, who is blind, nevertheless embraced the prank.
“So everyone’s throwing custard pie, including Stevie, and everyone ends up covered in custard pies,” Jagger said. “I loved it.”
For a tour remembered as one of the greatest double bills of the rock era, it was a suitably unforgettable finale — two of music’s biggest stars sharing the stage one last time before leaving it covered in smashed pies.
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