Little Jimmy - Don Croissant
THE ROLLING STONES IN BRUSSELS, 1966: LITTLE JIMMY REMEMBERS…
Once upon a time, Little Jimmy & The Sharks were so popular in Belgium and Northern France that they shared the bill with The Kinks, The Who and… The Rolling Stones. Here are Little Jimmy’s memories of The Rolling Stones’ first Belgian concert in March 1966.
The Rolling Stones first came to Belgium in 1964 to do a show for the Flemish TV station ‘BRT’, but the fans had to wait another two years for the real thing. March 27 1966 should have been D-Day for all Belgian Stones fans as the Notorious Five were supposed to fill the ‘Palais des Sports’ in Schaarbeek, Brussels (capacity 10,000 - 12,000). And notorious they were: in 1964, the Belgian Minister of Home Affairs had tried to prevent the TV show by refusing them permission to enter the country! In the meantime, The Stones had caused riots all over the Continent, more particularly in Germany, Holland and France. Was Belgium going to experience its first-ever pop music riot? Decca Belgium used every marketing trick to fill the 10,000+ capacity Palais des Sports (‘Sports Palace’, a velodrome), but it is now agreed upon that less than 5,000 fans actually attended.
Little Jimmy is still alive and rocking. He quit the scene in the early seventies but returned with a blues’n’rock trio in the nineties. "I played the blues then and I play the blues now”, is Little Jimmy’s very concise summary of his career.