How Rolling Stone and Creem Reviewed the Stones' 1972 STP Tour — Decadence as Spectacle

Rolling Stone sent writer Robert Greenfield on the road with the Stones for the 1972 tour, and his dispatches practically became a third member of the band. He described the heroin, the groupies, the smashed hotel rooms with a kind of awestruck reportage — not quite condemnation, but a weary acknowledgment that this was the price of keeping the world’s greatest rock band running. The magazine’s coverage treated the decadence as a natural consequence of fame, more fascinating than horrifying.

Creem took a different angle. Writers like Lester Bangs mocked the whole circus, calling the tour a “sadomasochistic ego orgy” and implying the Stones were parodying themselves. Where Rolling Stone wanted to document the legend, Creem wanted to puncture it. Bangs saw the excess not as rock ’n’ roll rebellion but as a tired act that treated fans like marks.

Later cultural historians have viewed the 1972 tour as a pivot point — the moment when rock stardom tipped from music into theater of indulgence. The tour became shorthand for “the last great rock tour” in memoirs and docs, but also a cautionary tale about the machinery of excess. Robert Greenfield’s book STP: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones (1974) is now treated as a classic of gonzo rock writing, while the tour’s actual drug-fueled chaos reads less like liberation and more like burnout in retrospect.