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Rolling Stones Bio
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 front man, 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.
The Rolling Stones are a British rock band who rose to prominence during the mid-1960s. The band was named after a song by Muddy Waters, a leading exponent of hard-rocking blues. (This was a popular choice of name; at least two other bands are believed to have called themselves The Rolling Stones before Jagger/Richards' band was formed.) In their music, the Rolling Stones were the embodiment of the idea of importing blues style into popular music.
Their first recordings were covers or imitations of rhythm and blues music, but they soon greatly extended the reach of their lyrics and playing, but rarely, if ever, lost their basic blues feel. The original lineup included Mick Jagger (vocals), Brian Jones (guitar), Keith Richards (guitar), Ian Stewart (piano), Charlie Watts (drums) and Dick Taylor (bass). Taylor left shortly after to form The Pretty Things, and was replaced by Bill Wyman. By the time of their first album release Ian Stewart was "officially" not part of the band, though he continued to record and perform with them. Brian Jones, although popular and charismatic, was forced out of the band and died an enigmatic death, presumed accidental at the time, although accusations have surfaced that he was murdered. Jagger and Richards took over songwriting and performance leadership. Jones had favored sticking close to the blues base, although he had also experimented with the sitar, but Jagger and Richards broadened their approach.
The band came into being in 1961 when former school friends Jagger and Richards met Brian Jones. United by their shared interest in rhythm and blues music the group rehearsed extensively, playing in public only occasionally at Crawdaddy Club in London, where Alexis Korner's blues band was resident. At first Jones, a guitarist who also toyed with numerous other instruments was their creative leader.
Taking their name from a Muddy Waters song, the band rapidly gained a reputation in London for their frantic, highly energetic covers of the blues and R & B songs of their idols and, through manager Andrew Loog Oldham were signed to Decca Records (who had passed when offered The Beatles). At this time their music was fairly primitive: Richards had learned much of his guitar playing from the recordings of Chuck Berry, and had not yet developed a style of his own, and Jagger was not as in control of the idioms as he would soon become. Already though, the rhythmic interplay between Watts and Richards was clearly the heart of their music. The choice of material on their first record, a self-titled EP, reflected their live shows. Similarly, the album The Rolling Stones which appeared in April 1964 featured versions of such classics as "Route 66" (originally recorded by Nat King Cole), "Mona" (Bo Diddley) and "Carol" (Chuck Berry). The performances were pivotal in introducing a generation of white British youth to R'n'B music, and helped to fuel the "British Invasion".
More importantly perhaps, while The Beatles were still suited, clean-cut boys with mop-top haircuts, the Stones cultivated the opposite image: decidedly unkempt, and posing for publicity photographs like a gang. The follow-up album, The Rolling Stones #2 was also composed mainly of cover tunes, only now augmented by a couple of songs written by the fledgling partnership of Jagger and Richards. Encouraged by Oldham, the band toured Europe and America continuously in their support, playing to packed crowds of screaming teenagers in scenes reminiscent of the height of Beatlemania. While on tour they took time to visit important locations in the history of the music that inspired them, recording the EP Five By Five at the studios of Chess Records in Chicago. Back at home these early years of success represented a rare period of stability in the personal relationship between the band members. Jagger, Richards and Jones were sharing a house and Jones had begun to see Anita Pallenberg, an actress and model who introduced them to the circle of society in which she moved: a group of young artists, musicians and film makers.
Prompted by Oldham, who possessed sufficient business acumen to see where money was to be made, Jagger and Richards became more prolific songwriters and 1965's Out Of Our Heads contained much self-penned material, including the classic "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," and saw the dynamic of the band began to change, with Jagger and Richards starting to emerge as the perceived leaders of the band. Jones, not unaware of his reduced importance, retreated into drug abuse, alienating both Richards and Pallenberg, who began a liaison that would last over ten years. During this period Pallenberg's opinions about the music, as one of the few people the band trusted, should not be underestimated.
By now the band had become almost synonymous with part of the rebellious spirit of the 1960s, and in particular a more relaxed attitude towards drug use. As a reaction the police obtained warrants to search Richards' country home, Redlands. The February 1967 raid, now legendary in the band's mythology, occurred during one of the regular parties, where police discovered a moderate quantity of cannabis. The raid also served as a source of apocryphal stories, mainly concerning the appearance and demeanor of their friend Marianne Faithfull, which only served to augment their reputation for debauchery. Richards was charged and a few months later stood trial for allowing drug use in his home. Amidst intense press interest he was convicted and sentenced to a year's imprisonment, prompting The Times newspaper to run an editorial criticizing the verdict. With Richards out on bail within a day, and shortly to be acquitted on appeal, work commenced on a new "psychedelic" album, which Jagger envisioned as the group's response to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. The record, which would eventually be released as Their Satanic Majesties' Request, received lukewarm reviews -- the songs and arrangements did not lend themselves to their natural style and the increasingly-strung-out Brian Jones contributed little -- but, despite Richards later pronouncing it "crap," still produced a small number of songs which showcased the improving songwriting of Jagger and Richards.
Within the band the dynamic was changing with the two principal writers steadily usurping power from the former leader, Jones, with Pallenberg as their eminence grilse. After the excesses of Satanic Majesties, and with personal relations between Jones and Richards increasingly frayed, the band returned to the black music that had originally inspired them on 1968's Beggars Banquet. Despite the tension, and aided by an excellent sound from an up-and-coming producer named Jimmy Miller, Jagger and Richards produced some of their most memorable work -- including the distorted acoustic guitar-driven "Street Fighting Man" and the anthemic "Sympathy for the Devil" -- and the Stones entered the phase that would see them billed as "The World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band".
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