Mick Jagger, dressed in a white smock, his hair still darkened from his role in the movie “Performance,” comes on stage, asks several times for quiet, and then reads quietly from Shelley’s poem Adonais as thousands of white butterflies were released:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken’d from the dream of life;
‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
And the Stones launch into their first song. They are horribly out of tune, but it is, all in all, a great day in London’s Hyde Park. The concert is the largest of its kind in the UK, one of the largest free concerts ever, until it is eclipsed by Woodstock in the following month.
