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200 Crazed Rolling Stones Fans Turn ‘Shine a Light’ Into Their Own Live Show

A Shidoobee at this weekend’s show.Photo: Ray McEntee (a.k.a. Mackie212)


Members of the unofficial Rolling Stones fan club, the Shidoobees, make a habit of traveling long distances to see their aged heroes rock it out live all over the world. But they’d never met up for a mere movie before — until the opening of Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s Stones documentary. This weekend at the Lincoln Square Imax theater nearly 200 Shidoobees — who had flown in from as far away as Japan and Papua New Guinea — filed up the maze of escalators and giddily danced their way into the movie theater, layered in every piece of Stones merchandise imaginable. Once the film started, the theater sounded less like a hushed movie palace and more like a real concert: Fans stood on their chairs and cheered for the Stones, sang along with their favorite songs (all of them), and took flash photos of the massive 2-D close-ups of their idols on the Imax screen.

No one in the crowd seemed to know who Jack White was during his underwhelming duet on “Loving Cup,” but they went wild when Buddy Guy appeared onstage to sing “Champagne and Reefer,” shouting out loud as he tore into his grinding solos — one of a few occasions when it was hard to tell whether the applause was from the audience in the theater or from the movie. And when Jagger introduced his background singer, Lisa Fischer, as hailing from Queens, the crowed immediately protested; the Shidoobees, knowing the Stones better than the Stones do themselves, were fully aware that Lisa is from Brooklyn. After the film ended the New Guinea delegate presented another Shidoobee with a bouquet of flowers. She’d appeared, very briefly, in a crowd scene in the film, and the entire fan club earnestly congratulated her on her film debut. —Andrew Rozas

200 Crazed Rolling Stones Fans Turn ‘Shine a Light’ Into Their Own Live Show