Review: Vinyl Reissues of Nico's 'The Marble Index' and 'Desertshore'

Nico had little control over the beginning of her music career, when she sang a couple of pop songs for Andrew Oldham's Immediate label. Another Andy gave her a shotgun marriage to The Velvet Underground, with which she had nearly no creative input despite being the comely commercial face of the band. Nevertheless, her unforgettable turns on the few songs she got to sing were definitely steps in a more natural direction for Nico and her avant garde sensibilities. 

When she got to make her first solo LP a few months after The Velvet Underground & Nico was released, members of the VU (as well as future MOR superstar Jackson Browne, of all people) still provided most of the songs and instrumentation, and she ultimately expressed a distaste for the prettiness of it all. The one song Nico co-wrote on Chelsea Girl, "It was a Pleasure Then", gave a taste of her true ambitions: uncompromisingly dark, borderline queasy music seemingly designed to give her listeners a severe case of the heebie jeebies. Plus, harmonium. Lots and lots of harmonium.

Nico finally got the chance to fully express herself and her harmonium on The Marble Index. Frazier Mohawk, who co-produced the album with former-Velvet John Cale, reportedly said that he made sure it didn't push too far beyond the thirty-minute mark because he was afraid that listeners would start killing themselves if subjected to any more of her ghoulish dissonance. 

Review: 'The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971'

*It's been twenty months since the release of The Rolling Stones Singles 1963 - 1966, and though that set's press release promised the inevitable sequel would arrive in 2023, vinyl reissues of the Stones' U.S. LPs were apparently ABKCO's main concern that year. In 2024, the label has wasted little time in finally making good on that 2022 promise. 

So, now The Rolling Stones Singles 1966 - 1971 has finally arrived to compile eighteen singles representing the time period that I, for one, insist was the Stones' most creatively fertile. While they are usually lauded for sticking to their rudimentary rock and blues guns, I will forever insist that they were at their most exciting and vibrant when grooving with sitars, Mellotrons, dulcimers, synthesizers, John Paul Jones, and John and Paul. 

Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Metamorphosis' Vinyl Reissue

Looking to take advantage of its vast library of vintage Stones tapes, ABKCO started planning an outtakes compilation in the mid-seventies. When Bill Wyman got wind of the project, he assembled his own list of songs he wanted released as Black Box, but Allen Klein supposedly balked at the lack of lucrative Jagger/Richards originals. He probably also wasn't crazy about Bill's reliance on live recordings and unfinished backing tracks. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of 4 Rolling Stones LPs

When the Rolling Stones' sixties albums made their first appearance on digitally remastered CDs in the mid-eighties, ABKCO made the fairly controversial decision to issue them in their American iterations rather than the UK originals. At the same time, the label also issued these American versions on vinyl.

That was 37 years ago. Since then, the UK albums have become the standard in the US during the current vinyl resurgence, although most of the American albums were included on ABKCO's Rolling Stones in Mono box set from 2016. Long story short, ABKCO recently began reissuing each of the American albums in the U.S. as standalone vinyl releases for the first time since 1986. Some of these LPs, such as Aftermath, Between the Buttons, and Flowers, have not been issued in the states on stereo vinyl in any way since 1986. The campaign also includes a few UK records that have never been given standard (i.e.: non-RSD or non-box set) releases in the States before.

Review: 'Parachute Women'

The Rolling Stones have long been celebrated for their glamorous, titillating rock and roll decadence, but before hooking up with two remarkable women, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were basically a couple of low-key, awkward, middle-class English boys. It was Marianne Faithfull and, especially, Anita Pallenberg who helped elevate their art and personas by exposing them to culture outside of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. It was these women who imbued them with black magic mystique by pushing Jagger and Richards out of their comfort zones and into the more liberated/dangerous realms of sexual exploration and hard drug use. And while Jagger and Richards were lauded as "bad boy" templates for the male rock star, Faithfull and Pallenberg were held up as examples for how women should never behave and practically destroyed by both the men they loved and Britain's misogynistic tabloid press.

Review: 'Charlie's Good Tonight: The Authorized Biography of Charlie Watts'

The Rolling Stones' reputation for being "bad boys" or whatever is not unearned considering all the abuse of women, drugs, and each other for which Mick, Keith, Brian, and Bill were known to indulge in to varying degrees (as far as I know, Keith was always pretty gentlemanly when it came to women and Bill never messed with drugs or his bandmates. Underage girls, however...). 

Review: RSD Edition of The Rolling Stones' 'More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies)'

Sure Hot Rocks: 1964 - 1971 had "Satisfaction", "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Honky Tonk Women", and plenty of other examples of what made The Rolling Stones such a superior blues and R&B-based rock band, but it was missing a really key component of the Stones' story: they could be pretty fucking weird. Aside from a bit of sitar on "Paint It Black", some dissonant guitar effects on "Mother's Little Helper", Brian Jones's pastoral recorder on "Ruby Tuesday", and that choir on "You Can't Always Get What You Want", Hot Rocks generally presented the Stones as a more conventional band than they'd been from 1964 to 1971 (more consistently conventional days were ahead of them after '71, but that's another, less interesting story). Where was the psychedelia? Where were the fey Elizabethan ballads? Where was whatever the hell "I'm Free" is? 

Review: 'The Rolling Stones Unzipped'

There's no question that the audio side of The Rolling Stones was always their most crucial facet, but they probably would not be quite so legendary if not for their visual one. Much imagery is inextricably twined up with the band: Charlie's natty suits, Keith's pirate costumes and arsenal of flash yet functional guitars, Mick's lips and the ubiquitous logo they seemingly inspired. The Rolling Stones Unzipped is a lavish tribute to that iconography. The big hardcover showcases not only the band's garb and gear but also their handwritten lyrics, pages from Keith's 1963 diary that reveal he was always really self-congratulatory, and perhaps most charmingly, Ronnie's needlessly artful but utterly delightful handwritten/hand-designed set lists of the band's rehearsals.

However, the garb and gear shots are what really carry Unzipped. Mick's wardrobe of the sixties is truly spectacular. The grenadier jacket (by M&N Horne) and gorgeous waistcoat/ruffled silk shirt combo (by Mr. Fish) he wore in 1965 were outrageously individual choices from a time when The Beatles still wore matching uniforms. His outfits start sucking in the seventies with an overabundance of gross unitards and sub-Elvis jump suits, but they tighten up again in the late eighties and nineties with sharp frock coats. Charlie, of course, always looked fab, but his wardrobe is unfortunately underrepresented, and there's nothing at all from the closet of the always well-attired Brian Jones. However, there are some nicely crumpled pieces from Keith Richards' bedroom floor. There are also some choice pieces of equipment, such as the tabla set Charlie banged on Their Satanic Majesties Request and the bizarre toy drum set that packs such a wallop on "Street Fighting Man".

Unzipped is also notable for complimenting the pics with all-new commentaries from Jagger, Richards, Wood, and the recently departed Watts. The most substantial chunk of text is Anthony DeCurtis's nutshell history of the band, which does include a few head scratchers. He claims the Stones found psychedelia "silly" and "confusing," completely ignoring the head-long plunge they took into it with Satanic Majesties, their own prodigious LSD consumption, and the spaced out interviews Mick and Brian gave to the underground press during the acid era. He mostly ignores the band's pre-Beggars Banquet work, but calls the embarrassingly dated and antiseptic Dirty Work "possibly the most underrated album of the Stones' career" that "finds the band at its rawest and most rhythmically charged." Take another listen to "Back to Zero" and get back to me, Tony.

There are also essays from various guest stars, such as Martin Scorsese who assesses the Stones on film, Anna Sui and John Varvatos on their fashion sense, lips-logo designer John Pasche (who drops the A-bomb that he was only paid 50 quid to design that logo that has been pasted on a multi-million dollars worth of merch) on their graphic design, and Buddy Guy (who offers an ever-so-slightly and utterly justifiably begrudging nod to the Stones for introducing white America to blues artists mainstream DJs were too racist to play) on their relationship with the blues. All in all, Unzipped is a very plush, surprisingly eye-opening package, not unlike the Stones' musical body of work.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones'

For a band regularly derided as ugly and dirty throughout their nearly sixty-year career, The Rolling Stones' mugs have sure sold a lot of books. Originally published in 2014, editor Reuel Golden's The Rolling Stones was just the latest in a long history of Stones-centric photo books. Most of its images had been previously published, but since it's a Taschen book, it is atypically comprehensive. Its more than 450 pages are packed with pictures of them from their most photogenic days in the sixties to sessions for their most recent album at that time, 2005's A Bigger Bang. Half of those 450 pages focus on the sixties with a variety of publicity photos, album cover sessions, and recording studio documents. Surprisingly few catch them on stage in their most vital days, though concert pics become the dominant type when The Rolling Stones starts sucking in the seventies. Hilariously, and thankfully, the book sprints through the Stones' most execrable decade, the eighties, in just ten pages, while about twenty each are allotted for the inessential nineties and twenty-first century. 

Because so many of these images will be familiar to Stones fans, The Rolling Stones will be most valuable to fans purchasing their first Stones photo book or others looking to consolidate. I've seen my share, but some of these were new to me, such as a shot of Brian Jones holding a (presumably) psychedelic mushroom aloft in 1967 and a shot of Keith Richards's pre-Redlands living room, which is as Spartan as a hotel room. My favorite shots are the LP-cover outtakes, but that's just because I can never get enough of seeing Charlie Watts pal around with a donkey.

Taschen is now publishing an updated edition of The Rolling Stones, though the only post-2014 photos can be found in the memorabilia and discography sections. Perhaps more pics were added to the sixties and seventies. I doubt anyone would complain about that. 

Review: 'The Rolling Stones in the Beginning: With Unseen Images'

Between mid-1965 and mid-1966, Danish photographer Bent Rej was one of The Rolling Stones’ most trusted chroniclers. He began working with the band just as Mick and Keith penned their first smash, “The Last Time”, entering them into the upper echelon of pop artists. Rej exited the fold when Brian, his closest friend in the group, spiked him, and the group’s descent into druggy darkness began. Consequently, his shots tend to show an atypically innocent Rolling Stones.

Review: 'Melody Makers: Should’ve Been There'

Melody Maker was generally more significant for Barrie Wentzell’s striking B&W photos of sixties and seventies pop and rock stars than the depth of its reportage. So Leslie Ann Coles’s documentary Melody Makers: Should’ve Been There is a fitting tribute to the long-running UK music paper. The storytelling is as flimsy as a puff piece on Yes, but boy, those Wentzell photos that fill the screen throughout this film’s 88 minutes are impressive. Peter Gabriel resplendent in his daisy headpiece. Brian Jones cradling his sitar. Tina Turner commanding the stage as a Screaming Mimi in a mini.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones in Comics'

With Mick’s exaggerated lips, Bill and Charlie’s square heads, and Keef’s bird’s nest scruff, The Rolling Stones always did look a bit like cartoon characters. And between their easily caricatured mugs and equally outrageous behavior, the Stones have always been ripe targets for cartoonists. Bill Wyman even anthologized newspaper comic parodies of his band in The Stones: A History in Cartoons back in 2006.

Now a writer named Ceka is using the comic medium to tell a somewhat more complete version of Stones history in a book called The Rolling Stones in Comics. Between large chunks of text-only exposition, 21 different artists bring portions of the story to life employing a variety of styles from Domas’s Sunday comic section doodles (illustrating Lennon and McCartney composing “I Wanna Be Your Man”) to Kyung-Eun Parks’s more detailed, slightly grotesque style (illustrating the Stones’ fall out with the Marquee club) to Dominique Hennebaut’s Underground Comix-indebted approach (Mick and Keith’s first songwriting attempt) to the stylized yet more realistic approach of Amandine Puntous (the Redlands bust) to Anthony Audibert’s sketchy abstractions (Mick’s alleged dalliance with Anita Pallenberg while making Performance). It’s an invigorating mixture that makes the 1000^th retelling of The Rolling Stones’ story seem fresh again. So do Ceka’s realistically coarse dialogue and decision to include such valuable trivia as the real… and horrifying… explanation for the term “Rolling Stone”.

The one downside is Ceka’s tendency to sometimes veer to close to hagiography, as when he refers to all five of the Stones as “geniuses” (I doubt any one of them deserves that much-overused designation) or deifies the horribly abusive Brian Jones as an angel. Fortunately, the author balances moments such as these with sly criticisms of the Stones myth, such as a sardonic depiction of Mick’s half-hearted and hypocritical participation in socio-political activism in 1968. I also really dig the sections that fly away from the main story, such as the clever explanation of Keith’s open tuning from guest cartoon character and real musician Vincent Blanchard and Ceka’s personal story of finding the love of his life as “Angie” spins at a party. The Rolling Stones in Comics works nicely as a pocket history of Rock & Roll’s key band, but its narrative quirks and far-out art are what make it special.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones in Concert, 1962-1982: A Show-by-Show History'

The Rolling Stones made some of the greatest records of the Rock & Roll era, but for a lot of fans, the band was at their greatest on stage. Sitting in your living room listening to Aftermath you couldn’t see Jagger shimmying his skinny hips and flapping his pillow lips. You couldn’t watch Keef swaying over his guitar like a marionette operated by a drunken puppeteer. You couldn’t see Wyman…errr…standing.

While the Stones’ recordings have been well documented in books such as Martin Elliott’s Complete Recording Sessions, their live performances have not been as thoroughly covered. In his introduction to The Rolling Stones in Concert, 1962-1982: A Show-by-Show History, author Ian M. Rusten is up front about attempting to create a stage equivalent to Elliott’s studio-centric one. Like Elliott, Rusten has created a very well organized chronicle of The Rolling Stones at work with separate entries for each item. Of course, recordings are more available to review than ephemeral performances are, so Rusten relies less on his personal opinion in evaluating his topic than Elliott did. This means a hell of a lot more research was involved as Rusten had to seek out period reviews for nearly every concert he discusses in The Rolling Stones in Concert. No wonder he only had it in him to cover the Stones’ first two decades.

Even without considering the workload, 1982 is still a smart year to cease the discussion because it both marks an end to the Stones’ road work before they took an extended (and very acrimonious) break and also marks the end of the Stones as a fairly uncalculating live act. To see them from 1989’s Steel Wheels tour and beyond is not to see the real Rolling Stones. They became more like a Vegas act. Rusten covers the Stones before they started putting on slick shows. In their earliest days, it was more like they were putting on hurricanes. It’s stunning to see how many of their mid-sixties shows ended in riots. In the context of the Stones’ whole sixties stage career, Altamont looks more like a business-as-usual show than a grotesque aberration.

It’s hard to convey the excitement of live music in prose, especially when you weren’t present for the performance in question, so Rusten mostly serves as relayer rather than reviewer. Along with period reviews and less reliable fan relocations culled from contemporary message boards, Rusten provides set lists when possible, and most interesting of all, chunks of quotes from the Stones themselves. Mick and Keith’s hilariously nasty responses to some daft reporters from Phoenix are worth the admission price alone.

Farewell, Anita Pallenberg

Despite her work as a model and actress who appeared in such groovy items as Performance, Barbarella, and an episode of Absolutely Fabulous (in which she played the Devil against Marianne Faithfull's God), Anita Pallenberg will forever be known as the woman who made Keith Richards seem tame. Her life was well-lived but rocky. She endured an abusive relationship with Brian Jones before getting involved with Richards. Her drug-abuse rivaled that of her mate's. The death of the infamous couple's infant son Tara drove a wedge between them that caused a permanent split after Pallenberg's 17-year old boyfriend Scott Cantrell killed himself in her and Richards' bed in 1979. 

In the early eighties Pallenberg worked hard to get sober, and despite a couple of relapses, continued on while mostly choosing to remain outside of the public eye with occasional returns such as her Ab Fab appearance and work as a DJ. Yesterday, Pallenberg died at the age of 73. Her Rock & Roll adventures will surely continue to be the stuff of myth for years to come.

Review: 'The Rolling Stones in Mono'

Keith Richards is a pretty vocal mono purist, so it must have galled him that The Rolling Stones had been inconsistently represented in his preferred format since the end of its dominance in the late sixties. During the CD age, their pre-Aftermath albums tended to be hodgepodges of stereo and mono tracks and everything afterward was exclusively stereo. This was a dire situation, because their cro-mag gang rock relied so much on its sonic solidarity. The Stones bled an alluringly swampy murk in which Keith’s guitar was rarely discernible from Brian’s, and Bill’s bass throbbed through their wall of sound as if his band mates had hid his amp under the floorboards. Stereo dilutes that murk, violates its magic. 

Review: 'Brian Jones: The Making of The Rolling Stones'

Everyone who has done their Rolling Stones homework knows that Brian Jones started the band, that he was their most naturally gifted musician, that he contributed more to their recordings than Mick and Keith want you to believe. Unfortunately, Brian did not live to drill his version of events into your consciousness the way Mick has with his carefully calculated interviews and Keith has with his critically drooled-over doorstop of an autobiography. Had he lived beyond 1969, Brian Jones probably would not have anyway based on the way Paul Trynka presents the guitarist/ keyboardist/ saxophonist/ sitarist/ marimbaist/etc. in his new biography Brian Jones: The Making of The Rolling Stones. The most vilified member of the Stones comes across as less violent, less perpetually drugged, less useless here.

Review: 'Keith Richards on Keith Richards: Interviews and Encounters'

The cover shot says everything you need to know about the Keith Richards attitude. The bird he’s flipping says, “Fuck off.” The smile says, “Don’t take it so seriously, baby.” This is the Keith we encounter time and again in Keith Richards on Keith Richards: Interviews and Encounters, largely because Sean Egan chose so many pieces from the eighties onward when Keith was in full I-know-I’m-a-living-legend mode. The editor, who also put together the excellent recent anthology The Mammoth Book of The Rolling Stones, had his reasons for skewing so post-golden years. In the sixties, Keith was actually third in line behind Mick Jagger and Brian Jones in the Stones hierarchy, so there were fewer interviews with him. Because Rock journalism had not matured yet, the interviews of that period tended to be lightweight anyway.

Review: The Rolling Stones in 'Crossfire Hurricane'

When Mick Jagger contacted Brett Morgen about making a fiftieth anniversary documentary on The Rolling Stones, the filmmaker rightfully believed Mick wanted a series not unlike the great Beatles Anthology. Not so. Mick was very emphatic about wanting a lean, under-two hours documentary. Why the hip shaker wanted to place such a ridiculous constriction on such a bountiful history is anyone’s guess. This left Morgen with the task of condensing five decades of dirty work and eighty hours of audio interviews down to 110 minutes. I don’t envy the dude, yet as a hardcore Stones freak I can’t be anything but disappointed with Crossfire Hurricane. 

Lucifer Sams and Satanic Majesties: Cult Sects of Rock Gods

Who is Pink Floyd? Cold experiments and saxophones. Twenty minute opuses and barren atmosphere. Faceless, immobile, serious musicians. Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.

Who are The Rolling Stones? Sleazy sex and heroin. Mick’s lips and strutting. Blues, booze, and Berry. Exile on Main Street and Some Girls.

Who are The Beach Boys? Surf and sun. Hot rods and bikinis. Prancing old Reaganites in Hawaiian shirts. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Surfin’ Safari”.

Who are The Who? Rock operas and ponderous proto-metal. Bluster and bashing. Classic Rock radio staples and Broadway bounders. Tommy and Who’s Next.

Four of Rock’s institutions as they’re understood by the masses. When their congregations file into the hallowed halls of their local stadiums to hear the hits, the hits are what they most often receive. A sacrament of the familiar, fulfilling essential stereotypes, banishing the obscurities to torchlit basement gatherings where the freaks and obsessives huddle around turntables to spin gouged copies of Their Satanic Majesties Request and fifth generation bootlegs of SMiLE. Bruce Johnston calls them “the one percenters”: the one-percent of The Beach Boys’ fans who hope to never hear “Kokomo” again but cannot get enough of “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” and “Do You Like Worms?”

Classifying these acts as cult bands is a far-fetched stretch. They are among the most enduringly popular in Rock history. The Beach Boys were the biggest white American Rock band of the ‘60s, scoring three number one hits in their hey day and another some 25 years after their debut. Pink Floyd are responsible for one of Rock’s all-time bestselling and most iconic records. The Stones and The Who may only fall behind The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the British Rock race. Yet within each of those band’s expansive histories lay genuine cult items; recordings that the majority of their fans and the bands, themselves, generally ignore. The cultists these oddities have attracted feel decidedly stronger about SMiLE, Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Who Sell Out, and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. We are the one percent.

Cult items are natural products of any long and fruitful career. Perhaps The Beatles and Zeppelin are the only top Rock bands of the classic era who don’t really have any, which is likely because both had relatively short careers that produced relatively few records. Had The Beatles continued making music for another decade, it is possible that at least one of them might have dipped through the cracks. It was inevitable that The Beach Boys and The Stones would make their cult records, because they both created tremendous bodies of work (as of this writing, The Beach Boys have made 30 albums; The Stones made 22 and are apparently at work on another) and are both confined by most people into tight compartments. Those people include the artists, themselves. Brian and Dennis Wilson were the only Beach Boys who really seemed to recognize the genius of the stereotype-defying SMiLE, with its fragmented structures, whimsical humor, and stoned avant gardism. Mike Love famously (perhaps apocryphally) warned Brian to not “fuck with the formula” of surf and hot rod songs. He hated Van Dyke Parks’s poetic, cryptic lyrics and most of the guys claimed they felt degraded by being forced to simulate barnyard noises and orgasms by a giggling, LSD-infused Brian during the sessions. Keith Richards is similarly embarrassed by the blues-eschewing, psychedelic onslaught Their Satanic Majesties Request, dismissing it as “flimflam” in his autobiography. Mick’s embarrassment seems to cloak a genuine affection for the record, constantly vacillating between deeming it “nonsense” and “lovely” throughout the years.

50 Years/50 Reasons The Rolling Stones are the Most!

According to Karnbach and Bernson’s It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards first went to see Brian Jones and Ian Stewart rehearse with their new blues band on May 25, 1962. Kismet. For the next fifty years, The Rolling Stones would remain the definitive Rock & Roll band, leaving a trail of milestones in their wake. Here are 50 that prove The Stones are and have always been the most.

1. Start Me Up
“Hot Stuff” notwithstanding, Stones albums could always be counted on to get off to a rousing start. Track one always packed a little extra kick: “Route 66” on their debut, “She Said Yeah” on Out of Our Heads, “Sympathy for the Devil” on Beggars Banquet, “Gimme Shelter” on Let It Bleed, “Rocks Off” on Exile on Main Street, “Start Me Up” on Tattoo You. Sometimes The Stones lured you in with beguiling mood music, as they did with “Mother’s Little Helper” on Aftermath, “Yesterday’s Papers” on Between the Buttons, and “Sing This All Together” on Their Satanic Majesties Request. No matter what, as soon as the needle drops on side one, there’s no mistake you're listening to the world’s greatest Rock & Roll band.

2. Imagination
Sometimes The Stones’ exploits overshadow their music. Mick and Keith are rarely spoken of in the same breath as fellow lyricists Dylan or Lennon and McCartney, but could they be Rock’s greatest wordsmiths? They were not as poetic as Dylan. They were not as empathetic as The Beatles. Yet Mick and Keith were far more personal, varied, and imaginative than many listeners realize. Songs such as “Before They Make Me Run” and “Wild Horses” are vulnerable contemplations of real situations. “Citadel”, “Torn and Frayed”, and “When the Whip Comes Down” establish incredibly detailed scenarios of fantasy and reality. “Sympathy for the Devil” may be Rock & Roll’s finest—and most frightening— character study, while “Monkey Man” might be its most hilarious self-parody.

3. Copy Me
One of the things that made Mick Jagger such a stellar frontman was his ability to mimic the greatest frontmen before and of his time. He spent the first few Stones records working hard to capture Chuck Berry’s audible smirk, Jimmy Reed’s slur, Marvin Gaye’s sweet roll, and Otis Redding’s transcendent shout. By the mid-‘60s he was an expert impersonator who had Ray Davies’s wryness (“Cool, Calm, & Collected”), The Beatles’ Liverpudlian harmonies (“Yesterday’s Papers”), and Dylan’s whine (“She Smiled Sweetly”) down pat.

4. The Bass Player He Looks Nervous…and the Drummer, He’s So Shattered…
Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were never a flash rhythm section like Moon and Entwistle, or rhythmic melodists like Starr and McCartney. They just locked into grooves like no other white rhythm section, smearing slicks of drums and bass Keith could slide all over with his greasy licks. So what if Charlie played a little behind the beat? So what if Bill didn’t have the interest in distinguishing his lines from the mix, making it necessary for Keith to tear the bass from Bill’s hands and do the job himself from time to time? There’s still an undeniable magic to their boogie: Charlie wacking away like a slightly slack metronome; Bill tossing off walking runs with ease, occasionally dive-bombing down neck like Bo Diddley. On stage, the guys looked like they could not have been less interested in what they were doing. The exquisite rumble they made proved otherwise.

5. …and the Guitar Players Look Damaged
While Bill and Charlie were perfecting their rhythms at the back of the stage, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were out front revolutionizing guitar dynamics. The lead and rhythm player had always been distinct entities in Rock & Roll. Keith and Brian started changing that through a technique Keith christened “weaving,” instinctively trading rhythm and lead roles within a song. While Mick Taylor’s virtuosity meant that the roles became less integrated during his tenure, The Stones’ acquisition of Ronnie Wood in 1976 resulted in the most perfect weaving Keith would ever achieve with a guitar partner.

6. Slipped My Tongue
It’s been slapped on T-shirts, jackets, and air fresheners (though it’s hard to believe anything associated with The Stones would actually make the air smell better). Over-commercialized for sure, The Rolling Stones’ tongue is still a perfectly lascivious, unbelievably iconic logo for the world’s dirtiest band of pirates. It has certainly gotten more mileage than if it had “slowly (turned) into a cock,” as Keith Richards once suggested it might.

7. I Got the Blues