It was December 13, 1981. Helicopters circled the skies over Sun Devil Stadium, while inside, Mick Jagger floated over the crowd on a cherry picker. Roughly 74,600 fans filled the stadium for the show, later immortalized in footage from the Rolling Stones concert film, “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” And all of them had their lighters in the air.
“The whole Sun Devil Stadium was like a Christmas tree,” Larry Mac recalls. “Everybody lit their lighters in the air — before cell phones — and it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.”
Mac, who became a radio DJ in 1985 and has worked the knobs for Phoenix station 98 KUPD and 96.1 KLPX in Tucson, was around 16 years old at the time. He’d camped out in line to get tickets for the concert, which was common before digital tickets existed. “This wasn’t just a concert — it was an event,” Mac says. The massive Stones show at Sun Devil Stadium (now called Mountain America Stadium) also wasn’t an outlier — it was routine back then…