Rolling Stones
FORMED: January 1963, London, England
By the time the Rolling Stones began calling themselves the World's Greatest
Rock & Roll Band in the late '60s, they had already staked out an impressive
claim on the title. As the self-consciously dangerous alternative to the
bouncy Merseybeat of the Beatles in the British Invasion, the Stones had
pioneered the gritty, hard-driving blues-based rock & roll that came
to define hard rock. With his preening machismo and latent maliciousness,
Mick Jagger became the prototypical rock frontman, tempering his macho showmanship
with a detached, campy irony, while Keith Richards and Brian Jones wrote
the blueprint for sinewy, interlocking rhythm guitars. Backed by the strong,
yet subtly swinging rhythm section of bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie
Watts, the Stones became the breakout band of the British blues scene, eclipsing
such contemporaries as the Animals and Them. Over the course of their career,
the Stones never really abandoned blues, but as soon as they reached popularity
in the U.K., they began experimenting musically, incorporating the British
pop of contemporaries like the Beatles, Kinks and Who into their sound. After
a brief dalliance with psychedelia, the Stones re-emerged in the late '60s
as a jaded, blues-soaked hard rock quintet. The Stones always flirted with
the seedy side of rock & roll, but as the hippie dream began to break
apart, they exposed and reveled in the new rock culture. It wasn't without
difficulty, of course. Shortly after he was fired from the group, Jones was
found dead in a swimming pool, while at a 1969 free concert at Altamont,
a concertgoer was brutally killed during the Stones' show. But the Stones
never stopped going. For the next thirty years, they continued to record
and perform, and while their records weren't always blockbusters, they were
never less than the most visible band of their era -- certainly, none of
their British peers continued to be as popular or productive as the Stones.
And no band since has proven to have such a broad fan base or far-reaching
popularity, and it is impossible to hear any of the groups that followed
them without detecting some sort of influence, whether it was musical or
aesthetic.
Throughout their career, Mick Jagger (vocals) and Keith Richards (guitar,
vocals) remained at the core of the Rolling Stones. The pair initially met
as children at Dartford Maypole County Primary School. They drifted apart
over the next ten years, eventually making each other's acquaintance again
in 1960, when they met through a mutual friend, Dick Taylor, who was attending
Sidcup Art School with Richards. At the time, Jagger was studying at the
London School of Economics and playing with Taylor in the blues band Little
Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Shortly afterward, Richards joined the band.
Within a year, they had met Brian Jones (guitar, vocals), a Cheltenham native
who had dropped out of school to play saxophone and clarinet. By the time
he became a fixture on the British blues scene, Jones had already had a wild
life. He ran away to Scandinavia when he was 16; by that time, he had already
fathered two illegitimate children. He returned to Cheltenham after a few
months, where he began playing with the Ramrods. Shortly afterward, he moved
to London. where he played in Alexis Korner's group, Blues Inc. Jones quickly
decided he wanted to form his own group and advertised for members; among
those he recruited was the heavyset blues pianist Ian Stewart.
As he played with his group, Jones also moonlighted under the name Elmo Jones
at the Ealing Blues Club. At the pub, he became reacquainted with Blues,
Inc., which now featured drummer Charlie Watts, and, on occasion, cameos
by Jagger and Richards. Jones became friends with Jagger and Richards, and
they soon began playing together with Dick Taylor and Ian Stewart; during
this time, Mick was elevated to the status of Blues Inc.'s lead singer. With
the assistance of drummer Tony Chapman, the fledgling band recorded a demo
tape. After the tape was rejected by EMI, Taylor left the band to attend
the Royal College of Art; he would later form the Pretty Things. Before Taylor's
departure, the group named themselves the Rolling Stones, borrowing the moniker
from a Muddy Waters song.
The Rolling Stones gave their first performance at the Marquee Club in London
on July 12, 1962. At the time, the group consisted of Jagger, Richards, Jones,
pianist Ian Stewart, drummer Mick Avory and Dick Taylor, who had briefly
returned to the fold. Weeks after the concert, Taylor left again and was
replaced by Bill Wyman, formerly of the Cliftons. Avory also left the group
-- he would later join the Kinks -- and the Stones hired Tony Chapman, who
proved to be unsatisfactory. After a few months of persuasion, the band recruited
Charlie Watts, who had quit Blues Inc. to work at an advertising agency once
the group's schedule became too hectic. By 1963, the band's lineup had been
set, and the Stones began an eight-month residency at the Crawdaddy Club,
which proved to substantially increase their fan base. It also attracted
the attention of Andrew Loog Oldham, who became the Stones' manager, signing
them from underneath Crawdaddy's Giorgio Gomelsky. Although Oldham didn't
know much about music, he was gifted at promotion, and he latched upon the
idea of fashioning the Stones as the bad-boy opposition to the clean-cut
Beatles. At his insistence, the large yet meek Stewart was forced out of
the group, since his appearance contrasted with the rest of the group. Stewart
didn't disappear from the Stones; he became one of their key roadies and
played on their albums and tours until his death in 1985.
With Oldham's help, the Rolling Stones signed with Decca Records, and that
June, they released their debut single, a cover of Chuck Berry's "Come On."
The single became a minor hit, reaching number 21, and the group supported
it with appearances on festivals and package tours. At the end of the year,
they released a version of Lennon-McCartney's "I Wanna Be Your Man" which
soared into the Top 15. Early in 1964, they released a cover of Buddy Holly's
"Not Fade Away," which shot to number three. "Not Fade Away" became their
first American hit, reaching number 48 that spring. By that time, the Stones
were notorious in their homeland. Considerably rougher and sexier than the
Beatles, the Stones were the subject of numerous sensationalistic articles
in the British press, culminating in a story about the band urinating in
public. All of these stories cemented the Stones as a dangerous, rebellious
band in the minds of the public, and had the effect of beginning a manufactured
rivalry between them and the Beatles, which helped the group rocket to popularity
in the U.S. In the spring of 1964, the Stones released their eponymous debut
album, which was followed by "It's All Over Now," their first U.K. number
one. That summer, they toured America to riotous crowds, recording the Five
By Five EP at Chess Records in Chicago in the midst of the tour. By the time
it was over, they had another number one U.K. single with Howlin' Wolf's
"Little Red Rooster." Although the Stones had achieved massive popularity,
Oldham decided to push Jagger and Richards into composing their own songs,
since they -- and his publishing company -- would receive more money that
away. In June of 1964, the group released their first original single "Tell
Me (You're Coming Back)," which became their first American Top 40 hit. Shortly
afterward, a version of Irma Thomas' "Time Is On My Side" became their first
U.S. Top Ten. It was followed by "The Last Time" in early 1965, a number
one U.K. and Top Ten U.S. hit that began a virtually uninterrupted string
of Jagger-Richards hit singles. Still, it wasn't until the group released
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in the summer of 1965 that they were elevated
to superstars. Driven by a fuzz-guitar riff designed to replicate the sound
of a horn section, "Satisfaction" signaled that Jagger and Richards had come
into their own as songwriters, breaking away from their blues roots and developing
a signature style of big, bluesy riffs and wry, sardonic lyrics. It stayed
at number one for four weeks and began a string of Top Ten singles that ran
for the next two years, including such classics as "Get Off My Cloud," "19th
Nervous Breakdown," "As Tears Go By" and "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby,
Standing in the Shadow?"
By 1966, the Stones had decided to respond to the Beatles' increasingly complex
albums with their first album of all-original material, Aftermath. Due to
Brian Jones' increasingly exotic musical tastes, the record boasted a wide
range of influences, from the sitar-drenched "Paint It, Black" to the Eastern
drones of "I'm Going Home." These eclectic influences continued to blossom
on Between the Buttons (1967), the most pop-oriented album the group ever
made. Ironically, the album's release was bookended by two of the most notorious
incidents in the band's history. Before the record was released, the Stones
performed the suggestive "Let's Spend the Night Together," the B-side to
the medieval ballad "Ruby Tuesday," on The Ed Sullivan Show, which forced
Jagger to alter the song's title to an incomprehensible mumble, or else face
being banned. In February of 1967, Jagger and Richards were arrested for
drug possession, and within three months, Jones was arrested on the same
charge. All three were given suspended jail sentences, and the group backed
away from the spotlight as the summer of love kicked into gear in 1967. Jagger,
along with his then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, went with the Beatles
to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; they were also prominent in the international
broadcast of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love." Appropriately, the Stones'
next single, "Dandelion"/"We Love You," was a psychedelic pop effort, and
it was followed by their response to Sgt. Pepper, Their Satanic Majesties
Request, which was greeted with lukewarm reviews.
The Stones' infatuation with psychedelia was brief. By early 1968, they had
fired Andrew Loog Oldham and hired Allen Klein as their manager. The move
coincided with their return to driving rock & roll, which happened to
coincide with Richards' discovery of open tunings, a move that gave the Stones
their distinctively fat, powerful sound. The revitalized Stones were showcased
on the malevolent single "Jumpin' Jack Flash," which climbed to number three
in May 1968. Their next album, Beggar's Banquet, was finally released in
the fall, after being delayed for five months due its controversial cover
art of a dirty, graffiti-laden restroom. An edgy record filled with detours
into straight blues and campy country, Beggar's Banquet was hailed as a masterpiece
among the fledgling rock press. Although it was seen as a return to form,
few realized that while it opened a new chapter of the Stones' history, it
also was the closing of their time with Brian Jones. Throughout the recording
of Beggar's Banquet, Jones was on the sidelines due to his deepening drug
addiction and his resentment of the dominance of Jagger and Richards. Jones
left the band on June 9, 1969, claiming to be suffering from artistic differences
between himself and the rest of the band. On July 3, 1969 -- less than a
month after his departure -- Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool.
The coroner ruled that it was "death by misadventure," yet his passing was
the subject of countless rumors over the next two years.
By the time of his death, the Stones had already replaced Brian Jones with
Mick Taylor, a former guitarist for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. He wasn't
featured on "Honky Tonk Women," a number one single released days after Jones'
funeral, and he contributed only a handful of leads on their next album,
Let It Bleed. Released in the fall of 1969, Let It Bleed was comprised of
sessions with Jones and Taylor, yet it continued the direction of Beggar's
Banquet, signaling that a new era in the Stones' career had begun, one marked
by ragged music and an increasingly wasted sensibility. Following Jagger's
filming of Ned Kelly in Australia during the first part of 1969, the group
launched their first American tour in three years. Throughout the tour --
the first where they were billed as the World's Greatest Rock & Roll
Band -- the group broke attendance records, but it was given a sour note
when the group staged a free concert at Altamont Speedway. On the advice
of the Grateful Dead, the Stones hired Hell's Angels as security, but that
plan backfired tragically. The entire show was unorganized and in shambles,
yet it turned tragic when the Angels killed a young Black man, Meredith Hunter,
during the Stones' performance. In the wake of the public outcry, the Stones
again retreated from the spotlight and dropped "Sympathy for the Devil,"
which some critics ignorantly claimed incited the violence, from their set.
As the group entered hiatus, they released the live Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out in
the fall of 1970. It was their last album for Decca/London, and they formed
Rolling Stones Records, which became a subsidiary of Atlantic Records. During
1970, Jagger starred in Nicolas Roeg's cult film Performance and married
Nicaraguan model Bianca Perez Morena de Macias, and the couple quickly entered
high society. As Jagger was jet-setting, Richards was slumming, hanging out
with country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons. Keith wound up having more musical
influence on 1971's Sticky Fingers, the first album the Stones released though
their new label. Following its release, the band retreated to France on tax
exile, where they shared a house and recorded a double album, Exile on Main
St. Upon its May 1972 release, Exile on Main St. was widely panned, but over
time it came to be considered one of the group's defining moments.
Following Exile, the Stones began to splinter in two, as Jagger concentrated
on being a celebrity and Richards sank into drug addiction. The band remained
popular throughout the '70s, but their critical support waned. Goats Head
Soup, released in 1973, reached number one, as did 1974's It's Only Rock
'N' Roll, but neither record was particularly well received. Taylor left
the band after It's Only Rock 'N' Roll, and the group recorded their next
album as they auditioned new lead guitarists, including Jeff Beck. They finally
settled on Ron Wood, former lead guitarist for the Faces and Rod Stewart,
in 1976, the same year they released Black N' Blue, which only featured Wood
on a handful of cuts. During the mid- and late '70s, all the Stones pursued
side projects, with both Wyman and Wood releasing solo albums with regularity.
Richards was arrested in Canada in 1977 with his common-law wife Anita Pallenberg
for heroin possession. After his arrest, he cleaned up and was given a suspended
sentence the following year. The band reconvened in 1978 to record Some Girls,
an energetic response to punk, new wave and disco. The record and its first
single, the thumping disco-rocker "Miss You," both reached number one, and
the album restored the group's image. However, the group squandered that
goodwill with the follow-up Emotional Rescue, a number one record that nevertheless
received lukewarm reviews upon its 1980 release. Tattoo You, released the
following year, fared better both critically and commercially, as the singles
"Start Me Up" and "Waiting on a Friend" helped the album spend nine weeks
at number one. The Stones supported Tattoo You with an extensive stadium
tour captured in Hal Ashby's movie Let's Spend the Night Together and the
1982 live album Still Life.
Tattoo You proved to be the last time the Stones completely dominated the
charts and the stadiums. Although the group continued to sell out concerts
in the '80s and '90s, their records didn't sell as well as previous efforts,
partially because the albums suffered due to Jagger and Richards' notorious
mid-'80s feud. Starting with 1983's Undercover, the duo conflicted about
which way the band should go, with Jagger wanting the Stones to follow contemporary
trends and Richards wanting them to stay true to their rock roots. As a result,
Undercover was a mean-spirited, unfocused record that received relatively
weak sales and mixed reviews. Released in 1986, Dirty Work suffered a worse
fate, since Jagger was preoccupied with his fledgling solo career. Once Jagger
decided that the Stones would not support Dirty Work with a tour, Richards
decided to make his own solo record with 1988's Talk Is Cheap. Appearing
a year after Jagger's failed second solo album, Talk is Cheap received good
reviews and went gold, prompting Jagger and Richards to reunite late in 1988.
The following year, the Stones released Steel Wheels, which was received
with good reviews, but the record was overshadowed by its supporting tour,
which grossed over $140 million dollars and broke many box office records.
In 1991, the live album Flashback, which was culled from the Steel Wheels
shows, was released.
Following the release of Flashback, Bill Wyman left the band; he published
a memoir, Stone Alone, within a few years of leaving. The Stones didn't immediately
replace Wyman, since they were all working on solo projects; this time, there
was none of the animosity surrounding their mid-'80s projects. The group
reconvened in 1994 with bassist Darryl Jones, who had previously played with
Miles Davis and Sting, to record and release the Don Was-produced Voodoo
Lounge. The album received the band's strongest reviews in years, and its
accompanying tour was even more successful than the Steel Wheels tour. On
top of being more successful than its predecessor, Voodoo Lounge also won
the Stones their first Grammy for Best Rock Album. Upon the completion of
the Voodoo Lounge tour, the Stones released the live, "unplugged" album Stripped
in the fall of 1995. Similarly, after wrapping up their tour in support of
1997's Bridges to Babylon, the group issued yet another live set, No Security,
the following year. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
Formed in London in 1963, the Rolling Stones would by the end of that decade
be among the world's most celebrated rock bands, but unlike their friendly
rivals the Beatles, the Rolling Stones were never able to translate their
charisma and musical smarts into a successful career in the movies. The Rolling
Stones grew out of the fertile British blues scene that began to take root
during the skiffle craze of the mid '50's, and when the meteoric rise of
the Beatles expanded the boundaries of what was possible for a British rock
group, the Rolling Stones were shrewd enough to capitalize on the dichotomy
between the two bands -- while the Beatles were likable mop-tops who played
upbeat pop music nearly anyone could enjoy, the Stones played much grittier
blues-based music and assumed a tough, rebellious image that made them scary
to grown-ups but appealing to teens. This also limited their film careers,
however; while the Fab Four displayed a natural wit and easy onscreen charm,
the most charismatic Stone, Mick Jagger, hardly looked or acted like a matinee
idol, and while Brian Jones may have had a movie star's appearance, he was
far more interested in playing guitar than facing the camera. One also wonders
what a director would have made of Keith Richards' stoic surliness or the
"stand in the back and chew gum" facelessness of Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman.
While the Rolling Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, periodically announced
feature film projects for his boys, none ever appeared (they at one time
were attached to the Dirk Bogarde vehicle The Singer Not the Song, though
their participation was eventually limited to writing the title song). But
the continuing popularity of the Rolling Stones and their dynamic live show
ensured that they popped up in a significant number of concert documentaries
over the years. 1964's The T.A.M.I. Show found them headlining a stellar
bill of rock and R&B hitmakers (including James Brown, the Beach Boys,
Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson, and the Supremes), with the band looking a
bit green but plenty enthusiastic. The band's 1966 tour of Ireland was the
focus of Charlie Is My Darling, while two years later director Jean-Luc Godard
used footage of the Stones recording "Sympathy For The Devil" as a framing
device for his look at youth politics and global revolution in Sympathy For
the Devil (aka One Plus One). In 1969, the Rolling Stones decided to wind
up their riotous U.S. tour (their first American dates with new guitarist
Mick Taylor, who replaced the late Brian Jones) with a free concert in San
Francisco. The result was the band's single most infamous show, the Altamont
Speedway concert, caught on film by David Maysles and Albert Maysles in the
disquieting documentary Gimme Shelter. While Gimme Shelter captured the Rolling
Stones in superb form, the film didn't make them look like terribly nice
people, and periodically the band attempted to create another film that would
document their potent stage show in a better light. For the group's 1972
American tour, photographer and experimental filmmaker Robert Frank was brought
along to make a movie about the Stones; Frank was given total access to the
band's activities both on- and off-stage, and he put every scandalous moment
of the Stones' debauched lifestyle into CS Blues -- so much so that the band
successfully pursued legal action to prevent the film from being released,
though Frank was given permission to screen the film once a year, with the
director in attendance. (In its place, the band released the competent but
unexciting Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones). In 1981, the band teamed
up with veteran director and editor Hal Ashby for Let's Spend the Night Together,
a feature assembled from the group's stadium tour of that year; the shows
found the Stones in less than exciting form, and Ashby's fondness for cutting
from one performance to another in mid-song was more disorienting than exciting.
(This was also the first Stones concert feature after Ron Wood replaced Mick
Taylor on guitar.) And in 1991, the Rolling Stones gave it yet another try
with At the Max; director Julian Temple shot the film in the high-definition
IMAX format, which attempted to recreate the excitement of a Stones show
with a massive, curved screen that enveloped the audience and a six-track,
stereo-sound mix. Since the rise of home video, a steady stream of concert
films and retrospective features on the band have appeared, with no end in
sight for Stones fans looking for a dose of Mick and Keith's deadly charisma.
Several of the Stones have also worked in films when not busy with the band's
commitments. Mick Jagger has acted in several films starting with Tony Richardson's
Ned Kelly in 1970, and though he was forced to back out of Werner Herzog's
Fitzcarraldo, a few scenes he shot for the film appeared in Les Blank's documentary
about its troubled production, Burden Of Dreams. Jagger also co-wrote Running
Out of Luck, a short feature designed to help promote his first solo album.
Brian Jones tried his hand at writing music for films by scoring the 1967
drama Mord Und Todschlag, which starred his then-paramour Anita Pallenberg.
Ron Wood made cameo appearances in the comedies The Wild Life and All You
Need Is Cash (the latter also featured Jagger as himself in a mock-interview
segment). After leaving the Stones, Mick Taylor appeared as a musician in
the drama The Last of the Finest, and contributed to the score of Bad City
Blues. And Bill Wyman has written scores for a number of pictures, starting
with 1981's Green Ice. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide