The Rolling Stones Live in Hyde Park
Open Culture excerpt
The year was 1969. The hippie counterculture was still in bloom, and the Stones were at a moment of transition. The band was in the process of finishing its Let it Bleed album at Olympic Studios in London without founder and multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, who was asked to leave the group in early June because of his escalating drug problem and increasingly difficult personality. The Stones replaced Jones with the talented guitarist Mick Taylor. Eager to get rolling again, the group asked a promoter to organize a free music festival in Hyde Park, with the Stones at the top of the bill.
On July 5, 1969, a crowd of between 250,000 and 500,000 people gathered for the concert. Only three nights earlier, Brian Jones was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool. In his honor, Mick Jagger started the Hyde Park concert by reading a passage from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “An Elegy on the Death of John Keats.” The Stones then released thousands of white butterflies and launched into a raw set that included both classics and rarities...
This coming July 6, exactly 44 years and a day after the 1969 concert, the Stones will return to Hyde Park for another concert.