Speaker 1 (00:00):
B-R-A-Z-E-N.
Tom Wright (00:06):
It’s early 2016, and the Rolling Stones are in a Los Angeles studio rehearsing for an upcoming tour of Latin America.
Adam Wilkes (00:15):
They always rehearse in a city before they start a tour, and they take over a studio, and that becomes kind of like their business center. It’s their office, and it’s phenomenal. You’re literally there sitting having a meeting, and in the next room is the Rolling Stones, and they’re like trying to remember how to play “Satisfaction” again. It’s quite surreal.
Tom Wright (00:37):
Taking a band on tour already is stressful, but Adam Wilkes has a problem. The Stones want to play Havana, Cuba, a city that’s not on a typical tour itinerary. In the room with Stones management, Adam begins to list the challenges. As he does so, the music next door stops, and the door opens.
Adam Wilkes (01:00):
I see Mick Jagger has kind of poked his head in, so I’m like, “Look, I want to just make it clear. I come with them a lot of enthusiasm about the concept,” I said, “but, guys, this is mission impossible. Okay?”
Tom Wright (01:15):
Cuba was only just starting to emerge from decades of isolation, and its communist economy was in bad shape.
Adam Wilkes (01:22):
Logistically speaking, they have nothing there. There’s no electricity, there’s no fuel, there’s no vehicles. You’d probably have to bring in several hundred people for labor. You would have to send some guy down there tomorrow to set up the Rolling Stones office in Havana and just pray that you could figure it out. And I remember right when I said that, Jagger kind of chimes in. He is like, “So when are you going?” And everybody looked at me, and that’s the moment in my life where I would say I had no balls. I said, “Right away, sir.”
Tom Wright (02:06):
I’m Tom Wright, an author and podcaster.
Adam Wilkes (02:09):
I’m Adam Wilkes, a concert promoter, and this is Night of Show.
Tom Wright (02:17):
Last episode, we saw how John Meglen and Paul Gongaware, Adam’s colleagues, helped Prince stage a comeback in 2007. In this episode of Night of Show, we are focusing on one of the Stone’s most unusual live performances and how Adam, along with his colleague Bryan Mosko, played a crucial role. Back then Adam was in his thirties and, well, let’s just say a little less jaded than his more seasoned colleagues.
Adam Wilkes (02:46):
I got a phone call from John Meglen, my boss at the time, my friend, my mentor, and him and Paul had been touring the Rolling Stones for a number of years.
Tom Wright (02:57):
Adam had reservations about pulling off the Stones concert in Cuba in only three months, but he was game for the challenge, especially after Mick Jagger urged him on. John, however, was trying to wash his hands of it.
Adam Wilkes (03:11):
He goes, “It’s just bullshit. I’m going to get stuck going to Cuba. I’m getting so good at golf, and this is going to totally fuck everything up. Where do these guys get these ideas from?” And this sort of rage boiled up in me. I was so furious. And here was this guy, the CEO of our company, and I couldn’t help myself. And I said, “John, if you don’t think that the Rolling Stones going to Cuba and doing a free concert for the people of Havana is cool, then you have lost all of your passion in life, and you should just give up. Go off and golf.” And there was just this silence on the phone. It was like a dead silence for 10 seconds. And he goes, “You know what? You like Cuba so much, living in communist countries? Well, you go and do it.” Click, hangs up the phone on me.
Tom Wright (04:07):
Adam has spent much of his professional life in China managing venues and promoting concerts. He’d even studied Cuban American relations for a semester in Havana two decades earlier. To Paul and John, Adam was an expert on communism, and so the Cuba concert became his responsibility.
Paul Gongaware (04:26):
The thing is, we try to do what our artists want. So if Mick wants to go to Cuba, we got to try to figure out how to do that, and the answer was Adam Wilkes. I mean, come on, you knew how to deal with communist governments. And the biggest thing was you attended a semester of college there. You knew the town, you knew the situation. And if there was one ideal person on the planet to pull this off, it was you.
Tom Wright (05:00):
Is it fair to say that the music business is kind of organized on the fly?
Adam Wilkes (05:05):
This particular situation really exemplifies that.
Bryan Mosko (05:09):
It’s like jazz.
Adam Wilkes (05:10):
It’s like jazz.
Bryan Mosko (05:11):
You just got to go with it.
Barack Obama (05:15):
Today the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba.
News Anchors (05:19):
Old Glory being hoisted up for the first time in more than 50 years.
(05:23):
Literally hundreds of Cubans crowded up against police barriers by the US Embassy. This is a hugely symbolic, historical day.
(05:29):
Symbolizing the reestablishment of diplomatic relations after 54 years.
Tom Wright (05:39):
Why did Mick Jagger want to go to Cuba? Partly it was timing. The US and Cuba in 2015 had reestablished diplomatic relations after more than half a century, and there was talk of more tourism and an easing in the US economic blockade. But Jagger also wanted to make a statement. The Stones had achieved every milestone imaginable, four Grammys, 200 million in record sales, and a concert machine that had been minting money since 1962. Now aged 72, Jagger was still looking to push boundaries, and as he always did, keep the band in the public eye.
Adam Wilkes (06:18):
This was Mick Jagger’s pet project. From a commercial standpoint, it didn’t make sense. From a logistical standpoint, it didn’t make sense. It put a burden on the entire organization, but he wanted to do it.
Tom Wright (06:32):
The Stones had never really been particularly political, but they are among the world’s most popular live bands, even today with Mick Jagger close to 80. And they’ve toured some weird places in the past. In 1967, at the height of the Cold War, the Stones had played in Poland, which ended in police attacking fans outside the venue.
Speaker 10 (06:53):
[foreign language 00:06:58].
Tom Wright (07:04):
Mounting a concert in Cuba with a similarly authoritarian government was going to be a headache, Adam realized. Gregory Elias, a businessman in Curaçao, a Caribbean island, had agreed with the Stones to fund the $5 million needed to put on the free concert. Elias sent a private jet to fly Adam and a small team from Miami to Havana where they had meetings with Cuban government officials. Adam roped in his old University of Havana professor to translate, but his team was out of its depth.
Adam Wilkes (07:37):
And our first crisis was that we ran out of money because very naively, we were not aware that American credit cards don’t work there. We can’t even pay for dinner. And it’s a small town, and we’re making some noise, and we’re starting to meet a lot of people, it started to be this weird thing. I’m like, “Look, here’s the deal. It’s going to be the biggest thing in the world. I think you could be a big part of this. There’s a big role for you. Can you buy dinner tonight? I’ll get the next dinner. Yeah, I’ll have another beer. But yeah, you got this one, right?” That kind of behavior is only going to go so far, and it starts to become a real big problem. And that’s when I called Bryan Mosko, one of my colleagues because I needed money. So I called Bryan. I said, “Bryan, I’m on a special mission. I’m on a top secret mission. Do you speak Spanish?”
Bryan Mosko (08:27):
No.
Adam Wilkes (08:28):
And I said, “Bryan, it’s Adam. I’m on a top secret mission. Do you speak Spanish?”
Bryan Mosko (08:35):
Si.
Adam Wilkes (08:36):
I said, “Good.” I said, “Fly to LA. I need you to find this person in the accounting department, and I need $50,000 in cash, and then fly to Havana.”
Bryan Mosko (08:46):
What?
Adam Wilkes (08:48):
And I said, “Just go.”
Bryan Mosko (08:50):
Okay.
Tom Wright (08:52):
So Bryan arrives with the money, which they stash in a hotel safe. The government had put Adam and the team in the presidential suite of the Hotel Nacional, an imposing Art Deco edifice on the waterfront.
Adam Wilkes (09:03):
And this is the famous hotel that Meyer Lansky, the American gangster, used to own, and it was the main casino in town. And it’s this architecturally beautiful building, but it’s also semi-dilapidated. And the presidential suite was spectacular in a very sort of wacky, in somewhat cheesy way. And we could not get one Cuban person to go in the room no matter what we did. They’d be like, “[inaudible 00:09:35]. Great. Well, we’re at the Hotel Nacional. Great. Oh, come up. We’re in the presidential sweet.” They’re like, “No. Nope.” And finally we realized that this is where they would put the foreign dignitaries, and it was famously bugged, and the entire room was a listening device.
Tom Wright (09:52):
So they moved to another hotel and began planning. Cuba had almost no experience of rock concerts. Castro had famously banned the Stones in the 1960s as a symbol of Western decadence. But relations with the West had thawed, and in 2005, Audioslave had played to 70,000 people in Havana. But the Rolling Stones was going to perform to at least half a million. And Cuba, well, Cuba had seen nothing like this.
Adam Wilkes (10:22):
So typically the way a concert works is that you bring items one through five, and item six through 10 are local. So you’ll bring the lights and the sound, but they have electricity, and they have trucks to take your lights and sound off the plane. They have fuel to put in the trucks. They have cranes, they have cables, they have water. As we get further and further long, they don’t have anything. It’s not like, “Oh, we forgot the cable. Let’s go down a Home Depot and get the cable.” There’s no Home Depot. There’s no cable store. There was at one point we needed a toilet, and it was right around the showtime. We unfortunately needed a toilet, and we literally-
Tom Wright (11:05):
Like a portable toilet?
Adam Wilkes (11:06):
We just needed a toilet.
Bryan Mosko (11:08):
A toilet.
Adam Wilkes (11:08):
We paid someone $200 to disassemble the toilet in their house, to build it there, and then we gave back to them. It was that kind of stuff.
Tom Wright (11:18):
The team scoured Havana begging for supplies. Here’s Jim Allison, who worked with Adam on the show.
Jim Allison (11:24):
One day we were driving by a place where there was a show two days before, and we saw they had left their generator there. So we got out of the car, went over, saw, oh, it’s a new generator. Oh, it’s still got fuel in it. Great. Okay, remember where that is. Tell the team to go get it. So we sent a truck over to borrow that generator, and we brought it back afterwards.
Tom Wright (11:46):
The team arranged a state-of-the-art concert without email working on basic Nokia phones from the 1990s.
Adam Wilkes (11:53):
It’s the one with the snake game on. I had that one.
Bryan Mosko (11:55):
I think a good point to bring up is most of our phones didn’t have internet.
Adam Wilkes (11:58):
I don’t think I used email the entire time.
Tom Wright (12:01):
And they still hadn’t secured a venue. Havana doesn’t have multipurpose spaces like the Crypto.com Arena or Madison Square Garden. They’d need to build a stage, but even choosing a location was politically fraught.
Adam Wilkes (12:14):
So we had looked at all different locations. One was this Revolutionary Plaza, and they were like, “You can’t do it there,” which actually would’ve been perfect. But that’s where Fidel Castro would make the famous speeches and stuff, and it was a political forum. So we ended up in a field.
Bryan Mosko (12:36):
It was basically a recreational sports field.
Tom Wright (12:38):
The venue, the Ciudad Deportiva was set. Adam’s team spoke to scores of people.
Adam Wilkes (12:44):
Everything was I don’t want to say locked and loaded, but it was looking pretty good.
Tom Wright (12:49):
Then Adam had a strange meeting with
(12:52):
, the senior US diplomat in Cuba. The meeting was in the recently reopened US embassy.
Adam Wilkes (12:59):
He kept sort of questioning, “When’s the show taking place?” And I’m like, “Oh, it’s going to be on March 18th.” “Are you sure?” And I said, “Well, I’m hopefully sure. We have a lot of things to figure out.” “Can’t change the date, right?” I was like, “Well, nope. That’s the only date.” And he was asking me all these questions in the way that a diplomat would, sort of saying everything except saying it. I remember leaving thinking that was a particularly strange meeting. It didn’t feel like they were here to help.
Tom Wright (13:25):
Did the US have something against the Stones playing in Cuba? Why not support this concert? A few days later, Adam had his answer.
News Anchors (13:34):
President Obama, expecting to make a historic trip to Cuba next month-
(13:38):
An important step forward in signaling this new beginning.
(13:41):
The first time in 88 years.
Barack Obama (13:43):
This week we made it official. I’m going to Cuba.
Tom Wright (13:47):
President Obama would be landing in Cuba just two days after the Stones were supposed to play their concert. A Cuban government official called Adam in a panic.
Adam Wilkes (13:56):
And they were just very straightforward. They said, “Look, we just cannot have logistically a US president come here and the Rolling Stones come here in the same week. We don’t have enough cars. We don’t have enough fuel. We don’t have hotel rooms.” And the whole thing just fell apart. And there we were, and we were in so deep.
Tom Wright (14:22):
Adam called his colleague Paul Gongaware.
Adam Wilkes (14:24):
So I start talking to Paul, and I started to realize that there was a lot of people in the Stones organization that were relieved it wasn’t happening. It was like, “Mick Jagger really can’t say anything now because it’s just not happening. It’s too bad. He’ll have to live with it.” And I had this call with Paul, and he was like, “Look, dude, it’s over.” And I made this deeply impassioned plea. I said, “You can’t give up right now. I’ve committed myself to this.” It’s a bit like Donnie Brasco. You go so deep undercover, you lose track of right and wrong. I had become a Cuban government official, and I just couldn’t accept it. And he said to me, somewhat blowing me off maybe, but somewhat maybe as words of advice. He goes, “You get Joyce on the phone.” Joyce is the manager. And he goes, “You don’t let her get off the phone until she says yes.”
Tom Wright (15:23):
By this point, Adam’s been two months in Cuba. He’s been eating on the fly, drinking a lot, and hardly sleeping. He hasn’t seen his infant daughter or his wife. Today he’s gym fit with a flowing mane of salt and pepper hair. In a photo from Cuba, he looks haggard with an unruly beard. In desperation, he calls Joyce Smith, the Stones’ manager, asking for a week’s delay. The Stones weren’t getting paid for Havana, but it costs around $5 million per week to keep the band on the road. Hotel rooms, salaries for 150 crew members, food, fuel, that kind of thing. The initial cost of the show was already $5 million. With a week’s delay, it had just doubled to $10 million.
Adam Wilkes (16:08):
So Joyce said that if we could find the money, which we would have to find roughly within 48 hours, she would tentatively agree.
Tom Wright (16:20):
Paul pitched in to save the concert.
Paul Gongaware (16:23):
We just didn’t want to let go of it. We just had to keep going. We figured out pushing back a week, what that was going to cost. That’s when the Stones, I think, threw in everything because they wanted it to happen so badly. They didn’t want to miss this. That’s when we got really close, and that’s when John and I took the last little bit of the risks to get it in there.
Tom Wright (16:50):
Gregory Elias, the Curaçao businessman, who already was financing the show, agreed to stump up some of the extra $5 million, and Adam and his colleagues wrangled other money from investors. The show was back on set for March 25th, which that year was Good Friday.
News Anchors (17:21):
Our producer saw the President’s plane coming past our location here. Now it’s touchdown.
(17:25):
The President and First Lady and their daughters coming off Air Force One in Havana, Cuba.
(17:29):
The first full day of Barack Obama’s visit to Havana opened with a ceremony for…
Adam Wilkes (17:33):
I mean it, there’s sometimes that there’s some places in the world where it’s just indisputable. If there’s one place in the world to be at that time, it’s there, and that might be the World Cup final or something like that. At that moment from when Obama was there until the Stones were there, there was absolutely nowhere else in the world where anybody could look out on the map and say there’d be a better place to be than Havana. Havana was the-
Tom Wright (18:01):
Parties every night?
Adam Wilkes (18:03):
No. Well, not for us.
Tom Wright (18:05):
Not for you.
Adam Wilkes (18:05):
But DiCaprio was there and Richard Branson, all these-
Tom Wright (18:09):
Where were they staying, on yachts or what?
Adam Wilkes (18:09):
I don’t fucking know. I remember people were like, “We have to make a VIP section for DiCaprio.” I’m like, “Tell him to go in the fucking audience with everybody else.” We didn’t have a VIP section. There was no VIP section country, unless you were Raul Castro. He probably had a VIP section.
Tom Wright (18:24):
By this point, the stage is under construction with huge LED lights. Hundreds of crew are on site. The Stone’s pre-arrival team is already in situ. And then-
Adam Wilkes (18:35):
Six days out, I wake up to a phone call from the Minister of Culture.
Tom Wright (18:39):
The minister said he needed to come over immediately to Adam’s hotel. The minister arrives, and Adam takes him into a conference room.
Adam Wilkes (18:47):
And he says, “Well, the Pope called Raul Castro.” And I’m just like, “Oh God, you got to be kidding me.” The Pope called Raul Castro last night, and he’s really upset that we’re doing this rock and roll concert on Good Friday. It just doesn’t seem right by him. The Pope asked Raul, would he mind moving the concert back a couple of days? So Raul called me, and he wanted me to ask you. And I’m like, “I wonder if I understood that correctly in Spanish, or did I just make that up? Could that have possibly just been said to me?”
Tom Wright (19:29):
Initially banned by the communist government, the Catholic Church had gained influence in Cuba. Just a year earlier, Pope Francis had visited, and he met with Fidel Castro, and it’s why the Pope took such an interest in this concert. Pushing down a rising anger, Adam responds that it’s too late to delay any longer, and the meeting breaks up.
Adam Wilkes (19:50):
And then they come back a couple hours later again, and this is after work, and I think I probably had a few drinks at this point. And they said, “No, we got an idea.” I’m like, “Okay, what do you got?” And they said, “12:05.” And I said, “What do you mean 12:05?” They’re like, “The concert, it starts five minutes after midnight because it’s Saturday. It’s no longer Good Friday.” And I was like, “Hold on a second. So the Pope calls Raul Castro, and you’re going to beat him on a technicality? Do you want to know what the Rolling Stones are doing at 12:05?”
(20:31):
I said, “They’re sleeping. They’re 80 years old. All right? So let me ask you a question. Do you want to be the country that’s opening to the world on the back of normalized relations with the US inviting the Rolling Stones here to perform for free for the people of Cuba, or do you want to be the guys that killed Keith Richards?” I said, “You stew on that. Let me know what you want to do.” And I put my drink down and I left.
Tom Wright (21:02):
Keith Richards isn’t going to be killed by staying up past midnight.
Adam Wilkes (21:05):
Yeah, Keith Richards would’ve been fine. Just from a photo standpoint, he looked the oldest.
Tom Wright (21:12):
But even the Pope didn’t have the sway to stop the Stones. Joyce, the band’s manager, stepped in. Paul remembers.
Paul Gongaware (21:20):
I definitely remember we were in the middle of it and trying to figure it out, and Joyce really came up with the solution. She just said, “Rolling Stones aren’t political, and they’re not religious in any way. We don’t hold any of those beliefs. We’re rock and roll, and we’ve never bowed to that sort of pressure before. We’re not going to do it now.” And the government relented.
Tom Wright (21:43):
The concert was all set to proceed, and Havana was electric.
Mick Jagger (21:51):
We’re very pleased to be here, and I’m sure it’s going to be a great show.
Speaker 13 (21:51):
The Rolling Stones touch down in Havana ahead of a huge free concert tonight.
Speaker 17 (21:56):
Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones!
Tom Wright (22:06):
Fans began to stream in from all over the country. There was an estimated 700,000 people in the field by the time the Stones took to the stage, among the largest concerts ever held.
Speaker 18 (22:15):
[foreign language 00:22:21].
Tom Wright (22:21):
“I’ve waited 50 years to see them,” said this Cuban fan. “Since I couldn’t see the Beatles, I’ll see the Rolling Stones.” And the performance would certainly not disappoint. The Stones are famous for never giving a bad show, but Mick Jagger, dressed in a bright pink shirt and sequin jacket, performed with even more swagger than normal that evening. The band played 18 songs over two hours, which was recorded as a concert film, Havana Moon. Afterward, Jagger was ecstatic.
Mick Jagger (22:54):
It was great concert, it was amazing. Very enthusiastic crowd, and they seem to know all the songs.
Tom Wright (23:01):
For Keith Richards, the show held a deeper meaning.
Keith Richards (23:03):
You could feel in the air that there was something special going on. Incredible country, and the energy there is quite amazing, and I just hope that the changes that are coming come in the right way, you know?
Tom Wright (23:19):
The hope of those days is dimmed. The blockade remains. But for a moment that evening in Havana, a group of people felt part of something more significant than a rock concert.
Adam Wilkes (23:29):
There was a feeling in the city, there was a moment in time that everybody there recognized that this was something they had never seen in their life and that maybe they would never see again, not just a rock and roll spectacle as much as this incredible moment of potential change and hope. For the band that had done everything, it was a feather in their cap to stage something that really would be very hard for anybody else to replicate, a testament to who the Rolling Stones are.
Paul Gongaware (23:57):
It goes back to remembering those days with Fidel and when their music was banned in Cuba and when people got thrown in jail for listening to the Rolling Stones, and for that transformation of people’s mindset into things are actually changing and they’re improving. This was the catalyst for a major upheaval of thinking, I guess you’d have to say, in Cuba. And the Stones wanted to do that, and I think they knew that that something would happen a result of that. Mick is always looking for something new, something different.
Tom Wright (24:34):
The Stones closed the show with a rapturous performance of Satisfaction. As the crowd, maybe a million strong, felt the elation of the moment, Jagger bowed and walked off the stage.
Adam Wilkes (24:49):
He would normally just go into his car, and he saw me, and he walked across the field towards me.
Tom Wright (24:54):
As the pair stood there, the promoter and the rock legend, relief washed over Adam. Back in the LA studio, Jagger had all but ordered Adam to fly down to Cuba. The gambit had paid off.
Adam Wilkes (25:07):
And he said to me, “I know how hard this must have been for you and what you and your team went through to put this event together, and I just want to let you know that I recognize that, and I want to let you know how much that means to me, and I deeply thank you. Thank you so much for doing this.”
Tom Wright (25:34):
Coming up next week on Night of Show…
Paul Gongaware (25:37):
This is Michael Jackson, dude. He has it in his soul, in his blood.
Brian Marcar (25:41):
I begged him, I begged him. If you don’t do it, I can’t live here anymore.
Paul Gongaware (25:44):
The King put the military on the hotel. We weren’t going anywhere until we played the show.
Brian Marcar (25:49):
I said yes to everything. Yes.
Tom Wright (25:55):
We want to hear from you. Perhaps you experienced a life-changing moment at a concert or meeting one of your favorite artists. Send us your best stories via voice message at nightofshow.com/contact. That’s nightofshow.com/contact. We’ll include the best of them on future episodes, and you stand to win Night of Show merch, also available on the show’s website, nightofshow.com. Thanks for listening.
(26:23):
Night of Show is a production of Project Brazen in partnership with PRX. It’s written and presented by me, Tom Wright and Adam Wilkes. The executive producers are Adam Wilkes, Paul Gongaware, John Meglen, Tom Wright, and Bradley Hope. Sandy Smallens is the executive producer for Audiation. The story editor is Joe Levy. Mariangel Gonzales is senior producer. Matthew Rubenstein is the producer. Dialogue edit, theme, and original music by William Whitman. Mixing an additional scoring by Paul Vitolins at Audiography. Lucy Woods is head of research. Ryan Ho is the creative designer for the project, with Cover Art Design by Julien Pradier. Clearance counsel is Innes Smolansky, Esquire.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Audiation.
