The “life-changing moment” The Rolling Stones performed with Howlin’ Wolf
The Rolling Stones’ impact on music and culture is immeasurable. Bursting onto the scene in the 1960s, the band brought an electrifying energy that captivated a new generation of music lovers. While the concept of the “teenager” had emerged as a cultural force in the previous decade, it was Mick Jagger and his bandmates who injected that youth movement with a raw, rebellious edge, introducing them to the wild and unapologetically hedonistic world of rock and roll.
Of course, though the genre would later be hailed as rock, many of the band’s earliest inspirations were from the US and the depths of the blues. In truth, The Rolling Stones considered themselves missionaries of blues, responsible for spreading the music that made them into the mainstream. Sharing a stage with Howlin’ Wolf on US television was arguably their best effort.
“It’s about time you shut up, and we have Howlin’ Wolf on stage,” Brian Jones quipped at a host of Shindig before the musician sauntered in, and the biggest gasps came not from the audience but from the band themselves. Wolf towered over his audience at two metres tall. He didn’t invite their attention but demanded it, creeping across the room and dancing with a fervour that inspired both joy and fear.
He was notorious for having that effect, and he’d actually toned down his act to be more palatable for the show’s white audience after he left crowds a gloopy, sweating, quivering mess. Born Chester Arthur Burnett, his performances were often imbued with so much intensity that it seemed he might transform from man to wolf at any moment; thus, the moniker Howlin’ Wolf.
It was 1965 when the Stones welcomed him as a guest on Shindig, his first of few appearances on national TV. Jones’s biographer Paul Trynka called the episode “a life-changing moment, both for the American teenagers clustered round the TV in their living rooms, and for a generation of blues performers who had been stuck in a cultural ghetto”.
Shindig, for those unaware, was a musical variety show featuring a broad range of popular music, including acts like The Beach Boys, Tina Turner, The Who and The Beatles. But, like much of the 1960s, the TV series was largely concerned with what was new and fresh. It wasn’t interested in giving away airtime to an older act. However, perhaps with an eye on completing a lifelong ambition, The Rolling Stones made Wolf’s opening act a condition of their own appearance on the show. To have the band sitting worshipfully at the bluesman’s feet was an apt representation of the debts they – and popular music at large – owed to Wolf and his contemporaries.
Wolf’s music was made for a Black audience and embedded with the distinct sounds born from African American culture in the Deep South. For Shindig, he opted for ‘How Many More Years’, a song about a man burdened by circumstance, desperate to be liberated. “How many more years / Have I got to let you dog me around?” he sang, pointing to a power dynamic representative of the fraught racial relations in the US. His performance marked a cultural shift that Trynka said “built a bridge over a cultural abyss and connected America with its own black culture”.
The Rolling Stones insisting that Howlin’ Wolf be given a spot on the show might seem like a small gesture, but it highlighted a group of young white Brits honouring a Black blues legend. This connection served as a reminder of how easily differences can be set aside in the name of art. Perhaps now, it’s time to take a cue from Brian Jones: shut up and listen to Howlin’ Wolf.
