Rolling Stones to release tracks from second night of 1977 incognito show at Toronto’s El Mocambo

Were you there when the Cockroaches invaded the El Mocambo for the club’s two most notorious shows in March 1977?

If you were, here’s some good news — even better news if you weren’t: the band’s entire second show is being released by Universal Music on CD and vinyl May 13.

Unless you were one of the 325 CHUM radio contest winners led to believe they were being treated to an exclusive April Wine concert on March 4, 1977, you wouldn’t know that the “opening” band, known as the Cockroaches, was actually the incognito Rolling Stones, playing their only two dates of the year here in the city that would eventually become their second home.

As Duff Roman, CHUM FM’s program director at the time, remembered, the partygoers were told of the evening’s true intent only when they were heading to the venue by chartered bus.

“I told them that I had bad news, that April Wine had to cancel,” Roman recalled. “But we’ve worked really hard to find a replacement, a band calling the Strolling Bones … er, the Rolling Stones.”

Any incredulousness by the contest winners was dispelled when Stones drummer Charlie Watts appeared just before their set to adjust his kit.

“Every conversation in the club suddenly stopped,” said Roman. “You could have heard a pin drop.”

Kicking off the first evening with “Honky Tonk Women,” the Stones — Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Bill Wyman and Watts, along with keyboardist Billy Preston — proceeded to tear down the joint with a 23-song set list that mixed the hits with blues and rock covers that inspired the boys to take up instruments in the first place. That included four that would fill the third side of 1977’s “Love You Live” double album: Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy,” Bo Diddley’s “Crackin’ Up,” Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster” and Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around.” (Toronto was further represented on the live album with two 1975 Maple Leaf Gardens performances: “Fingerprint File” and “It’s Only Rock ’N Roll (But I Like It),” but we digress.)

Of course, once word got out that the Stones were playing the El Mo, all secrecy went out the window the second night, with police cordoning off the area as hundreds lined up outside the club hoping to get a glimpse of their rock heroes.

But it is the full set of the second night — plus three unidentified tracks from the first — that will make their public debut on May 13: “Live at the El Mocambo” will be released in numerous configurations — a double CD; a four-disc vinyl set; a four-disc coloured vinyl set — and, of course, digitally for downloads and streaming.

Performances include — aside from the covers mentioned above — a handful of tracks from their current album at the time, “Black and Blue,” including “Hand of Fate,” “Fool to Cry,” “Crazy Mama,” “Hot Stuff” and “Melody.” Also included are “It’s Only Rock ’N Roll,” plus that album’s “Dance Little Sister” and “Luxury”; “Goat’s Head Soup’s” controversial “Star Star”; a cover of Bobby Troup’s “Route 66”; the previously unreleased “Worried About You” (which would show up on 1981’s “Tattoo You”) and a smattering of classics that includes “All Down the Line,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Happy,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Rip This Joint,” “Brown Sugar” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

The Stones’ El Mocambo gig was significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which was kicking off a trend that saw fellow arena rock acts use pseudonyms to play intimate club gigs. (Aerosmith paraded themselves as Dr. J. Jones and the Interns; Blue Oyster Cult as Soft White Underbelly.)

And there was the extraneous infamy surrounding the event: from the Feb. 27 arrest of Keith Richards for heroin possession at the Harbour Castle Hilton Hotel (he was granted probation and ordered to play a benefit for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, which took place in Oshawa in 1979) to the impromptu, solo attendance of Margaret Trudeau on her and then prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s sixth wedding anniversary — and all the additional security measures that entailed. (Roman recalls that sniper postings on rooftops opposite the club were suggested at one point.)

But most importantly, it raised Toronto’s profile on the world stage.

“I think the Stones gave their blessing to Toronto as a rock ’n’ roll capital,” said Roman, borne out by subsequent appearances at such intimate venues as the Horseshoe, the Palais Royale, the Phoenix and RPM.

“What they proved is that you didn’t have to be in Soho in N.Y. where an event like that might have happened. So many good things came out of that show.”