Did The Rolling Stones Really Discover the Tequila Sunrise?
The Rolling Stones on Tour in America in 1972. Photo: New York Daily News/Getty
It’s long been said that The Rolling Stones played a big role in making the Tequila Sunrise a popular drink, but did they really discover it? Legend has it the band was drinking at The Trident, a San Francisco bar in the early 1970s, when a bartender handed them what he called a Tequila Sunrise, a drink made with orange juice, grenadine, and Jose Cuervo.
Mick Jagger and company loved it, and continued to drink them throughout a raucous two-month North American tour to support their album “Exile on Main St.” The tour became legendary — there were fan riots, Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested for fighting with a photographer, the band stayed for a few days in the Playboy Mansion, and celebrities including Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, and even Zsa Zsa Gabor turned out for the festivities.
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The band started referring to the time as the “Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise Tour.” Tequila-maker Jose Cuervo jumped on the branding — minus the cocaine — and started printing the recipe for the cocktail on the back of the bottle. In 1973, the Eagles recorded the song “Tequila Sunrise” as the drink started to make a splash at bars around the country.
The drinking habits of the Rolling Stones became legendary. Photo: Bob Olsen/Getty
Sounds too mythical of a drink origin story, right? That’s what cocktail historian and author Jeff Burkhart thought when he heard it.
“In the cocktail industry, a lot of information is false, exaggerated or urban myth,” Burkhart says. “As far as I knew the drink had been invented in Arizona in the 1930s.”
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So Burkhart started digging. He was right — the drink had been created at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in the 1930s, but it was a riff on a Singapore Sling, with tequila, lime juice, soda water, and crème de cassis. The bartenders at The Trident, who were a bit of mixology geeks, had started serving something similar, but over time, simplified the recipe to what it is today — orange juice, grenadine and tequila.
Burkhart was able to verify every part of the story — except he couldn’t get ahold of the Rolling Stones to confirm if they had indeed loved the cocktail. Then Keith Richards’ autobiography “Life” came out, and he opened a chapter with “The ’72 tour was known by other names — the Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise tour…”
“Well, it doesn’t’ get any better than that, the facts lined up,” Burkhart says, who went on to write about the drink for National Geographic a few years ago.
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And while many people associate the Tequila Sunrise as a dated cocktail made with OJ from concentrate and syrupy bright red grenadine, Burkhart says it can be pretty tasty if you make it with fresh juice and homemade grenadine, from pomegranate juice, sugar, and water.
Jose Cuervo, in an effort to recapture some of that 1972 Rolling Stones cool, has launched two special-edition bottles of tequila with Rolling Stones packaging: a Jose Cuervo Especial ($16.99) for those Tequila Sunrise cocktails, and a high-end Ultra Premium to sip on neat ($149.99).
To go along with the bottles, the company has launched a new ad campaign, set to the Rolling Stones’ song “Miss You.” As a flight attendant serves drink to a swinging party on a tour plane, the words, “The tour that became legend, the drink that fueled it,” appear on screen.
