Rip this joint.

They were seven shows into their first tour of America. They had a number one album in England and a half-empty tour bus in Pennsylvania. Their biggest song in the United States was a Buddy Holly cover called "Not Fade Away." Between June 5 and June 20, 1964, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Ian Stewart were playing eleven shows across the United States to find out whether America wanted them — and on a humid Wednesday evening in the hollow below Perry Highway, four hundred teenagers and a curious girl from Dormont named Paula Cline were about to find out whether they wanted the Rolling Stones.

The venue was West View Park Danceland, the largest dance hall in Pennsylvania when it was built in the late 1920s and, by 1964, a weathered art-moderne ballroom with neon signage, a polished maple floor, and three decades of Saturday-night memories burned into its ceiling tiles. It sat at the mouth of the West View Park midway, just past the ticket booth and across from the Dips — the wooden roller coaster whose first drop you could hear from the intersection of Center Avenue and Perry Highway. The Park had been booking music there since the Jazz Age. Glenn Miller's orchestra had played the hall in 1949. Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Louis Prima, Guy Lombardo, Stan Kenton, Xavier Cugat, Gene Krupa, and Vaughn Monroe had all stood on its stage. Frankie Yankovic played it three times in a single year. Danceland was a working dance hall, not a concert venue — and on June 17, 1964, the Rolling Stones were the closing act on a six-band bill.

The headliner, technically, was Bobby Goldsboro. He had a Top 10 hit that spring called "See The Funny Little Clown" and was the name on the KQV marquee. The Stones went on last. They played for somewhere between thirty and forty minutes. Admission was one dollar and fifty cents. Tickets were available at any National Record Marts location and at the door. Very few people came.

The tour.

The 1st American Tour had opened twelve days earlier, on June 5, at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, California. From there the Stones had flown to San Antonio for two nights at the Joe Freeman Coliseum — where most of the Texas audience, reportedly, had come to see a supporting act named Bobby Vee — and then on through Minneapolis, Omaha, and Detroit. A Chicago stop was given over not to a concert but to two days of recording at Chess Studios, where they cut "It's All Over Now" in the same building that Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry had built their careers. By the time the tour bus pulled into Pittsburgh on June 17, the band had seven shows behind them and four still to go: West View that night, Harrisburg the next, Cleveland on the 19th for a television taping of The Mike Douglas Show, and then two shows at Carnegie Hall in New York to close on June 20.

Eleven shows across nine American cities in sixteen days, for a band most Americans had never heard of. Keith Richards would later describe that first tour as "the most bizarre part of the whole story" — a group of purist British teenagers who had come to turn America on to the blues and instead discovered they were turning Americans back on to their own forgotten music. "Sometimes we were top of the bill," he wrote in his 2010 memoir Life. "Not always. But usually." West View was one of the shows where they were not.

The set.

The setlist for June 17, 1964 was not professionally recorded, not reviewed by any local paper, and not, as far as anyone has ever been able to confirm, broadcast on radio. But we know what they played — because they played the same eleven songs in the same order at every full-length concert on this tour. The opening show in San Bernardino on June 5 is documented. The closing shows at Carnegie Hall on June 20 are documented. Both use the identical eleven-song set. There is no reason to think the West View performance deviated.

The set opened with "Not Fade Away" — the Buddy Holly song the Stones had rearranged with a Bo Diddley beat and turned into their first U.S. hit. It moved through Chuck Berry's "I'm Talking About You," Lennon and McCartney's "I Wanna Be Your Man" (given to the Stones by the Beatles as a favor a year earlier), Tommy Tucker's "Hi-Heel Sneakers," Bobby Troup's "Route 66," Rufus Thomas's "Walking the Dog," and the Jagger-Richards original "Tell Me" — which had only been released as a U.S. single a few weeks earlier and remains, along with "I Wanna Be Your Man," the only non-cover on the set. It closed with Chuck Berry's "Beautiful Delilah," Marvin Gaye's "Can I Get a Witness," Willie Dixon's "I Just Want to Make Love to You," and Bo Diddley's "I'm All Right."

Nine of the eleven songs on the program were written by African-American artists — Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Rufus Thomas, Holland-Dozier-Holland. Of the other two, one was by Buddy Holly's Crickets and one was written for them by the Beatles. The Rolling Stones had at this point essentially one original of their own, "Tell Me," released as a single two weeks earlier. "Satisfaction" was a year away. "Paint It Black," "Gimme Shelter," "Sympathy for the Devil," and every other song the Rolling Stones would one day be known for were still ahead of them. On the night of June 17, 1964, they were a very good covers band from London, playing blues records they had memorized, for an American audience that had mostly forgotten blues records existed.

"What actually happened was we turned American people back on to their own music. That's probably our greatest contribution." — Keith Richards, writing in LIFE (2010)

The photographs.

Paula Cline was a teenager from Dormont, a streetcar suburb on the South Hills side of the city. She went to the show on a Wednesday night in June with her camera — most likely a small fixed-lens 35mm of the sort sold at drugstores — and she used it. The photographs she took that evening are, as far as anyone has been able to establish, the only visual record of the Rolling Stones' performance at West View Danceland. She did not sell them. She did not submit them to a newspaper. For decades they were family snapshots that moved from album to album without leaving home.

Rick Sebak of WQED, writing about the show for Pittsburgh Magazine in 2013, credited her by name: "One girl, Paula Cline from Dormont, took her camera and snapped shots of the band. Local rock historians have been grateful ever since." Pittsburgh has other Paulas and other cameras, but we do not have another set of photographs of the Rolling Stones at Danceland. We have hers, and we are lucky to have them.

Look at them honestly. They are not good photographs, technically. They are under-exposed, motion-blurred, grainy, framed by an amateur standing somewhere in the first third of a dance hall doing her best with a camera that was never intended for this. And that is precisely why they matter. The Stones would go on to be photographed more than almost any musicians in the twentieth century — by Annie Leibovitz, by David Bailey, by a thousand tour photographers on a thousand tours. Every subsequent image of the Rolling Stones was taken by someone who already knew they were the Rolling Stones. Paula Cline did not know that yet. Nobody in the room did. She took these photographs because she wanted to remember a show she had gone to on a Wednesday in June. The Stones had not yet been invented as a legend. They were just the band that had flown in that afternoon.

Everything after.

The day after the Danceland show the Stones played Harrisburg. The day after that, June 19, they flew to Cleveland and taped four songs — including "Tell Me," which they had played at Danceland two nights earlier — for The Mike Douglas Show. Two days later they closed the tour with a double-bill at Carnegie Hall. Twenty thousand fans tried to get in; the hall held two thousand, eight hundred. Dick Clark introduced them. The contrast between a Carnegie Hall headliner on a Saturday and a West View sixth-billed act on a Wednesday was, for the Rolling Stones, a matter of seventy-two hours.

In July, back in England, they recorded "It's All Over Now" from their Chess sessions and watched it become their first British number one. In February 1965 they wrote "The Last Time." Three months after that Keith Richards woke up in a Florida hotel room with the riff to "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" stuck in his head and, by his own account, fumbled for a cassette recorder in the dark. By the summer of 1965 they were one of the biggest bands in the world. They never played West View Park again.

They have since played Pittsburgh ten more times. The Civic Arena in November 1965, on a bill that also included the Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, Bo Diddley, and Paul Revere & the Raiders. The Civic Arena again in 1966 with Tommy James & the Shondells and the McCoys opening. The Civic Arena in 1972 on the legendary Exile on Main Street tour. Three Rivers Stadium in 1989 on the Steel Wheels tour — Bill Wyman's last — and again in 1994 for Voodoo Lounge. The Civic Arena once more in 1999 and 2003. PNC Park in 2005, with Pearl Jam opening. And Heinz Field twice — in 2015 and again in October 2021, the first tour after Charlie Watts's death. At that 2021 show Mick Jagger, by then seventy-eight years old, stopped between songs and asked the crowd a question: "Did anybody here climb under the fence that day?" He meant Danceland. He meant 1964. He meant four hundred teenagers on a Wednesday night in June, and the ticket that cost a dollar fifty, and the dance hall they had been the last act to play. "Thanks for coming back," he said.

Danceland itself lived another nine years after that June night. The Park continued to book big-band acts on weekends and smaller acts on weeknights, and the ballroom continued to draw dancers well into the 1970s. On October 3, 1973, a fire of unknown origin broke out in the building late at night. By morning Danceland was gone — the neon sign, the maple floor, the art-deco chandeliers, the stage the Rolling Stones had played on. The owners collected the insurance and chose not to rebuild. Four years later West View Park closed for good. Four years after that the midway was cleared for a shopping center. There is a Post Office today on the footprint where the Stones stood, and a drugstore parking lot where Paula Cline aimed her camera.

The girl from Dormont grew up, kept her photographs, and quietly let them circulate, once it was clear anyone would care. Without her we would know the Rolling Stones played West View Danceland on June 17, 1964 because we have the advertisement. We would know the crowd was around four hundred because Keith Richards mentioned it in passing, once, in his autobiography. We would know the admission was $1.50 because it was printed on the ticket. We would know the setlist because they played the same set for the whole tour. What we would not have are the pictures. Four hundred people watched the Rolling Stones in an amusement park ballroom on a Wednesday night in June of 1964, and we have Paula Cline to thank for the fact that the rest of us can see what it looked like.

Sources & Acknowledgments

• Rick Sebak, "Rip This Joint," Pittsburgh Magazine, May 16, 2013. The title of this piece is borrowed from Sebak's with gratitude; his article was the first to bring Paula Cline's photographs to wide attention. Available at pittsburghmagazine.com/rip-this-joint.
• Keith Richards, Life (with James Fox), Little, Brown and Company, 2010. For the band's recollections of the 1964 U.S. tour and Richards's now-famous "we turned American people back on to their own music" formulation.
• "The Rolling Stones 1st American Tour 1964," Wikipedia, and the independent setlist database at setlist.fm, for confirmation of tour dates, cities, and the eleven-song programme as played at the opening (June 5, San Bernardino) and closing (June 20, Carnegie Hall) shows of the tour.
• Shirley McMarlin, "A look back at the Rolling Stones' Pittsburgh concerts," Tribune-Review, 2020, for the complete record of the band's ten subsequent Pittsburgh appearances.
• Original concert advertisement, Pittsburgh Press, June 1964, from the archive of the West View Historical Society.
• Charles J. Jacques Jr., Goodbye, West View Park, Goodbye, Amusement Park Journal, 1985, for the history of the Danceland ballroom, its 1973 fire, and the eventual closure of West View Park.
• Photographs by Paula Cline of Dormont, Pennsylvania, reproduced here with the enduring gratitude of the Historical Society. All five images: 17 June 1964.

John Schalcosky President and founder of the West View Historical Society, and founder of Odd, Mysterious & Fascinating History of Pittsburgh.