The Rolling Stones Were Chased Down Broadway Before Going Live — Then Brian Jones Pulled Out a Sitar

A fourth visit, and a very different band

On September 11, 1966, The Rolling Stones came back to The Ed Sullivan Show for the fourth time, but the circumstances were no longer those of a hungry British act trying to win over American television. By then, the group had become one of the most famous and controversial bands in the world, carrying a reputation that mixed hit records, tabloid fascination, and a sense of danger that mainstream TV both feared and exploited.

That tension made Sullivan an ideal stage. His program was one of the most powerful gateways into American living rooms, but it also represented the tidy, controlled side of show business. The Stones, by contrast, brought swagger, noise, and unpredictability. Even before the broadcast began, their appearance already had the shape of an event rather than a simple booking.

The warning at CBS

After dress rehearsal, the band was warned not to leave the CBS building. It was sensible advice. By 1966, public appearances by major rock groups could quickly spiral into scenes of screaming crowds, blocked sidewalks, and overwhelmed security. The Stones were not just popular; they were a magnet for disorder, especially in a city as crowded and excitable as New York.

But warnings like that often had the opposite effect on a band whose identity was built around testing limits. The instruction underscored the mood of the day: television producers wanted reliability, while the musicians moved through the city with the kind of restless confidence that made them impossible to fully contain. The result was chaos waiting for an opening.

A chase down Broadway

What happened next became the kind of backstage story that helps explain the mythology around the group. Before the cameras went live, the Stones ended up being chased down Broadway, turning a scheduled television taping into something closer to a street-level spectacle. It was a perfect 1960s collision of celebrity, urban energy, and the increasingly porous line between performers and the crowds that pursued them.

The image is as memorable as it is revealing: one of the biggest bands in the world running through Midtown before a national TV appearance, trailed by the frenzy their own fame had created. It captures how quickly Beatle-era pop had evolved into something more unruly. These were not polished guests moving neatly from rehearsal to makeup chair. They were cultural flashpoints, and New York reacted accordingly.

By 1966, The Rolling Stones did not simply arrive at television studios. They brought a disturbance with them.

Going live with a new sound

If the chase supplied the drama, the performance supplied the surprise. Brian Jones pulled out a sitar, an instrument that had become one of the era’s most recognizable symbols of rock’s widening imagination. Its presence on a mainstream variety show said a great deal about how quickly pop music was changing in 1966.

The sitar was more than an exotic prop. In the hands of British rock musicians, it suggested curiosity, experimentation, and a desire to break away from the strict boundaries of guitar-bass-drums rock and roll. Jones, the most sonically adventurous Stone, was central to that shift. His interest in unusual textures gave the band a way to sound less like a bar-band juggernaut and more like a group probing the edges of what pop could absorb.

Brian Jones as the band’s musical wild card

Jones often occupied a singular role in the Stones’ public story. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards increasingly defined the group’s songwriting center, while Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman anchored its rhythm. Jones, meanwhile, brought color, instability, and invention. He was the member most associated with reaching for unfamiliar instruments and sounds, making him both indispensable and hard to pin down.

That made the sight of him with a sitar especially resonant. On television, where images can flatten musicians into types, Jones looked like evidence that the band’s danger was not only social or sexual but musical. The Stones could provoke because they also refused to stand still. In a period when rock was rapidly opening itself to folk, psychedelia, and non-Western influences, Jones embodied the appetite for transformation.

Why the moment still matters

The September 1966 Sullivan appearance endures because it contains several truths about The Rolling Stones at once. There is the mass hysteria outside the studio, the friction with authority inside it, and the performance itself, where experimentation slipped into one of the most conventional formats in American entertainment. The whole episode feels like a compact drama about what rock stardom had become by the mid-1960s.

It also shows how television preserved contradictions. Sullivan offered order, sponsors, cameras, cues. The Stones arrived trailing noise and unpredictability. Yet the pairing worked precisely because each side sharpened the other. A chase down Broadway and a sitar on live TV were not separate anecdotes. Together, they formed a portrait of a band expanding popular culture even as the old machinery of show business tried to keep pace.

Image credits: Harding, Garrick M. (Garrick Mallery), 1827-1904 / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain; Arp, Bill, 1826-1903 Making of America Project / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain; Irvine, Leigh H. (Leigh Hadley), 1863-1942 / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.