The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones, perhaps the biggest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time, formed in 1962. The first stable line-up consisted of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, led initially by Jones, a blues fanatic who set his sights on bringing the traditional American genre to the UK charts.

The band rapidly garnered the attention of the UK’s post-war youth as a class blues act, but their early albums lacked original material. Approaching the mid-1960s, the Jagger-Richards songwriting partnership began to take shape as Jones became increasingly detached from proceedings as he grappled with drug addiction.

As far as Jones was concerned, The Rolling Stones peaked in December 1964, when their recorded cover of Willie Dixon’s blues standard, ‘Little Red Rooster,’ reached number one in the UK singles chart. The occasion marked the first time a traditional blues track had reached the top spot in the UK, and it remains the only one to this day.

As the Jagger-Richards material began to take the limelight, the Rolling Stones became the biggest threat to The Beatles’ throne. At odds with Brian Epstein, the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, began to present his band as the bad-boy alternative to The Beatles, fabricating a rivalry in the press that had very little prevalence in reality.

As The Rolling Stones conformed increasingly to a pop-oriented sound, Jones became increasingly withdrawn as his personal issues worsened. He was finally dismissed from the band in June 1969, with his final contributions appearing on the group’s seventh studio album, Beggars Banquet. Tragically, he died in July 1969 after drowning in the swimming pool at his Sussex home.

Entering the 1970s, The Beatles had disbanded, leaving The Rolling Stones to usurp the rock ‘n’ roll throne. Most fans will agree that the early 1970s marked the pinnacle for the band with Mick Taylor on guitar. This period was highlighted by 1971’s ‘Sticky Fingers’ and the following year’s ‘Exile on Main St’, the latter famously recorded in France, where the band were living in exile from the UK’s heavy taxation laws.

Remarkably, The Rolling Stones have managed to maintain their high calibre rock ‘n’ roll lifestyles on stage and in the studio for 60 years. In 1975, Taylor was replaced by Ronnie Wood and original bassist Wyman exited in 1993. Sadly, founding drummer Watts passed away in August 2021, leaving just Jagger and Richards as the two remaining founders in the group today.

“The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be,” Bob Dylan said in 2009. “The last, too. Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it… you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and the last, and no one’s ever done it better.”