Stones Rolled Right Past Rohrabacher

From the Department of Rock ‘n’ Roll:

Even after nine years of Republican rule, official Washington is still a soft touch for the glamour of the Glimmer Twins, those aging bad boys, the Rolling Stones.

And so it was that two weeks before the legendary band’s Sept. 24 appearance at RFK Stadium, a promoter’s assistant in charge of VIP tickets received a telephone call from the office of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

An aide to the self-styled “rock ‘n’ roll Republican,” whose 42nd Congressional District includes northern Orange County, let it be known that Rohrabacher was personally interested in seeing the world’s greatest rock band in concert. The tickets were promptly dispatched.

However, the Lomita congressman did not attend the show. In fact, he never saw the tickets, nor was he aware that they had been requested in his name.

Attending in his stead, unknown to the congressman, was Allen Taylor, 25, a legislative correspondent in Rohrabacher’s office.

“I just wanted to go to the concert, and I . . . just basically used the congressman’s name,” said Taylor, who earns $23,000 a year by helping to answer Rohrabacher’s mail. “They delivered the tickets to me, and I went to the concert.”

Taylor, a North Carolinian who formerly worked for Rep. C. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), is leaving Rohrabacher’s office at the end of the month. Both he and Rohrabacher said the departure is unrelated to the Rolling Stones, but others on Capitol Hill are not so sure.

Rohrabacher “wasn’t pleased about this at all,” one staffer said.

Taylor, however, insisted that his boss took the incident in stride.

“He was very calm about it,” Taylor said. “The congressman came to me about a week later and said he understood I’d gone to the concert, and he asked me what I knew about it and I told him what I’d done.

“He just said that I should not have done this without consulting him or the chief of staff, at least,” Taylor said. “He said he’s a rock ‘n’ roll Republican, and he doesn’t have any problems being associated with the Rolling Stones.”

Rohrabacher, 42, concurred. The congressman said he would have been angry if he had gone looking for tickets to the show, only to discover that they had already been claimed by Taylor.

“I wish I could have gone,” Rohrabacher said. “But I haven’t had the time to do things like that since I came to Washington.”

Then he paused and recalled that he had taken time out from his duties to attend a summer concert at Wolftrap Farm Park in nearby Virginia, along with other freshmen members of the House of Representatives. Consistent with another Washington tradition, the new members of Congress rated only the Everly Brothers for that show.