No Stone Unturned: Rolling Stones Landmarks Across the U.S.

I'm standing in a blacktop lot on the grounds of the National Orange Show Events Center in San Bernardino, California. It's a clear, California winter's day; about 90 degrees. There are agricultural halls on the wide-open property, along with some 1950s-era exhibit buildings. In the pavement, scarred seams trace a large structure that once stood here, the Swing Auditorium, which was knocked down after a plane hit it in 1981.

I'm just about where the stage would have been, the very spot where, on the evening of June 5, 1964, the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, played their first U.S. show just a few days after landing in New York City.

With the Stones back on our soil for a series of select East Coast shows, it's hard not to think about this band and its relationship not just with American fans, but also American geography. In almost 50 years since they first arrived, over more than a dozen tours, recording sessions, photo shoots and even living here, they have carved many indelible swaths into the map.

There are the all-too familiar places the Stones have collided with, like the windswept Altamont racetrack, site of their infamous open-air December 1969 free concert where a member of the Hell's Angels stabbed a gun-wielding man to death. Or Chess Records in Chicago, a Mecca for these white British boys that grew up worshiping black American blues (and where they wound up recording many songs). Some people are at least semi-familiar with the fact that the riff for "Satisfaction" floated into Keith Richards' head while he was staying in a Florida hotel (that today is a Scientology headquarters). Venerable arenas like New York's Madison Square Garden, the Forum in Los Angeles and the long-gone Boston Garden are also well-known sites of many storied Stones concerts.

But there are lesser-known locations they've brushed up against that also illustrate the Stones' deep-rooted physical connection to America.

Like the tiny Alabama recording studio called Muscle Shoals, where the band recorded "Brown Sugar," "Wild Horses" and "You Gotta Move" late in 1969 while on their way to Altamont. There's the speck on the map known as Fordyce, Arkansas, where Richards and Ron Wood were arrested in the middle of the band's massive 1975 tour. Cops thought they smelled dope as the Stones left the Four-Dice diner, arrested them, and for a moment the tour almost came crashing to an early halt -- but their release was quickly (and strenuously) negotiated.

How about the Memory Motel on Long Island that inspired the name of one of the band's prettiest ballads of the same name, 24th street in New York where they posed in full drag back in 1966 for a record sleeve photo, the Greenwich Village stoop featured in their "Waiting On a Friend" video and Florida's Sanibel Island Beach where the cover of their Black and Blue album was shot?

Or the Sacramento stage where Keith Richards was electrically shocked in 1965, the Los Angeles hotel room from where he tossed a TV set out the window, and tragically, his former house in South Salem, N.Y. [pictured above] where a young man, thought to have been having an affair with Richards' paramour Anita Pallenberg, died in a supposed 1979 suicide?

Let's not leave out the hotel where Brian Jones and Bob Dylan played guitars by candlelight during New York's big blackout of '65, the Laurel Canyon log cabin where (according to Frank Zappa) Jagger pulled a splinter from Zappa's toe in '68, or Main St. in Los Angeles, where the band was photographed in 1972 for the cover of their sprawling and seductive album Exile on Main St.

Then there is the music that reflects their experiences here and the culture they've soaked up so sublimely.

A rousing ode to a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis and a divorcée in New York City; those "Honky Tonk Women." A down-home campfire sing-along celebrating "Sweet Virginia," driving through Bakersfield listening to country music thinking about that girl with "Far Away Eyes," a "Shattered" view of a desperate New York City and a lonely late night shuffle through Central Park in "Miss You" are just some of the lyrical snapshots that these troubadour tourists, aka Jagger/Richards, have snapped so masterfully over the years.


On a dreary May 1, 1975, a storm was threat'ning New York City. Then the Rolling Stones pulled up and played "Brown Sugar" atop a flat bed truck on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square Park to announce their upcoming American tour, creating near-chaos in the streets.

I was 13 at the time and watched it on the news, incredulous that my favorite band in the world had actually come down from that mystical, shrouded, pre-MTV mountain where all rock gods ruled from, to grace the streets with their supernatural presence. Whenever I pass the site today, my mind drifts back to that moment. It is no longer just another city block. It is special, because the Rolling Stones were right there, shaping our history in the same moment they were shaping their own.

How comforting it feels to have them back here on the ground, marking even more sites and making more history as their unprecedented journey rolls on. Little did they imagine in San Bernardino, back in 1964, what lay ahead for them here.

Or then again, maybe they did.

Author, AOL Music contributor and avowed Rolling Stones devotee Chris Epting has written a new e-book, Moonlight Miles – A Guide to Rolling Stones Landmarks Across America 1964-1981, available now from Miniver Press.