Concert-crazy: Jagger, meister, with Keith RichardsPhoto: Jon Gardiner

There's plenty of power behind a Stones tour. A standard Stones contract was leaked onto the Internet following an earlier tour, "Bridges to Babylon," in the late Nineties. The contract called for "one quality town car with drivers, i.e., Lincoln, Mercedes, BMW," with dark-tinted windows. Also required: a workout room with "extremely clean bathroom and shower facilities"; a "full-size Snooker table--not a pool table--with a full set of cues, bridges, chalk, and racks"; and "two smartly dressed, well-groomed hostesses to assist in serving food in the band lounge from 3:00 p.m. on the day of show. Table waiting experience preferred."

If they weren't all well groomed, the fans were well behaved. The concert "passed without any major incidents and with only a few arrests and citations," reported Bob Dean, interim Duke Police director. Durham police charged seven people with trademark infringement after they were discovered selling bootlegged Stones T-shirts, at the tempting price of $20.

While securing the campus was no easy assignment, the greater logistical challenge was organizing parking. The event produced a massive gathering of vehicles. Walking to the stadium, I passed an area devoted to "Limousine Parking"; lines of vehicles from local rescue squads, along with a van ominously labeled "Special Operations"; and technology-packed TV-news vans. Overseeing all of that for Duke Parking Services was Renee Adkins, special-events coordinator.

This was certainly a special event. I talked to Adkins a couple of days after the concert. From her office on the curiously named Coal Pile Drive, she informed me, with evident understatement, "This was huge for us. The thought of accommodating 40,000 people looking for parking--we have problems parking the number we have on campus normally." Her group went about securing everything from golf carts for shuttling the physically handicapped to "Event Parking" signs to direct the many who would be hunting for parking spaces, to portable toilets--some fifty in all--to be dispersed among twenty-one parking lots on campus. Duke also took over 1,300 off-campus parking spaces, in the American Tobacco Complex, and provided a shuttle service to and from campus. By 4:00 on the day of the concert, one of the bigger campus lots, with 375 spaces, was full; cars had been lining up ten or fifteen minutes before the official 2:00 opening of the lot.

Adkins' operation learned lessons that it could employ for any mega-event on campus. "But," she added cheerily, "we don't have to have it anytime soon."

Where to park all those people was only one concern on campus. The impact of all those people on the grass in Wallace Wade Stadium was another. Mitch Moser, in the athletics department, was the official worrier about the football field. The Blue Devils were scheduled to play Georgia Tech the following Saturday. Would the concert stage and the 7,000 fans seated in folding chairs on the field--covered with something called Terraplas, a perforated plastic system designed to allow grass to breathe--leave a significant footprint? The day after the concert, Moser did a walk-through and was pleased: "The field actually looks pretty good," he said.

There were some who reveled in the weekend but didn't quite make it to the stadium. One was Dana Dolinoy '98, a third-year Duke graduate student in toxicology and genetics. A year earlier, Dolinoy had reserved Duke Chapel and the Washington Duke Inn for her wedding to Michael Cipolla on October 8. Only in July, just before the rest of the world, did she learn that the campus--and the hotel--would be playing host to an even larger event. She said she's long been a fan of the Stones.

Dolinoy and Cipolla had 200 guests at their wedding and had set aside seventy-five rooms at the Washington Duke Inn. That was where the Stones were staying. Good luck trying to walk in there on concert day, as I did, only to be blocked by a guard protecting the perimeter of "a high-security environment," as he called it. The hotel was also housing the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, on campus for an exhibition game, and participants in an NCAA golf tournament. To avoid Stones-related congestion on their way to Duke Chapel, the wedding party was directed onto chartered buses. For her own departure, Dolinoy had the use of a staff elevator, a side exit, and two uniformed police motorcyclists as escorts to ease her through the traffic.

After the concert, the campus was rife with rumors that Mick Jagger had offered Dolinoy's father huge amounts of money to give up the presidential suite--and perhaps the entire block of rooms at the hotel. It never happened, Dolinoy told me. "He probably wouldn't have accepted money, but he would have said, 'Well, would you come to the reception and sing a song?' We heard the offer was for $50,000, and we heard the offer was to pay for the entire wedding." But the rumors did pay dividends: Dolinoy's sister managed to snag an autograph from the 76ers' Allen Iverson; when she tracked down the team's coach at the hotel, he told her, "Any dad who will stick to his guns and not sell off his daughter's hotel suite is worth an autograph."