Did critics love or hate the Stones' 1975 arena spectacle?

The 1975 Tour of the Americas was the Stones’ first full-blown arena mega-tour, complete with a giant inflatable phallus, a cherry picker that carried Mick Jagger over the crowd, and a massive lotus-stage that rotated. Critics split hard. Rolling Stone’s Paul Nelson called the shows “the best rock & roll I’ve ever seen” and praised the band’s renewed fire with new guitarist Ronnie Wood. But others, like Creem’s Dave Marsh, slammed the overproduction, the $10 ticket price (high for 1975), and what he saw as a bored band going through the motions behind a circus act.

Robert Christgau was especially brutal, giving the tour a C+ in his Village Voice column and dismissing the whole thing as “astroturf phallocentrism.” The divide captures a turning point: the Stones were still capable of transcendent nights (the Forum shows in L.A. are legendary), but the spectacle had started to overshadow the music. The 1975 tour marks the moment the band became a corporation on wheels — adored by crowds, scrutinized by purists.