Keith Richards is a badass

Wherein I had no interest in seeing the Rolling Stones in 1981 but other than J. Geils Band their show would've been better than anything else I saw Foreigner 4 anyone


Watch this video of Mick Jagger running like a little girl while Richards beats the crap out of a stage-rusher before calmly resuming playing.

Photodude has more from the same tour:

It was a memory trigger that made me think about the night I saw them on that tour. They were playing big stadiums and outdoor shows before tens of thousands at a time. But for one night on the tour, they played for about 4,000 people at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, and I was lucky enough to be there.

How lucky? The announcement of the show and the beginning of ticket sales happened at 2AM one night, and within two hours the tickets were gone. I basically woke up to the news of a sold out show. However, being program director of a rock station in Macon, I did what I always did … call the promoter and ask for comps (“complimentary tickets”).

But the lady who’d always been able to come through for me before told me “there are no comps for this show, all the radio people have to pay for their tickets (!!!), and we were only given enough for the Atlanta stations. Sorry.”

Bummed, I was. But on the Friday afternoon before that Monday night show, this nice lady called me out of the blue: “I’ve had a last minute cancellation, do you want two tickets?”

Yes, indeedy. How much are they? $32.50 each!?! (this was twice the going rate for tickets in 1981) Gulp, OK.