“It’s the one Stones songs my mom always loved,” Potash says. “As Tears Go By” always reminds Potash of his mother, who died of cancer in 1986. Other songs evoke more poignant memories. “Hey, I wrote that!” Richards exclaimed, pointing to the plates. 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. He soon got the custom license plates “SHDOBE” while living in Chevy Chase, Md., then “SHATTRD” after moving to Chicago in 1983. The first time Potash heard “Shattered,” on DC 101 in 1978, the driving opening guitar groove, snarling vocals and cocky lyrics left Potash spellbound. The incident became a Shidoobee insiders’ joke on the origins of the “Between the Buttons” album title. So, Potash grabbed Jones’s coat, nearly ripping a button off it. Jones irked Potash when he pushed the teen away as he tried to climb into the Stones van post-show. He attended his first Stones show at Steel Pier in Atlantic City in 1966, the summer after ninth grade, with founding member Brian Jones playing guitar. 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. 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, who grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., has been a die-hard Stones fan since grade school. I have so many friends for life because of him bringing together people.” Potash, she says, “has brought me so many years of happiness through the Shidoobees. She and her daughter, Lauren Miller (who has seen the band 96 times), have been members of Potash’s club for 20 years. She says Jagger smiles or points to her from the stage at just about every concert she attends and has had picks emblazoned with his name delivered to her a few times. 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. “I couldn’t catch my breath and felt like I was going to faint.” “Suddenly, I was 14 again,” Hoffman says, laughing. 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. They exchange Stones books and bootleg audio and video recordings. They deliver impromptu concert reviews and recite set lists dating back decades. With Stones banners, posters, blankets, photos and oversize tongues hanging from the railings of balconies, Shidoobees belt out Stones songs into poolside microphones. Potash’s group holds its biggest annual celebration Labor Day weekend, when hundreds of Shidoobees - as they refer to themselves - descend on a motel in Wildwood, N.J. And the club is often the first to break band news. The fan club has a lively website and Facebook group with thousands of members it also hosts offline gatherings at concerts as well as events like this one. 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. 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. He has seen 172 Stones concerts and attends backstage “dinner with family and friends” of band members before shows. Here, Potash, a 68-year-old Annapolis wealth manager and divorced dad of one, is something akin to a rock star, or at least a fixture in the rock firmament. 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. 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. 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!" By Gary Gately, The Washington Post MagazineĪt a bar in the 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.
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