Little did the Rolling
Stones know how apt their name - inspired by the title of a Muddy Waters song,
“Rollin’ Stone” - would turn out to be. Formed in 1962, they hold the record
for longevity as a rock and roll band. There have been hiatuses, especially in
the 1980s, but never a breakup. Moreover, critical acclaim and popular
consensus has accorded them the title of the “World’s Greatest Rock and Roll
Band.” Throughout five decades of shifting tastes in popular music, the Stones
have kept rolling, adapting to the latest styles without straying from their
roots as a lean, sinuous rock and roll band with roots in electric blues and
Chuck Berry-style rock and roll. In all aspects, theirs has been a remarkable
career.
The Rolling Stones’
origins date back to the boyhood friendship of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards,
forged in 1951. Their acquaintance was interrupted when both families moved in
the mid-Fifties but got rekindled in October 1960, when the two ran into each
other at a train station and Richards noticed the imported R&B albums
Jagger was carrying under his arm. Jagger, a student at the London School of
Economics, was a hardcore blues aficionado, while Richards’ interest leaned
more toward Chuck Berry-style rock and roll. Richards soon joined Jagger’s
group, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.
While making the rounds of
London blues clubs, Jagger and Richards met guitarist Brian Jones, a member of
Blues Incorporated (fronted by Alexis Korner, a key figure in the early London
blues-rock scene). They had been knocked out by Jones’ slide-guitar work on his
solo reading of Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom.” (Jones actually employed the
pseudonym “Elmo James.”) Soon, the trio of Jagger, Richards and Jones became
roommates and musical collaborators.
Keith Richards has been
clear about whose band it was in the beginning: “Brian was really fantastic,
the first person I ever heard playing slide electric guitar,” Richards said in
Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock ’n’ Roll Band, by bassist Bill Wyman. “Mick
and I both thought he was incredible. He mentioned he was forming a band. He
could have easily joined another group, but he wanted to form his own. The
Rolling Stones was Brian’s baby.”
When Alexis Korner skipped
one of his regular Marquee gigs to appear on a BBC radio show, Jagger, Jones
and Richards seized the opportunity to debut their new group. And so it came to
pass that the earliest version of the Rolling Stones – which also included
bassist Dick Taylor (later a founding member and guitarist for the Pretty
Things), drummer Mick Avory (a future member of the Kinks) and keyboardist Ian
Stewart (the Stones’ lifelong road manager and adjunct member) - made their
first public appearance on July 12th, 1962.
The Rolling Stones landed
an eight-month residency at the Crawdaddy Club, where they attracted a
following of fans and fellow musicians. By that time, the group’s final lineup
had been set, with founding members Jagger, Richards and Jones augmented by
drummer Charlie Watts (a Blues Incorporated alumnus) and bassist Bill Wyman.
They also took on a young manager-producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, who saw in the
Stones a chance to exploit “the opposite to what the Beatles are doing.”
Indeed, the Stones would come to epitomize the darker, bluesier and more boldly
sexual side of rock and roll in a kind of ongoing counterpoint with the
Beatles’ sunnier, more pop-oriented vistas.
In May 1963 the Rolling
Stones signed to Decca Records and cut their first single. With a Chuck
Berry-penned A side (“Come On”) and a Willie Dixon cover on the flip (“I Want
to Be Loved”), this 45 set forth the rock/blues dichotomy whose eventual
melding in the Jagger/Richards songwriting team would come to define the
Stones’ sound and sensibility. Their second single, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” was
provided to them by the Lennon/McCartney songwriting tandem, proving from the
outset that there no hostilities existed between the Beatles and the Stones.
However, a spirit of friendly competition would serve each band well throughout
the Sixties. The first half of 1964 saw the Rolling Stones headline their first
British tour (with the Ronettes) and release the single “Not Fade Away” (a
powerfully retooled Buddy Holly cover) and their eponymous first album,
retitled England’s Newest Hitmakers/The Rolling Stones for U.S. release.
The Rolling Stones’
commercial breakthrough came in mid-1964 with their swinging, country-blues
rendition of Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” which went to #3 on the
British chart and just missed the U.S. Top Forty. But it was in 1965 that the
Stones discovered their own voice with the singles “The Last Time” and “(I
Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The last of these, built around a compelling
fuzztone guitar riff from Richard, is more than a standard; quite possibly it
is the all-time greatest rock and roll song. It also captured the Stones’
surly, impolite attitude, which would bring them into disfavor with rock-hating
elements in the establishment. Of course, that only made the group more
appealing to those youthful listeners who found themselves estranged from the
adult world.
Aftermath, released in
April 1966, was the first Rolling Stones album to consist entirely of
Jagger-Richards originals. Their hard-rocking British pop songs detailed
battles between sexes, classes and generations. The contributions of Brian
Jones, the one-time blues purist, were now key to the Stones’ more eclectic
approach , as he colored the songs with embellishments on a variety of
instruments including marimba ("Under My Thumb") and dulcimer
("Lady Jane"). The group’s subsequent singles further pushed the
envelope of outrage, which the Stones were learning to work to their benefit.
“Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” was a pounding
rocker whose picture sleeve depicted the Stones in drag, while “Let’s Spend the
Night Together” engendered controversy in the States for the bluntly sexual
come-on of its title and lyrics.
At mid-decade, the three
pre-eminent forces in popular music were the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling
Stones. They mutually influenced one another, and aspects of Dylan’s folk-rock
and the Beatles’ similar turn in that direction with Rubber Soul were clearly
evident on the Stones’ Between the Buttons, which appeared in 1967. It remains
the group’s most baroque and understated recording. After the release of
Flowers, an album that compiled stray tracks for the American market, the
Stones unleashed the bombastic psychedelia of Their Satanic Majesties Request.
It was the group’s portentous retort to the Beatles’ Summer of Love manifesto,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It also marked the last time that the
Stones would blatantly shadow the Beatles in a stylistic sense.
The year 1967 was an
eventful one for the Rolling Stones. Not only did they release three albums,
but also they were beset with legal troubles stemming from a string of drug
busts engineered by British authorities wanting to make an example of them.
When the dust cleared, Jagger, Richards and Jones narrowly escaped draconian
prison sentences. However, whereas the ordeal seemed to strengthen Jagger and
Richards’ resolve, ongoing substance abuse was rapidly causing Jones’ physical
and mental states to disintegrate. He was only marginally involved in sessions
for Beggar’s Banquet, the Stones’ 1968 masterpiece, and his departure due to
“musical differences” was announced on June 8th, 1969. Less than a month later,
Jones was found dead in his swimming pool, the official cause being given as
“death by misadventure.”
His replacement was Mick
Taylor, an alumnus of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers who made his debut with the
Stones only days after Jones’ death at a free concert in London’s Hyde Park.
The enormous outdoor concert launched the Stones’ 1969 tour while also paying
last respects to Jones. By this time, the Stones had returned to definitive,
hard-hitting rock and roll. The string of muscular Stones classics from this
period includes “Jumping Jack Flash,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Sympathy for the
Devil,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Gimme Shelter” and “Midnight Rambler.” The last
two songs came from Let It Bleed, an album filled with violence, decadence and
social cataclysm. Perhaps the all-time classic Stones album, Let It Bleed
debuted on the U.S. charts at #3, behind the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Led
Zeppelin II. While the counterculture foundered, the music scene remained
unassailably strong as the Sixties drew to a close.
As the Beatles’ final
chapters were being written, the Stones shifted into high gear. If the former
group expressed the heady idealism of the pop Sixties, then the Stones, by
contrast, were blues-steeped, hard-rocking realists. It was them to whom the
baton passed at the close of the decade. The Rolling Stones staged a free
concert - at Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco on December 6, 1969, mere
months after Woodstock - that literally and figuratively marked the end the Sixties.
A violence-prone, drug-wracked, daylong nightmare for which Hell’s Angels
provided security, Altamont was marred by the stabbing death of a concert
attendee. The event, viewed in hindsight as an epitaph, was filmed and
preserved in the unnerving documentary Gimme Shelter.
In 1971, the Stones
launched their own record company, Rolling Stones Records, for which they
signed a distribution deal with Atlantic Records. The initial releases on the
new label were Sticky Fingers and its raunchy, rocking first single, “Brown
Sugar.” With a cover designed by artist Andy Warhol that featured a working
zipper, Sticky Fingers’ benefited from guitarist Taylor’s melodic touch,
especially on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and “Moonlight Mile.” British
designer John Pasche came up with the famous red “tongue” logo that remains a
Stones icon to this day.
They followed this
succinct, well-tuned work with a sprawling, raucous masterpiece: the double
album Exile on Main St. At this point, the Stones’ had their fingers firmly on
the pulse of the fractured mood of the early Seventies. Recorded in France,
where they’d moved as British tax exiles, the album also reflected the group’s
internal yin-yang in grainy aural black-and-white: bristling musical energy vs.
heavy-lidded world-weariness, love of rock vs. loyalty to the blues, the
downward pull of decadence vs. a dogged effort to capture the moment. They took
this juggernaut on the road shortly after Exile’s release.
Subsequent albums - Goats
Head Soup (1973), It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (1974) and Black and Blue (1976) -
yielded solid individual songs but lacked its predecessors’ sustained
brilliance. Various factors, including Richards’ drug problems and Taylor’s
abrupt departure in 1974, contributed to an air of instability in the
mid-Seventies. Even so, Jagger and Richards were now firmly bonded as the
“Glimmer Twins” – a name that they used as their joint production credit on
albums from It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll onward. Ron Wood, a member of the Faces and
Rod Stewart’s frequent collaborator and accompanist, was chosen as Taylor’s
replacement for the Stones’ 1975 tour. He became an official member by the time
of Black and Blue, appearing on that albums cover (even though he’d only
actually played on a few of its tracks). Wood’s selection made perfect sense,
as he was a British rock and roller who made fit in solidly alongside Richards.
Richards’ arrest in
Toronto on drug charges, including heroin trafficking, didn’t stop them from
playing their scheduled club dates at Toronto’s El Mocombo club, excerpts from
which appeared on one side of the double album Love You Live. The fallout from
the bust would be 18 months of legal limbo, as Richards faced up to seven years
in prison if convicted. (He was ultimately ordered to perform a benefit concert
for the blind as his sentence.) Richards beat his heroin addiction during this
period, “closing down the laboratory,” in his words.
With Wood’s integration
into the lineup, and driven by the insurgent challenge of punk-rock, the Stones
rebounded in 1978 with Some Girls, their strongest effort since Exile On Main
St. The cover and certain lyrics proved controversial, with the title track
eliciting charges of sexism, and the songs paid heed to musical trends,
including unmistakably Stonesy takes on disco ("Miss You") and
punk-rock ("Shattered"). Some Girls remains the group’s best-selling
album, having been certified six times platinum (6 million copies sold) by the
RIAA.
The Eighties saw the
Stones achieve their highest-charting album (Tattoo You, #1 for nine weeks in
1981) but also take the longest period between tours (eight years). They kicked
off the decade with Emotional Rescue, which included straight-ahead rockers
like “She Was Hot,” as well as curveballs like the falsetto-sung title track.
Tattoo You, highlighted by the instant classics “Start Me Up” and “Waiting on a
Friend,” remains among the most revered of all late-period Stones albums.
Undercover, from 1983, took a more contemporary tack, especially on the outre,
New Wavish single “Undercover of the Night.”
At mid-decade, Jagger
launched a solo career with the release of She’s the Boss. A growing
estrangement between Jagger and Richards culminated in a three-year lull after
the release of Dirty Work (1986), during which another solo release from Jagger
(Primitive Cool) and Richards’ own solo debut (Talk Is Cheap) were released.
The standoff ended when Jagger and Richards resumed their working relationship
during a ten-day songwriting retreat in Barbados, resulting in the creative resurgence
of the Steel Wheels album and tour.
Bassist Bill Wyman,
increasingly suffering from fear of flying, announced his retirement from the
band after the Steel Wheels tour, in 1992. “I did everything but hold him at
gunpoint,” said Richards of his efforts to keep him in the band.” After
auditioning many musicians, the Stones picked Darryl Jones - who’d played with
various jazz, funk and soul musicians – to take over on bass. The Stones
released two albums of new music in the Nineties, Voodoo Lounge (for which they
won a Grammy for Best Rock Album) and Bridges to Babylon. Between those albums,
they re-recorded a batch of classic older songs in the then-popular “unplugged”
format, released at mid-decade as Stripped. Their three tours during this busy
decade were the best-attended and most lucrative live outings in rock history
to that point in time.
In 2002, The Rolling
Stones issued Forty Licks, a double-disc retrospective that appended four new
tracks. Their 40th anniversary tour followed that same year. In 2005 came A
Bigger Bang, their only studio album of new material in the decade. The Stones’
primary activity came on the touring front, as their two-year A Bigger Bang
World Tour set a new record ($558 million) for concert grosses. Not even a
serious head injury, sustained by
Richards during a fall from a coconut palm in Fiji could stop the juggernaut
for long.
Through their five decades
as a band, no one has yet stripped the Rolling Stones of their title as the
World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band. In 2002 Keith Richards had this to say
in USA Today about the group’s improbable longevity: “People thought it
couldn’t be done. We never thought of trying it. We are just here. It’s a vague
mission you can’t give up until you keel over.”
(http://rockhall.com/inductees/the-rolling-stones/bio/)
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