1978 Outlaws – Rolling Stones Tour Jacket COA Freddie Salem

Presented is an item from Freddie Salem’s personal collection. This was his 1978 Tour jacket from when the Outlaws were part of the Rolling Stones Tour. The jacket was given to Salem after the tour was in Anaheim and was only given to him as well as fellow members of the band. See photos from the tour.

Salem wore it throughout the chilly times of the tour that he was on that year. It’s a red satin baseball jacket with accents to the pockets, sleeve cuffs, waistband and collar. The reverse is applied with a large embroidered longhorn OUTLAWS logo and lettering reading “Rolling Stones Summer Tour 1978.” It’s a [size] Large. It measures 21″ from pit-to-pit (chest) and 27″ from top to bottom.  The jacket shows strong wear/aging throughout.

Salem was part of the legendary The Chambers Brothers Band as their lead guitar player then went on to join the Outlaws when he was 23 years old.  These days, Salem spends much of his time in the studio, working sessions (“Just another day at the office,” he says) and producing other acts. It took several decades to amass these rare treasures from the rock n’ roll world.

Salem started performing professionally at the age of 16 as he played with various bands from the Midwest before joining The Chambers Brothers Band as their lead guitar player. He recorded and toured with the Brothers for a year and a half. And it was a great learning experience at a young age. In 1977, Salem joined the popular southern rock-n-roll band, The Outlaws. For six years Freddie played lead guitar for ‘The Florida Guitar Army’ and wrote many songs on their albums which sold over 10 million copies worldwide, earning Freddie platinum and gold albums with Arista Records.

The Outlaws did manage to make an imprint on the mainstream market courtesy of a series of album rock standbys, “There Goes Another Love Song,” “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky” and “Green Grass and High Tides,” as well as the fact they were the first signing to Clive Davis’ Arista Records label. Given Davis’ reputation as a credible hitmaker during his fabled ’60s tenure as president of Columbia Records, the band should have excelled to a greater degree. (According to legend, Davis first spied them opening for Lynyrd Skynyrd and was subsequently told by the band’s Ronnie Van Zant, “If you don’t sign The Outlaws, you’re the dumbest music person I’ve ever met — and I know you’re not.”).

“Of course, nothing compares with my tenure with The Outlaws,” Salem says in hindsight. “It was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful part of my career, which I will never forget. Rolling back the hands of time and then rolling forward until now, that version of The Outlaws would still be extremely vibrant in today’s market. 

Authentication: 100% Authentic Freddie Salem

1978 Outlaws – Rolling Stones Tour Jacket COA Freddie Salem