The Rolling Stones

ALL BOW TO THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES
The Rolling Stones may have demonstrated a certain lack of modesty when
they anointed themselves the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the late
1960s. But the title was no idle boast. In their early days as the British Invasion’s
foremost exponents of bad attitude, the scruffy quintet embodied all
that was dangerous and transgressive about rock and roll. In the decades that followed, they managed to maintain their defi ant aura, even after they became
a stadium-fi lling, profi t-spinning institution.

Adults who were initially resistant to the Beatles couldn’t help but surrender
to the Fab Four’s cheeky charms. But there was never anything cuddly
about the Rolling Stones. While the relatively clean-cut Beatles and their
Merseybeat contemporaries were souping up the country/rockabilly-derived
sounds of Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and Carl Perkins, the Stones took
a darker approach, launching their career with unruly variations on black
American blues and R&B. Even after they began writing their own songs and
downplaying the cover material that had comprised their early repertoire, the
band maintained its rebellious stance, while indulging an abiding fascination
with darkness and sleaze, along with an air of world-weary decadence that
suited their status as jet-setting libertine superstars.
Like the Animals, the Yardbirds, Them, and the Pretty Things, the Rolling
Stones embodied the rougher, rootsier end of the British Invasion. But the
Stones’ commercial appeal and musical infl uence quickly put them in a class
of their own. Mick Jagger is probably rock’s most imitated frontman, embodying
a singular mix of macho swagger and campy fl amboyance that’s been
emulated by multiple generations of rock singers. Beyond his stage presence,
Jagger quickly emerged as an original, inventive songwriter as well as a canny
packager of his band’s mystique.
Jagger’s long-standing bandmate, writing partner, and onstage alter ego
Keith Richards is an equally seminal fi gure. In addition to being one of rock’s
most infl uential rhythm guitarists, Richards is an ageless, seemingly indestructible
icon whose unfl appable rock and roll cool has remained intact through
all manner of personal, chemical, and legal problems. Richards is also unusual
among rock guitar heroes in that he’s always been more concerned with riffs
and grooves than fl ashy solos, while maintaining a deep connection to his
blues roots.
Richards and fellow founding member Brian Jones were an extraordinarily
in-sync guitar duo, setting a remarkable standard for interlocking ax interplay
that was extended by Jones’s successors Mick Taylor and Ron Wood. The
band’s stellar guitarists were complemented by the rock-solid, subtly inventive
rhythm section of bassist Bill Wyman and jazz-loving drummer Charlie
Watts, who gave the music a propulsive punch as well as a subtle sense of
swing.
The Rolling Stones were initially the product of a groundswell of interest in
vintage American blues among a generation of young British men in the early
1960s. That movement would spawn many of the musicians who would
become leading lights in the U.K. rock scene in the coming decade. The Stones
rose from a small but thriving London-based electric blues revival, and began
their career playing music that merged the raw sound of Chess Records’ urban
blues artists with the propulsive rock and roll style of Chuck Berry’s classic Chess sides. But the Stones’ derivative early efforts quickly gave way to a distinctive
musical persona.
By the late 1960s, the Rolling Stones were the Beatles’ only serious competitor,
in terms of popularity, prestige, and musical infl uence. By then, the
Stones had already built a body of work as original and accomplished as anything
to emerge from the decade’s fertile rock scene, integrating country blues,
baroque folk, and psychedelia into their sound. After Brian Jones’s death in
1969, the band downplayed its more experimental elements to re-embrace
rock and roll basics. They largely stuck to that stylistic template, with brief
detours into reggae and disco, for the next four decades. If the music they
made didn’t always live up to the act’s legendary status, it rarely detracted
from their legendary aura.

LITTLE RED ROOSTERS
Precocious blues and jazz enthusiast Brian Jones was the Rolling Stones’
founder and, in its early days, main motivating force. But the team of Mick
Jagger and Keith Richards (aka the Glimmer Twins) quickly emerged as the
Rolling Stones’ musical and conceptual focal point. The pair fi rst met as childhood
schoolmates, and became reacquainted again in 1960. Depending upon
which source one believes, they either reconnected while both were waiting
on a train platform and Richards noticed that Jagger was carrying some
American blues LPs, or they were reintroduced by mutual friend Dick Taylor.
Taylor, also a budding musician and blues convert, was then attending Sidcup
Art School with Richards. At the time, Jagger was a student at the London
School of Economics, and playing the blues with Taylor in a combo known as
Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Richards joined soon after.
By the time he met Jagger and Richards, Brian Jones had already led an
eventful life. He’d quit school and run away to Scandinavia when he was sixteen,
by which time he’d already mastered several instruments and fathered
two illegitimate children. After returning, he played in some local bands before
moving to London, where he became a member of Blues Incorporated, an
outfi t led by blues revival godfather Alexis Korner.
Deciding to form his own group, Jones advertised for musicians; among those
he recruited was pianist Ian Stewart. Jones also performed solo, playing Elmore
James–style blues under the pseudonym Elmo Jones. While playing at the Ealing
Blues Club, he shared a bill with Blues Incorporated, which by now included
Charlie Watts on drums as well as auxiliary members Jagger and Richards.
The Rolling Stones—with a lineup consisting of Jagger, Richards, Jones, Ian
Stewart, Dick Taylor on bass, and drummer Mick Avory—made their public
debut at London’s Marquee Club on July 12, 1962. Taylor left a few weeks
later to attend the Royal College of Art; he would soon form the Pretty Things,in which he would play lead guitar for much of the next four and a half
decades. Avory exited as well; he would soon join the Kinks, with whom he
would spend more than thirty years.
Taylor’s eventual replacement, joining in December 1962, was Bill Wyman.
At twenty-fi ve, Wyman was a few years older than the rest of the Stones, but
the fact that he owned his own amplifi er helped him to clinch the gig. The
following month, the band convinced Charlie Watts, who had quit Blues
Incorporated and taken a job at an advertising agency, to join on drums.
In February 1963, the Rolling Stones began a now-legendary eight-month
residency at London’s Crawdaddy Club, located at the Station Hotel, across
from the Richmond railway station. The band’s high-energy performances
became so popular that the club was forced to move to a larger venue, the
Richmond Athletic Ground. By April, the Stones were playing two nights a
week at the Crawdaddy as well as doing a weekly gig at Eel Pie Island, two
miles away in Twickenham.

A key component in the Stones’ early sound was the bracing guitar interaction
of Richards and Jones, which blurred the traditional distinctions between
the guitarists’ lead and rhythm parts. It was Keith Richards who was responsible
for introducing Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley songs to their initial repertoire
of blues and R&B material, facilitating the band’s eventual embrace of rock
and roll.
After briefl y being handled by Crawdaddy founder Giorgio Gomelsky, the
Rolling Stones gained a new manager in Andrew Loog Oldham, a fl amboyant
hustler who’d worked as a press agent for Beatles manager Brian Epstein, among
others. The promotion-savvy Oldham consciously played up the Stones’ badboy
mystique, packaging the quintet as the unsavory, rebellious answer to
the Beatles, who by then were drastically altering the face of the British pop
scene.
One of Oldham’s fi rst moves in establishing the Stones’ image was forcing
the talented but unglamorous Ian Stewart out of the band. The unpretentious
Stewart would nonetheless remain a beloved fi xture of the group’s organization
until his death in 1985, serving as road manager as well as sideman in the
studio and on stage.
After George Harrison recommended the Stones to Decca Records’ A&R
head Dick Rowe (who had infamously turned down the Beatles not long before), Oldham secured a recording deal for the band with Decca Records.
June 1963 saw the release of the Rolling Stones’ debut single, a cover of
Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” backed by the Willie Dixon–penned “I Want to
Be Loved.” The disc became a minor hit, reaching number twenty-one on the
U.K. charts, and the group promoted it by performing on a series of British
package tours.
In November, the Stones released a second single, a cover of the Lennon/
McCartney composition “I Wanna Be Your Man. The song was perhaps a
curious choice, given the band’s supposed rivalry with the Beatles, but it
reached number twelve on the British pop chart. Its B-side was the instrumental
“Stoned,” written by Jagger and Richards but credited to the fi ctitious
“Nanker/Phelge.” The second half of the pseudonym referred to James Phelge,
a friend with whom Jagger, Richards, and Jones shared a squalid Chelsea fl at
for most of 1963.
In February 1964, the Rolling Stones achieved a commercial breakthrough
with their third single, a Bo Diddley–infl ected reading of Buddy Holly’s “Not
Fade Away.” The song reached number three in Britain. Its U.K. success was
enough to win the band its fi rst release in the United States, where “Not Fade
Away” squeaked into the Top Fifty.
Although it would take a while longer for the Stones to make a substantial
impression in America, they quickly became a sensation in Britain. The group’s
surly, dangerous vibe was enhanced by a series of minor scandals, like the band
members being busted in March for public urination (they were fi ned £5 each).
April 1964 saw the release of the band’s self-titled U.K. debut album,
released in the United States in slightly altered form as England’s Newest Hitmakers
. The LP’s American edition combined three Jagger/Richards compositions
with covers of tunes by Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Slim Harpo, Rufus
Thomas, and Marvin Gaye.
In June 1964, the Rolling Stones undertook their fi rst U.S. tour. While the
eight-city visit included a pair of sold-out shows at New York’s Carnegie Hall
in front of screaming, enraptured crowds, the band encountered less enthusiastic
reactions in other cities. Haphazard promotion, combined with the fact
that the band had yet to score a major U.S. hit, resulted in lukewarm crowds
and cancellations.
The tour allowed the band members to visit several landmarks of the American
music that had infl uenced them, including Chicago’s legendary Chess
Records—home of such seminal performers as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley,
Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, all of whose material the Stones had covered.
At Chess’s studio, they recorded the British EP Five by Five , which
spawned another British number one with an appropriately raw reading of
Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster.”
The tour preceded the American release of the band’s reading of Bobby
Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” which was the Stones’ first number one single
in the United Kingdom and reached number twenty-six in the United States.

The Stones had already achieved substantial commercial success by covering
outside material, playing to crowds of screaming teenagers in the United
Kingdom and Europe. But Andrew Oldham recognized the value of songwriting
royalties and publishing copyrights, and pushed Jagger and Richards to
pursue their budding writing partnership. At one point, he reportedly locked
them in a room until they came up with a usable song.
In August 1964, “Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)” became the fi rst Jagger/
Richards composition to see release as an A-side. It was a Top Thirty hit in the
United States, but it took another cover—a rugged reading of New Orleans
soul queen Irma Thomas’s “Time Is on My Side”—to get the Stones into the
American Top Ten. It was followed by a pair of memorable Jagger/Richardspenned
hits, the Top Twenty “Heart of Stone” and the Top Ten “The Last
Time.”
It was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” released as a U.S. single in May
1965, that established the Rolling Stones as both commercial superstars and
an important musical force. The song—driven by Richards’s commanding
fuzz-guitar riff and Jagger’s wry social commentary—offered bracing evidence
that Jagger and Richards had developed into distinctive songwriters.
“Satisfaction” (which appeared on the U.S. version of the album Out of
Our Heads ) spent four weeks at number one in the United States. The song
began a remarkable two-year string of Top Ten Stones singles that established
the band as one of the British Invasion’s most popular acts, while maintaining
a steady creative growth. The streak encompassed the swaggering rockers
“Get Off of My Cloud” and “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in
the Shadow?,” the bittersweet ballads “As Tears Go By” and “Ruby Tuesday,”
the menacing, exotic “Paint It, Black,” and the social-commentary “19th
Nervous Breakdown” and “Mother’s Little Helper.”
One Stones single that didn’t fare as well on the U.S. charts during this
period was the early 1967 release “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” whose
title was judged to be a bit too risqué for U.S. sensibilities by radio programmers—
as well as Ed Sullivan, who had Jagger sing the title phrase as “Let’s
spend some time together” when the band appeared on Sullivan’s infl uential
Sunday night variety TV show.
Aftermath , 1966, was the fi rst Rolling Stones LP comprising entirely original
compositions. The material showcased the Jagger/Richards writing team’s
increasing sophistication, even if the misogynistic lyrical sentiments of “Under
My Thumb” and “Stupid Girl” demonstrated that they hadn’t exactly grown
up. The album also refl ected Brian Jones’s stylistic sense of adventure: it was
Jones who played sitar on the psychedelic “Paint It, Black,” marimba on the
jazzy “Under My Thumb,” and dulcimer on the medieval-fl avored ballad “Lady
Jane.” Jones’s infl uence was also prominent on the droning eleven-minute blues
jam “Going Home,” whose length was a daring move at the time.
The move toward more exotic sounds continued with 1967’s Between the
Buttons , which matched the Stones’ budding penchant for experimentation with an ironic pop sensibility. While some fans complained that the stylistic
departures diluted the band’s original appeal, such tunes as “My Obsession,”
“Connection,” and “Yesterday’s Papers” found the Stones rocking with wit
and style.
While their music may have been moving in a more cerebral direction, the
Stones’ decadent image remained as strong as ever, making the band members
inviting targets for British law enforcement offi cials. In February 1967, a
month after the release of Between the Buttons , Jagger and Richards were
busted when police raided a party at Redlands, Richards’s estate in Sussex,
and found four amphetamine pills in Jagger’s possession. The pair was convicted
of the charge in June, when Jagger and Richards, respectively, were
sentenced to three months and a year in prison. But public outcry over the
blatantly trumped-up charges and the excessive sentences—including a nowfamous
London Times editorial headlined “Who Breaks a Butterfl y Upon a
Wheel?”—prompted their sentences to be reversed.
Meanwhile, Brian Jones was arrested in May for possession of cannabis,
cocaine, and methamphetamine. He escaped with a fi ne, probation, and an
admonition to seek professional help.
Their legal travails informed the next Rolling Stones single, “We Love
You.” In addition to being the band’s strongest stab at psychedelia yet, the
song was both a thank-you to fans for their loyalty through their legal diffi -
culties, and a pointed jab at the Metropolitan Police and the British tabloid
press, which had relentlessly sensationalized their coverage of the drug busts.
“We Love You” also featured guest vocals by John Lennon and Paul McCartney
and opened with the sound of a cell door banging shut. It was accompanied
by a promotional fi lm that paralleled the Stones’ trials and the legal
persecution of Oscar Wilde seventy years earlier, with Jagger portraying
Wilde. Despite (or because of) its topical nature, “We Love You” proved a bit
too heady for U.S. radio; its gentler fl ip side “Dandelion” became a hit in the
United States.
“Dandelion” and “We Love You” set the stage for the Rolling Stones’
full-on embrace of psychedelia on their next LP Their Satanic Majesties Request ,
released in December 1967. Ostensibly the Stones’ darker answer to the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , the album (complete with 3-D
cover depicting the Stones dressed as wizards amidst a mystical landscape)
was vilifi ed by many fans and savaged by many critics. But it’s far better than
its reputation suggests, with tunes such as “She’s a Rainbow,” “Citadel,” and
“2000 Light Years from Home” carrying an earthy, menacing undercurrent
that balanced their spacier pretensions. The songs’ exotic arrangements gave
Jones a chance to try out a variety of offbeat instruments, and Jones’s interest
in Moroccan music is manifested in the album’s prominent Eastern rhythms.
The legal threats hanging over the band members’ heads were such a distraction
during the making of Their Satanic Majesties Request that Bill Wyman
fi nally managed to get one of his own compositions, the playfully woozy “In Another Land,” onto the album. The song, on which Wyman sang
lead, even saw release as a single and slipped into the lower reaches of the U.S.
Top 100.
The Stones’ psychedelic fl irtation was a short one. The band soon returned
to basics with the anthemic May 1968 single “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” whose
intimations of rebellion were well suited to the era’s turbulent political mood.
It was followed in August by “Street Fighting Man,” whose rabble-rousing
stance expanded its predecessor’s air of provocation.
Early in 1968, the band had parted ways with Andrew Oldham and turned
their business affairs over to tenacious American music-industry hustler Allen
Klein. Klein had earned a fearsome reputation within the American music
industry for his ability to extract payment from record companies. He also
controlled the U.S. rights to albums by such artists as Sam Cooke, Herman’s
Hermits, and the Animals, and would eventually gain control of the Rolling
Stones’ London LPs.
“Street Fighting Man,” released in August 1968, previewed the Stones’ next
LP Beggar’s Banquet , which wouldn’t be released until December. The delay
was largely due to disputes over the album’s original cover art, which pictured
a graffi ti-covered men’s room wall. When fi nally released, it bore a simple white
cover. Beggar’s Banquet was quickly recognized as a creative rebirth for the
band, mixing raucous rock (“Sympathy for the Devil”) with rootsy departures
into Delta blues (“No Expectations”) and British folk (“Factory Girl”). It also
spotlighted Richards’s distinctive use of open guitar tunings, which would soon
emerge as one of the band’s most recognizable musical elements.

DARK CIRCUS
Although it reestablished the Rolling Stones as a vital creative force, Beggar’s
Banquet also marked the end of Brian Jones’s participation in the group that
he originally founded and led. While the band had never recorded any of his
compositions, Jones’s iconoclastic spirit and charismatic presence had been
key elements in the Stones’ unruly public persona, and his musical knowledge
and multi-instrumental abilities had been crucial to their artistic progress. But
Jagger and Richards’s dominance of the band restricted Jones to an increasingly
marginal role.
Jones had put some of his creative urges to use on a pair of extracurricular
projects: his musical score for the 1967 German fi lm A Degree of Murder ,
which starred his then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and his 1968 recordings of
traditional Moroccan musicians, which would be released in 1971 as Brian
Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka . He also contributed a jazzy saxophone
solo to the Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),”
recorded in 1967 but not released until 1970, when it became the B-side of
their “Let It Be” single.