With some exceptions (including The Beatles’ famous live farewell at Shea Stadium), the idea of “arena rock” didn’t really exist until the Stones: There wasn’t the infrastructure, the technical capacity. They toyed with folk and psychedelia in the mid-'60s (“Ruby Tuesday,” “Mother’s Little Helper”), but always circled back to something grittier, darker, the “Under My Thumb”s and “Paint It Black”s. Un-rock as it may be, The Rolling Stones decided to live.įormed in 1962 by singer Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards (Richards spotted Jagger carrying Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records on a train platform), the band-which went on to include jazz drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Ron Wood, among others-became one of the spearheads of the British Invasion, bad boys to The Beatles’ teddy bears. Certainly there were other artists of his generation who took the same attitude, figuratively and otherwise. Mick Jagger once said he’d rather be dead than singing “Satisfaction” at 45. Like excavations from an archaeological dig, the band’s best music played out like a conversation between present and past, finding fresh meaning and connections in sounds that feel classic, bygone.
#The rolling stones discography free#
You wonder if it had something to do with their otherness, as though the fact that the American sounds they emulated-blues, country, R&B-didn't belong to them made them both more reverential and more free to explore. But it didn’t exist at quite the same scale, or with the same reach, or the same sheer attitude that made the Stones so seismic. It wasn’t that rock music didn’t exist before The Rolling Stones-it did.
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