The Rolling Stones

Keith Richards plays behind the beat. Charlie Watts plays behind Keith Richards. The resulting groove (loose, swinging, slightly dangerous, as though the rhythm might fall apart at any moment but never does) is the Rolling Stones’ most fundamental musical identity and the thing that separates them from every other band in British Invasion. Where The Beatles refined their American sources into something polished and universally appealing, the Stones amplified the roughness: Chicago blues played louder, dirtier, and with an insolence that the original artists — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed — couldn’t get away with in a segregated America. The appropriation was real, and inseparable from the charge: the same insolence that crossed the color line is what made the records crackle.

Formation and the blues apprenticeship

The Rolling Stones began as Brian Jones’s band. In 1962 Jones, a blues purist, set out to assemble a group rooted in Chicago blues, and the nucleus formed around him: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, childhood acquaintances from Dartford who had reconnected as teenagers on a railway platform over the imported¹ Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records Jagger was carrying. Jones named the group on the spot during a phone call, spotting a Muddy Waters LP on the floor and taking the title of its song “Rollin’ Stone”.² They played their first billed gig at the Marquee in July 1962³ and, from early 1963, built their first real following through a residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, an energetic R&B act with a frontman who could not stand still.⁴ Their first single, a cover of Berry’s “Come On” (1963), reached No. 21⁵; the debut album, cut in five days at Regent Sound early in 1964, was mostly blues and R&B covers⁶; and their first British No. 1, that summer, was a cover too — Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now”, recorded at Chess Studios in Chicago, the building where half their record collection had been made.⁷

Influences and inheritance

The Stones’ foundation was American blues: Muddy Waters (the band’s name comes from his song), Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Jimmy Reed. Brian Jones was the purist, immersing himself in the blues and insisting on fidelity to the source material. Keith Richards absorbed Chuck Berry’s guitar style so completely that it became his own. Mick Jagger studied the vocal mannerisms of Black American singers and developed a performance style that mixed blues shouting with camp theatricality. The Stones also drew on rhythm & blues, soul (particularly Otis Redding and Solomon Burke), and — despite their image — the Brill Building: their early catalog includes covers of material by Goffin-King and Bobby Womack.

Core musical identity

The Stones’ identity rests on the guitar interplay between Richards and (initially) Brian Jones, later Mick Taylor and Ron Wood — two guitars weaving rhythm and lead into a single texture, the players trading roles inside a song so the line between lead and rhythm keeps dissolving. The engine of the classic riffs is Richards’s five-string open-G tuning, which lets him fret a full chord with one finger and ring drones and suspensions against it, a voicing a standard-tuned guitar cannot reproduce; it powers “Honky Tonk Women”, “Brown Sugar”, and “Start Me Up”.⁸ Underneath, Watts locks the groove with a quiet trick, lifting his hi-hat hand on the backbeat so the snare lands a hair late and drags the feel into the loose-but-locked swing the band is built on. Jagger’s vocals are theatrical and knowing: he is always performing, always aware of his audience, always playing a role (the devil, the seducer) without ever committing to sincerity the way Lennon or McCartney did.

The Jagger-Richards songwriting partnership emerged under pressure. Their manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who saw the band forfeiting royalties by recording other people’s songs, reportedly locked the pair in a kitchen until they came out with one; the result, “As Tears Go By”, became their first original.⁹ The early songs were derivative until “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (1965) gave them their first American No. 1 — a riff Richards taped half-asleep, meant as a placeholder for a horn line and left on a fuzzbox that became the most identifiable guitar sound in rock.¹⁰ By 1966 and Aftermath, the first album written entirely by the two of them¹¹, they had found a voice darker than the Beatles, more sexually explicit, edged from social observation into cruelty.

Brian Jones: the colorist and the decline

For a while Jones answered his loss of the writing game by becoming the band’s colorist. On Aftermath he reached past the guitar into sitar, marimba, and dulcimer — the sitar on “Paint It Black”, the first chart-topping single to feature one¹²; the marimba driving “Under My Thumb”¹³; a dulcimer shading “Lady Jane”.¹⁴ But drink and drugs pulled him under as Jagger and Richards consolidated control, and by the end of the decade he was barely present on the records. The band dismissed him in June 1969¹⁵, and less than a month later, on the night of July 2nd into the 3rd, he was found dead at the bottom of the swimming pool at his Sussex farm, twenty-seven years old.¹⁶ Two days afterward the Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park, already booked to introduce his replacement, Mick Taylor, and turned it into a memorial, Jagger reading from Shelley before the band played.¹⁷

Key records

The four-album peak run shares a producer the band had not had before: Jimmy Miller, who pulled them out of a brief psychedelic detour and back toward their roots.¹⁸

Aftermath (1966) — The first all-original album; the songwriting identity established, and Brian Jones’s multi-instrumental high-water mark
Beggars Banquet (1968) — Miller’s first with the band; the return to roots¹⁹, opening on the samba-rock incantation of “Sympathy for the Devil” and the overdriven acoustics of “Street Fighting Man”
Let It Bleed (1969) — Country, gospel, blues, and apocalypse; Merry Clayton’s voice cracking on “Gimme Shelter”, recorded around Jones’s exit, the decade’s epitaph²⁰
Sticky Fingers (1971) — The first record on the band’s own label and the first to top both the UK and US charts²¹; “Brown Sugar” (a US No. 1²²), “Wild Horses”, and the seven-minute Latin-jazz jam of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”
Exile on Main St. (1972) — Largely tracked in the basement of Richards’s rented villa during the band’s tax exile in France²³; a murky, sprawling double album that drew mixed reviews on release and was canonized only later as their masterpiece²⁴

1969 and the end of the sixties

The band’s bleakest, most American record arrived in the season that has come to mark the close of the decade. Let It Bleed was released in November 1969; the month before, Jones was dead; weeks later, at a hastily organized free festival at Altamont Speedway in California, a young man named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel a few feet from the stage as the Stones played.²⁵ The footage, caught in the documentary Gimme Shelter, fixed Altamont as the dark counterpart to Woodstock, and the Stones at its center.²⁶

Legacy and influence

The Stones established the template for the rock band as outsiders — dangerous, sexually provocative, authentically (or performatively) connected to blues tradition. Their influence runs through hard rock, punk (the Stones’ attitude more than their sound), garage rock, and every band that has positioned itself as the raw alternative to a more polished contemporary. The Jagger-Richards dynamic of frontman and guitarist, singer and songwriter, surface and structure became the standard model for rock partnerships. They became, too, the model for rock longevity itself: past sixty years and still touring, the band that turned a young man’s provocation into a lifelong institution.

MAP

Explorer

The Rolling Stones

Formation and the blues apprenticeship

Influences and inheritance

Core musical identity

Brian Jones: the colorist and the decline

Key records

1969 and the end of the sixties

Legacy and influence

See also

MAP

Explorer

The Rolling Stones

Formation and the blues apprenticeship

Influences and inheritance

Core musical identity

Brian Jones: the colorist and the decline

Key records

1969 and the end of the sixties

Legacy and influence

See also

Footnotes