The band was rehearsing at Andy Warhol’s place in Montauk, at the end of Long Island, and I went out there for a month or so, and then there was a break and the tour started in June. I was very naïve. I brought my tennis racket with me. I thought that maybe as we went from city to city I would take tennis lessons. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. They were paying me a few hundred dollars a week and I was supposed to create publicity pictures, but I only managed to get a few out the first day and that was it. I was never up during the day again. I was always with the band.

At the time, I thought that the way to get the best work was to become a chameleon. To become so much a part of what was going on that no one would notice you were there. It was unbelievably stupid of me to pick that situation to become part of. I did everything you’re supposed to do when you go on tour with the Rolling Stones. It was the first time in my life that something took me over.

A rock ‘n’ roll tour is unnatural. You’re moving through time and space too fast. The experience is extreme. There is the bigness of the performances and then the isolation and loneliness that follows. The band was like a group of lost boys, but their music saved them. It gave them a reason to exist. When they weren’t on tour they didn’t spend that much time together. On the road they worked. It was the first time in my life—and I’d been at Rolling Stone for five years by then—that I saw how music is made. I saw how it is produced organically. The riffs I heard in hotel rooms during the tour were the songs on the next album—“Memory Motel,” “Fool to Cry.”

The photograph that is emblematic of the 1975 tour for me is the one of Mick in the elevator. It was toward the end of the tour, and he was not on the ground. He was flying. From another world. He was the most beautiful object. Like a butterfly. Ethereal. After all the time on the road, his dancing was very loose. It was almost surreal. I was always aware of where Mick was. What might have seemed like a nuisance to him became a source of comfort. To know that I was somewhere nearby. It was a subject-photographer relationship of an obsessive kind. I remember him saying that I should tell him if I wanted him to be at a specific place on the stage at any point in the show, but I found that too daunting. I couldn’t think of anything for him to do that he wasn’t already doing.

At the end of the performances, the band would do two or three encores that had been planned. Nothing was ad-libbed. They were professional in a way I hadn’t seen until then. They’d been doing it awhile. After the last encore, when everyone in the audience thought they were coming onstage again, they would get out of Dodge. Mick dumped several pails of water on his head every night as part of the show and he would leave the stage totally wet, with his eye makeup running. He wrapped himself up in towels and jumped in the car. Usually the band went straight to the plane, but we were staying in town the night I photographed him in the elevator. The picture was taken on the way up to Mick’s room. He and I were alone. We were on some level out of it. Not because of drugs, but because of all that travel, and sleep deprivation, and the exertion of the performances.