Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: The Rolling Stones, broken down by 20 songs that define their themes and styles, and five albums that every serious rock fan should own. The Rolling Stones appear in the new concert film Shine A Light, directed by Martin Scorsese.
The Rolling Stones 101:
Unlike their classic rival, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones aren't frozen in time. Their body of work spans several decades, covers numerous musical eras, and varies widely in quality as the band aged, changed members, and attained incredible wealth. Exactly when and where you come at The Stones will define how you see the band. If you were born in the '80s or '90s, Mick Jagger has always been a preening, somewhat ridiculous dinosaur, shaking his wrinkled ass for graying baby boomers at $200 a ticket. It isn't a pretty picture, nor wholly representative of a band that's been making records for nearly 45 years.
Like the American bluesmen they emulated, The Stones have continued making music well into their 60s. They've been pilloried as much as praised for sticking together, but that's nothing new. As early as 1969, in the middle of the band's prime, people railed against The Stones for not breaking up already. (Rock writer Nik Cohn famously wished the band members would die in a plane crash before their 30th birthdays, so they could stay forever young.) It's a silly argument, because the greatness of what The Rolling Stones created could never be overshadowed, even by a hundred late-career cash-in tours. Any statement to the contrary is quickly refuted by the first 10 seconds of "Jumpin' Jack Flash," which still are as hard, exciting, and vital as any moments in rock 'n' roll.
"Jumpin' Jack Flash" by The Rolling Stones
Simply put, The Rolling Stones defined how a rock band is supposed to sound, look, fight, and fuck. The swaggering lead singer; the guitarist/sidekick "with mystique"; the wild, drug-fueled and sex-drenched escapades on the road; the arrogant disregard for authority; the grungy fashion sense—all the rock-band clichés can be traced back to here. Whenever a new rock band is supposedly bringing the music "back to basics," it often sounds like something off of 1972's Exile On Main St., considered by many to be the definitive Stones album—maybe even the definitive rock 'n' roll album, even though it doesn't contain any well-known singles. (The swinging "Tumbling Dice" comes closest.) Exile touches on a variety of American music styles, from blues to soul to gospel to country, sometimes in the space of a single song like "Loving Cup," a lilting Southern-soul ballad straight out of a prairie church, but played like a straight-up rocker. By this time, just eight years after their debut album, The Stones had so completely absorbed and perfected the earthy roots music they grew up on that it no longer seemed strange for pishy Brits to be playing around with music forms created by black Americans decades earlier.
"Loving Cup" by The Rolling Stones
That wasn't the case when Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones palled around London's blues scene in the early '60s. While their love and knowledge of greats like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf was real and deep, bringing blues back home in a mutated, updated form—even in the wake of The Beatles' incredible overseas success—was a dream only the most wildly ambitious British musicians dared ponder. But while The Beatles and the clean-cut British Invasion pop-rock bands that followed were a far cry from the Stones' hip, bohemian aesthetic, they did create a goody-goody center so ubiquitous that an alternative quickly became inevitable. Crafted with the help of media-savvy manager Andrew Loog Oldham, The Stones' bad-boy image was apparent from their first album cover, which pictured the decidedly unphotogenic group lined up menacingly like a gang of sociopathic schoolboys. The Beatles just wanted to hold your hand, the press breathlessly reported, but on their debut, England's Newest Hitmakers, The Stones covered Willie Dixon's "I Just Want To Make Love To You," a randy blues classic popularized by Muddy Waters. The Stones' image must have been scary to parents, but the music itself sounds precious today. Compared with Waters' version, which still sounds filthy in the best possible way, The Stones' cover sounds like young kids pretending to be grown-ups.
"I Just Want To Make Love To You" by The Rolling Stones
The band's grasp of blues and R&B quickly grew more assured, as hit cover versions of The Valentinos' "It's All Over Now" and Irma Thomas' "Time Is On My Side" (both collected on the band's second album, 12X5) brilliantly show. By the time of 1965's The Rolling Stones, Now!—a go-to party record in the band's catalog—they were the baddest white boys on the planet, taking on the heady likes of Chuck Berry and Solomon Burke, and providing a sturdy, blues-punk blueprint for countless American bands just starting to bash away on Bo Diddley riffs in their garages.
"It's All Over Now" by The Rolling Stones
As good as the early, blues-based Stones albums are, the band was still tethered to its larger-than-life influences. It wasn't until 1968's Beggars Banquet that The Stones showed they could make American music truly their own. Released during one of the most tumultuous years in modern history, Beggars Banquet summed up the fear and uncertainty of a time rife with political assassinations and street riots by reaching back to the haunted, desolate country blues of the Mississippi Delta. There was nothing precious about the apocalyptic cover of Rev. Robert Wilkins' "Prodigal Son," a positively evil-sounding gospel song for what must have seemed to some like the end of the world. And while the rest of the rock world was preaching the joys of free love and copious drug use, "Jigsaw Puzzle" vividly portrayed the seamy, paranoid underbelly of the hippie dream that was just starting to rise to the surface.
"Jigsaw Puzzle" by The Rolling Stones
The blues—or, more accurately, a hard-rocking British version of the blues—form the foundation of the Stones' sound, and the band usually was at its best creatively, the closer it stayed to those roots. Commercially, however, the Stones' strength was in their ability to zero in on the most exciting trends of the time and infuse their music with the new energy. Early on, The Beatles and Bob Dylan were important contemporary influences. When The Beatles used a sitar on "Norwegian Wood," The Stones were inspired to use Eastern sounds on "Paint It Black." (The Sgt. Pepper rip-off Their Satanic Majesties Request was less successful.) When the "thin wild mercury" folk-rock sound of Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde became the rage, The Stones responded with 1967's Between The Buttons, which includes Dylan-esque tracks like "Who's Been Sleeping Here?" The Stones weren't originators, they were synthesizers, taking what they liked (or what was popular) from various corners of the musical universe and integrating it into their sound. The ideas were borrowed, but the execution was wholly original and unmistakably "Stonesy."
"Who's Been Sleeping Here?" by The Rolling Stones
The best example of this is 1978's Some Girls, the band's best-regarded album from outside its "glory years" period in the late '60s and early '70s. Some Girls is an unabashed "New York" album, drawing on the city's nascent punk and disco scenes to breath some fresh life into the band's standard blues-rock attack. The Stones might have been another one of Johnny Rotten's "boring old farts" (he's said he wished the band had broken up in 1965), but none of rock's old guard confronted the present as forcefully or credibly as The Stones did on Some Girls. The album's rockers hit with an aggressive punk edge, and the disco track "Miss You" became a No. 1 hit. While some hardcore fans groaned that The Stones sold out, "Miss You" is rightfully considered one of the best disco singles of the era.
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