He picks Mick
A superfan from Maryland has become a fixture in the Rolling Stones firmament
At a bar in New York’s East Village in early December, Doug Potash, who has white hair and a bit of a beer belly, takes the stage and does his best Mick Jagger impression. Performing a cameo with a Stones cover band called the Blushing Brides, Potash claps and points, pouts and shakes his hips, spitting out the words: “Huh, shidoobee, shattered, shattered!”
Judging from the reaction of the crowd of 150 fellow Rolling Stones freaks, captured on video, you’d think Mick himself had stormed the stage. Sporting the famous red Stones tongue logo — on shirts, pants, jackets and a few tattoos — the audience members sing, dance, clap, laugh, shout and point back at him.
Here, Potash, a 68-year-old Annapolis, Md., wealth manager and divorced dad of one, is something akin to a rock star, or at least a fixture in the rock firmament. He has seen 172 Stones concerts and attends backstage dinners with family and friends of band members before shows. He’s met Stones guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood several times, along with keyboardist Chuck Leavell and backup singer Bernard Fowler, and knew the late saxophonist Bobby Keys. And he’s known to Stones fans worldwide through his fan club, Shidoobee With Stonesdoug — named after the refrain from Shattered, the raucous four-decade-old Stones song capturing the extremes of late-’70s New York. The fan club has a lively website and Facebook group with thousands of members; it also hosts off-line gatherings at concerts, as well as events like this one. And the club is often the first to break band news.
Potash’s group holds its biggest annual celebration Labour Day weekend, when hundreds of Shidoobees — as they refer to themselves — descend on a motel in Wildwood, N.J. With Stones banners, posters, blankets, photos and oversized tongues hanging from the railings of balconies, Shidoobees belt out Stones songs into poolside microphones. They deliver impromptu concert reviews and recite set lists dating back decades. They exchange Stones books and bootleg audio and video recordings. And they trade Stones stories — such as the one Gail Hoffman, a self-described “Mick Chick,” likes to tell about the time in 1994 when she was backstage at a Stones concert at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., and Jagger passed by a few feet away. “Suddenly, I was 14 again,” Hoffman says, laughing. “I couldn’t catch my breath and felt like I was going to faint.”
Hoffman, who by day is the controller at a New York consulting firm that works with major corporations, has seen the Stones 183 times, often from the front row. She says Jagger smiles or points to her from the stage at just about every concert she attends.
She and her daughter, Lauren Miller (who has seen the band 96 times), have been members of Potash’s club for 20 years. Potash, she says, “has brought me so many years of happiness through the Shidoobees ... I have so many friends for life because of him bringing together people.”
Potash, who grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., has been a diehard Stones fan since grade school. Back then, “we didn’t talk to the Beatles kids because they were the goody two-shoes, and we were the guys who got into trouble,” he says. Potash will always associate (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction with the raging hormones and angst of adolescence, and still laughs when he recalls a Boy Scout leader constantly telling him and other teen scouts to turn down the song blaring from their tent at camp in Pine Hill, N.J.
He attended his first Stones show at Steel Pier in Atlantic City in 1966, the summer after Grade 9, with founding member
Brian Jones playing guitar. Jones irked Potash when he pushed the teen away as he tried to climb into the Stones van after the show. So, Potash grabbed Jones’s coat, nearly ripping a button off it. The incident became a Shidoobee insiders’ joke on the origins of the Between the Buttons album title.
The first time Potash heard Shattered on the radio in 1978, the driving opening guitar groove, snarling vocals and cocky lyrics left him spellbound. He soon got the custom licence plates “SHDOBE” while living in Chevy Chase, Md., then “SHATTRD” after moving to Chicago in 1983.
Potash recalls Richards spotting the two plates affixed to his tattered denim jacket at a party after a charity gig the guitarist played in New York in 2006. “Hey, I wrote that!” Richards exclaimed, pointing to the plates.
Other songs evoke more poignant memories. As Tears Go By always reminds Potash of his mother, who died of cancer in 1986. “It’s the one Stones song my mom always loved,” Potash says. “When I was a boy, she would ask me, ‘Why can’t they do more beautiful songs like that one?’”
Potash says the Stones remain popular because their songs provide a soundtrack for people’s lives like no other group. The Stones have spanned 11 American presidencies; five major U.S. wars; the civil rights, women’s and gay rights movements; baby boomers, generation X and millennials. And despite entering their 58th year and being led by two often-feuding septuagenarians — one of whom (Jagger) underwent heart valve replacement surgery last April — they can still fill 80,000-seat stadiums.
Potash’s son, Trevor, 35, has attended 10 Stones concerts with his father since he was 13 years old, even though he prefers Led Zeppelin, 311 and the Roots. He says his father derives immense satisfaction from fellow fans’ joy at Stones shows and Shidoobee gatherings. “What he’s done with the Rolling Stones group is really just an extension of his personality.”