As every schoolchild knows, the Rolling Stones, then nearly unknown, made their U.S. debut at San Bernardino’s Swing Auditorium on June 5, 1964, to a warm response.
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At a bookstore recently, spotting Bob Spitz’s 2026 book “The Rolling Stones: The Biography” on the shelves, I hefted a copy and checked the index for San Bernardino. (As one does.) I flipped through to find the appropriate page.
Spitz writes that despite taping an appearance in Hollywood that fateful day for Dean Martin’s TV variety show, the band had no concert in Los Angeles. Instead, their debut was “inexplicably” in San Bernardino, “a poky industrial city 60 miles to the east” that had spawned McDonald’s.
Writes Spitz: “There were no limos, not even cars to take them to the gig. The group traveled by bus.”
His book has received strong reviews, but the few paragraphs on San Bernardino don’t inspire total confidence.
Spitz gives the venue as the “Inland Empire Exposition Center,” a name he seems to have invented. The Sun’s in-person account of the show, with the details of fan excitement that resulted in a broken window and a door ripped from its hinges, is dismissed as “journalistic embellishment.”
Likewise with the newspaper’s crowd estimate of 3,500 (in a venue that held 8,000). Spitz finds bassist Bill Wyman’s recollection of 400 to be more reliable. I’m going to side with the local reporter on this one, sorry.
Moral: Don’t throw shade on The Sun!
Spitz does take seriously the account of the 45-minute concert, culminating in the crowd’s roar of approval when Mick Jagger sang the “Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino” line in the song “Route 66.” “It was a straight gas, man,” Keith Richards once said of the show.
That was it for local references. However, scanning the book’s table of contents, I got a laugh out of a chapter titled “The Redlands Affair.”
Did Mick, Keith and company make an illicit stopover after leaving San Bernardino? Hardly.
Redlands was the name of Keith Richards’ country house in Sussex. It’s where he and Jagger were busted in 1967 for drug possession. Our Redlands can breathe easy.
More Stones
While we’re on the subject, it’s been 60 years since the Rolling Stones last performed in the Inland Empire proper, not counting the 2016 Desert Trip festival in Indio.
After the Stones’ debut at Swing Auditorium, they returned to Swing on Oct. 31, 1964 and again on May 15, 1965. Their fourth and final concert at Swing took place July 24, 1966, as IE music historian Armando Castro reminds me.
I wrote about all four Stones concerts on their — why not? — 55th anniversaries, from 2019 to 2021, collecting memories of some who were present.
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Back to July 24, 1966. The 2 p.m. (!) concert included support acts The McCoys, The Standells and The Tradewinds, according to Sun coverage at the time. Prices for this extravaganza: $4, $5 and $6. (“Limit four tickets per family,” the advertisement cautions.)
The Stones performed only eight songs. The Sun’s review said that the predominately teenage audience’s screams were so loud and so sustained, Jagger’s voice was inaudible.
“Immediately after the show,” Castro explains, “all the bands boarded a bus for an evening performance in Bakersfield.”
Actually, two evening performances, at 7 and 9 p.m., after a 165-mile bus trip. For the Rolling Stones, time wasn’t on their side.
(In many other senses, of course, time has been on their side. The band’s new album, “Foreign Tongues,” is quite good.)
Keller’s quip
Edgar C. Keller, who practiced as an attorney in San Bernardino from 1949 to 1996, died June 26 at age 105. His paid obituary, which we’ve run a few times lately, had some neat details: his office in the 1890s Katz Building, his quarter-century of service on the city library board, his Chicago Cubs fan club card from 1921 (the year of his birth).
Unmentioned was the one thing I knew about him: a funny piece of correspondence to The Sun in 1983, which came to my attention after writer Joan Didion’s death in 2021.
In his letter to the editor, Keller expressed his long-term distaste for Didion due to her claim, in 1966’s famed essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” that people in San Bernardino County were so backward that they’d never seen an artichoke.
Keller now had to eat his words, he wrote, because a photo caption in the newspaper’s feature section on Christmas Day had misidentified an artichoke as an avocado.
“If our erudite, all-knowing press does not know its artichoke from its avocado,” Keller concluded, tongue in cheek, “perhaps Miss Didion was correct. If you have her address, please send her my apologies.”
In, sort of
In Palm Springs, a proposed In-N-Out, the city’s first, has gone through two years of city hearings, the New York Times noted in a recent story on drive-thru restaurants. Holding up approval, the Times writes, are “fears that the architecture isn’t midcentury modern enough.” Gasp!
According to the Palm Springs Post, the city’s Architectural Review Committee finally, and reluctantly, signed off on the plans last month — but with the caveat that the committee wants one final review.
David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday, subject to review. Email [email protected], phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.
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