On this day · 54 years ago · 1972
54 Years Ago Today: A Bomb Rips Through the Rolling Stones' Gear Before Their Montreal Show
Someone planted dynamite under the Rolling Stones' equipment trucks in Montreal. The bomber blew up the wrong truck, the show went on anyway, and 3,000 forged tickets turned the night into a riot besides.
By Axel, Classic-rock desk · Edited by Cadence ·
A bomb exploded beneath two Rolling Stones equipment trucks parked at the Montreal Forum around 3 a.m. on July 17, 1972, destroying 30 speaker cones and forcing a scramble to fly in replacement gear before that night's show. No one was hurt, and despite over 50 calls claiming responsibility, the bomber was never caught. The show went on 45 minutes late, then a separate riot broke out when 3,000 forged tickets flooded the venue.
A dynamite blast under the wrong truck
The Rolling Stones' 1972 American Tour, nicknamed the Stones Touring Party, was already deep into a string of arrests, riots, and tear gas by the time it reached Montreal in mid-July, per Wikipedia's account of the tour. Around 3 a.m. on Monday, July 17, 1972, with most of the touring party asleep, someone detonated dynamite under a loading ramp at the Montreal Forum where two equipment trucks fresh off the road from Toronto sat parked. The blast blew out windows in a nearby apartment building and destroyed the cones of 30 speakers inside one of the trucks, according to Rolling Stone's contemporary report on the tour. No one was hurt. The band's press agent, Gary Stromberg, put it bluntly afterward: "Whoever it was was the world's dumbest bomber. First he put the bomb under the ramp instead of the truck, and the other truck was the one with most of the stuff inside."
Fifty calls, zero answers
Nobody was ever caught. Montreal radio stations and newspapers fielded more than 50 calls from people claiming credit for the blast, but the case was never solved, and even the tour's own crew was left guessing at a motive. Tour roadie Jo Bergman told Rolling Stone at the time, "There have been threats all along the tour, but nothing ever happened. It was totally surprising. We don't know who did it. Was it the Free the French people? Were they angry at the Forum? Was it us?" Mick Jagger's own reaction the next morning was drier: "Why didn't that cat leave a note."
The show still had to happen
Air Canada bumped luggage from a Los Angeles flight to get replacement speaker cones to Montreal in time, and once a bomb squad had swept the Forum, the Stones went on about 45 minutes late. That wasn't the only chaos that night: 3,000 forged tickets had flooded the venue, and the ticketless crowd outside pelted the building and police with rocks, wine, and beer bottles, with Jagger himself struck by a flying bottle once he was onstage. The mess scuttled plans for a repeat encore with tour support act Stevie Wonder, something the two acts had pulled off earlier in the run.
A rough week that didn't end there
The tour's bad luck followed the band out of Canada. Mechanical trouble delayed their charter out of Montreal, then fog over Boston diverted the flight to Warwick, Rhode Island, where an altercation with a photographer led police to arrest Keith Richards on a simple assault charge, along with Mick Jagger and three others from the touring party. Boston Mayor Kevin White personally intervened to get them released on bail in time for that night's Boston Garden show, which went on anyway, starting at 12:45 a.m. Richards and the tour's other guitarist that year, Mick Taylor, played through it all on borrowed nerves as much as borrowed gear.
The guitar behind it
Richards' open-G, five-string Telecaster work is still the signature sound of that era of the Stones, and it's fully sourced on his CYS guitar and string profile, built around Ernie Ball gauges to this day.
Regular Slinky
Why this one: The base gauge Keith Richards's own documented open-G five-string setup is built from, per his CYS-reviewed profile.
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