The Rolling Stones
Young Londoners who once carried Chicago blues records in their arms became rock's oldest working band, taking the stage under the same name for more than 60 years.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and companions ⏳🌊
- InfluenceMuddy Waters
The band took its name from one of his songs; they first met him in Chicago in 1964 and played alongside him on a Chicago club stage in 1981.
- MemberBrian Jones
The leader who first assembled the band and a versatile player who took on even sitar and marimba, he died in 1969 at twenty-seven.
- MemberMick Jagger
The frontman who sang and played harmonica, and who wrote most of the songs with Richards.
- MemberKeith Richards
Guitarist and songwriting partner, he is the man behind the riff of "Satisfaction" and the open-G-tuning sound.
- MembersCharlie Watts
A jazz-loving drummer who kept the band's time from 1963 until his death in 2021.
- FriendshipJohn Lennon
Though cast as rivals, he handed them “I Wanna Be Your Man” and joined in on the chorus of “We Love You” and in The Rock and Roll Circus.
I. Two boys from Dartford · 1942–1962
(Formation) The band was formed in London, England, in 1962. But the story begins first in Dartford, a small town in Kent southeast of London. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were born there in 1943, five months apart. The two attended the same primary school, but moves and changes of school made them lose track of each other for a while. (Family) Jagger's father, Joe Jagger, was a physical education teacher, and Jagger grew into a diligent student who went on to the London School of Economics (LSE). Richards, an only child, began playing on a guitar his mother, Doris, bought him. Richards recalled that it was his maternal grandfather, Gus Dupree, who had led a jazz band, who first let him lay hands on a guitar. (Reunion) In October 1961, the two ran into each other again on a platform at Dartford railway station. Jagger was carrying American import records by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, and that, the two have said many times, was what started the conversation. Rhythm and blues records (African American music that added a strong beat and electric instruments to the blues), hard to find in Britain, were a sign by which kindred spirits recognized each other. (Brian) Around the same time, Brian Jones, from Cheltenham, a spa town in the west of England, had come to London. Born in 1942, he had received a musical education in a middle-class home and was among the first players in Britain to master slide guitar (the sound made by sliding a metal tube or a piece of bottle along the strings). (The club) The place where they gathered was the Ealing Jazz Club, where Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated played. On that stage, too, was Charlie Watts, the future drummer. Jones placed an ad for members in a jazz magazine, and boogie-woogie pianist Ian Stewart answered it. The story goes that when a phone call before their first gig asked for the band's name, Jones glanced at a Muddy Waters record lying on the floor, saw the song “Rollin' Stone,” and named the band after it.
II. The London blues clubs · 1962–1964
(The Marquee) On July 12, 1962, they played their first gig at London's Marquee Club under the name the Rollin' Stones. Jagger took vocals and harmonica, Richards and Jones guitars, and Stewart piano. The lineup was complete once Bill Wyman, a South Londoner who had finished his service in the Air Force, joined on bass at the end of that year, and jazz fanatic Charlie Watts, then working as a designer at an advertising agency, came in on drums in January 1963. (Oldham) In the spring of 1963, word spread about their shows at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond. Nineteen-year-old publicist Andrew Loog Oldham saw them and became their manager, and the band signed with Decca Records. Oldham deliberately honed a rebellious image, the exact opposite of the clean-cut Beatles. (Stu) Saying six members were too many and that Stewart's looks did not fit that image, Oldham removed him from the official lineup. Stewart did not leave; he stayed on as road manager and pianist and remained at the band's side for the rest of his life. (Songwriting) The first single was Chuck Berry's “Come On,” and the second, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” was a song handed to them by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Jagger and Richards recalled that watching the two finish the song right before their eyes spurred them on. There is also a story that Oldham, convinced the band could not last on other people's songs alone, locked the two in a kitchen to make them write. (Chicago) In 1964 their debut album reached No. 1 on the British chart, and that June, during their first American tour, they recorded at Chess Studios in Chicago. “It's All Over Now,” made in their idols' studio, became their first British No. 1 single. They stood at the very center of the British Invasion (a name casting it as an invasion by Britain), when British bands swept the American charts.
An early hit (No. 3 in Britain) from the days when they still played other people's songs, in which they made a Buddy Holly song their own by recasting it in Bo Diddley's rhythm. The sweat of the London blues clubs still clings to it.
- From the first bar, Richards's acoustic guitar scratches out the Bo Diddley beat (a distinctive rhythmic pattern struck in five clipped strokes). This one rhythm is the engine that drives the whole song.
- The harmonica that cuts roughly in between the vocal lines is Jones's playing. It is a passage that captures the days when he was still at the center of the band's sound.
- The drumming puts its weight on thumping drums rather than cymbals, and maracas shake along with them to create a primitive texture.
- At under two minutes and without a single flashy solo, it drives hard to the end. It is the short, punchy form of their club-band days, just as it was.
III. An age that knows no satisfaction · 1965–1967
(The riff) In May 1965, in a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, Richards captured on a cassette recorder a riff (a short, repeated guitar phrase that drives an entire song) that came to him half asleep. When he played it back in the morning, he wrote in his memoir Life, the short riff was followed by a long stretch of his own snoring. This became “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,” the band's first American No. 1. (Original songs) In 1966, Aftermath was the first album filled entirely with Jagger–Richards originals. As songs and credits gathered around the two, there was less and less room for Jones, who had first brought the band together. (Color) Jones instead broadened the colors of the sound. The sitar on “Paint It Black,” the marimba on “Under My Thumb” and the dulcimer on “Lady Jane” came from his hands. At the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, he went onstage himself to introduce Jimi Hendrix, then still an unfamiliar name in America. (Klein) In 1965 the American businessman Allen Klein took over renegotiations with Decca and secured a large advance. But because of the contract structure he devised, a substantial share of the rights to recordings and songs from before 1971 remains with his company, ABKCO, to this day. (The courtroom) In February 1967 police raided Redlands, Richards's house in Sussex, and at their trial in June, Jagger and Richards were sentenced to prison. The Times criticized the severity of the verdict in an editorial, and the Who, in a show of solidarity, recorded “The Last Time” and “Under My Thumb” and released them as a single. On appeal in July, Richards's conviction was quashed and Jagger's sentence was reduced to a conditional discharge. That same year Jones, too, was charged in a drug case, and he began to come apart in body and mind. (Drift) That year Oldham left, and Their Satanic Majesties Request, a psychedelic album the band produced themselves, received mixed reviews. The single “We Love You,” with Lennon and McCartney singing on the chorus, remained as a kind of souvenir of that chaotic year.
A song in which Jagger spits out, in a sardonic voice, his irritation with endless touring and a consumer society saturated with advertising. Richards's half-asleep riff lifted the band to the top of the world.
- The riff's buzzing sound came from Gibson's fuzz pedal (a device that deliberately distorts the guitar's sound), the Maestro Fuzz-Tone. Richards recalled that he thought of it as a placeholder marking a melody meant for horns, and objected to its being released as it was.
- Watts's drums pound out all four beats with stubborn evenness, and a tambourine lays over them. This unwavering beat holds the riff's tension to the very end.
- In the verses Jagger stays low, almost muttering, then lifts his voice just before the chorus. Follow the change in temperature between verse and chorus.
- It was recorded at RCA Studios in Hollywood. A few days earlier, at Chess Studios in Chicago, they had first tried a slower version with harmonica and then scrapped it.
A song of despair, of wanting to paint everything in the world black after a loss, and the high point of the period when Jones was broadening the band's sound. It reached No. 1 in both Britain and America.
- The coiling melody of the intro is a sitar (an Indian string instrument) played by Jones. Other British bands were using the sitar around the same time, but it was rare for one to lead a song from beginning to end as it does here.
- Watts rolls and pounds the small drums (tom-toms) to build a rhythm that surges forward like a march. Beneath the sitar, follow the drums alone and the song's pulse comes into focus.
- Wyman recalled adding a low rumble by pressing the organ's foot keys (bass pedals) with his fists. Listen for the heavy drone laid down in the low end.
- In the closing section Jagger carries the melody on in a hum instead of words, and the instruments build and build as the song drives toward its end.
IV. Back to the blues · 1968–1972
(Miller) With the arrival of the American producer Jimmy Miller in 1968, the band went back to its roots. A former drummer, Miller prized groove (a rhythmic flow that makes the body move on its own) above all else. “Jumpin' Jack Flash” and Beggars Banquet put acoustic guitar, blues and country at the center, and around this time Richards began using open tunings (retuning the strings so they ring out a chord even when strummed without fretting) in earnest. (The Circus) That December the band filmed the television special The Rock and Roll Circus. The Who, John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Hendrix's drummer Mitch Mitchell took part, but the footage went unreleased and lay buried until 1996. It became Jones's last official performance. (Loss) Jones was in no condition to keep playing, and his conviction record made it hard for him to get an American visa. In June 1969 he left the band, and on July 3 he was found dead in the swimming pool at his Sussex home. The coroner's verdict was death by misadventure. He was twenty-seven. Two days later, at a free concert in London's Hyde Park, Jagger read a poem by Shelley, and twenty-year-old Mick Taylor, formerly of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, made his debut as the new guitarist. (Altamont) In December of the same year, at a free concert held at Altamont, California, at the end of an American tour, the Hells Angels motorcycle club, hired for security, clashed with the crowd, and an 18-year-old concertgoer, Meredith Hunter, was killed. The man who wielded the weapon was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. The scene was preserved in the documentary Gimme Shelter and came to symbolize the end of the 1960s counterculture. (Exile) Having split with Klein in 1970, the band founded its own label and released Sticky Fingers (1971), the first album to bear the tongue-and-lips logo. Soon after, facing an enormous tax problem, they moved to France and recorded the double album Exile on Main St. (1972) in the basement of Nellcôte, a villa in the south of France.
It captures the anxiety of 1969, as the Vietnam War and violence spread, in the voice of someone seeking shelter from a storm. It is remembered bound up with the Altamont tragedy of the same year and the documentary that shares its name.
- In the intro Richards's guitar, steeped in a quavering effect (tremolo), rings out as if approaching from far away, while beneath it lie Nicky Hopkins's piano and the guiro, a Latin percussion instrument played by scraping. The guiro was played by producer Jimmy Miller.
- Gospel singer Merry Clayton's voice was laid over the already recorded track (overdubbing). Late in the song, where she climbs alone into her high register, her voice cracks, and right after it you can faintly hear Jagger exclaiming in the background.
- In the middle of the song, Jagger's harmonica solo is followed by Richards's piercing guitar solo. Listen closely for the moment the two instruments pass the baton.
- Richards recalled that when they finished the last take, the neck of the guitar he had been playing broke off. Perhaps that is why the whole song is taut with the tension of something on the verge of collapse.
An 18-track double album recorded in the basement of a villa in the south of France while the band was in tax exile. Reviews were mixed on release, but over time the critical consensus hardened that it was their finest work.
- The song on the video card is the signature track “Tumbling Dice.” Richards's open-G-tuned guitar sways loosely, and the bass on this song was played not by Wyman but by Mick Taylor.
- Several accounts record that the person drumming in the long repeated section (coda) at the end of “Tumbling Dice” was not Watts but producer Jimmy Miller.
- Because of the damp, echoing space of the Nellcôte basement, the vocals are half buried among the instruments. Rather than trying to make out the lyrics, listen for the way the whole sound surges as a single mass.
- With Bobby Keys's saxophone and Jim Price's trumpet, a gospel-style female chorus, and even country-flavored songs like “Sweet Virginia,” it feels as if a map of the music of the American South has been unfolded.
V. New faces, the same road · 1973–1988
(Changes) In 1973 the ballad “Angie” went to No. 1 in America, but at the end of 1974 Mick Taylor left. The following year Ronnie Wood, guitarist of the Faces, joined the tour and soon became a full member. Richards and Wood loved playing with no division between lead and rhythm, the two guitars crossing back and forth into each other's lines, and Richards called this weaving. (Toronto) In February 1977 Richards was arrested in Toronto, Canada, for drug possession. When he pleaded guilty the following year, the court gave him a suspended sentence and ordered him to play a benefit concert for an organization for the blind, which he did in 1979. (Answer) In 1978, as punk swept through London, the band answered with Some Girls, recorded in Paris. Taking in both the speed of punk and the rhythms of New York's disco clubs, the album sent “Miss You” to No. 1 in America and became their best-selling studio album in the United States. In 1981, with “Start Me Up,” they mounted the highest-grossing American tour of the year. (Crossroads) In the mid-1980s Jagger looked for a path outside the band with the solo album She's the Boss (1985), and that same year he sang the Live Aid charity single “Dancing in the Street” with David Bowie. The distance grew between him and Richards, who believed the band had to come first. Dirty Work came out in 1986 without a tour, and in 1988 Richards released his first solo album, Talk Is Cheap. (Stu) In the midst of all this, in December 1985, Ian Stewart died of a heart attack. He had also played piano on Led Zeppelin's “Rock and Roll,” and though he was not an official member, the band remembered him as the man who had held them together from the very beginning. The following year they staged a memorial concert for him at a small club in London.
In 1978, when punk and disco lived side by side, this song embraced the disco beat and went to No. 1 in America. It flows like the lonely monologue of someone wandering the city late at night, missing someone.
- Wyman's bass drives the song with a disco-style line that bounces a single note between low and high (an octave). Follow this bass alone and you can see how the song moves its body.
- Watts played a disco beat, hitting the big drum (bass drum) on every beat. It is the moment a blues drummer took on the pulse of dance music.
- The wailing harmonica belongs to Sugar Blue, an American player working in Paris. It is a different sound from Jagger's harmonica, sharper and more fluid.
- In the chorus Jagger hums high in falsetto, and midway through he half-speaks instead of singing. Listen to how many different textures one man's voice can take on.
- The saxophone solo in the middle was played by Mel Collins. The 12-inch single, extended for the clubs, runs over eight minutes.
VI. The great tours · 1989–2020
(Reunion) In 1989 Jagger and Richards joined hands again, writing songs together on Barbados in the Caribbean. That year they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Ian Stewart's name was inscribed alongside theirs. The album Steel Wheels and a massive stadium tour followed, and at the Los Angeles shows Guns N' Roses opened. (Wyman) In early 1993 Wyman left the band after thirty years. Having spent half his life in the band, he said, he now wanted to do something else. The gap was filled by bassist Darryl Jones, a veteran of Miles Davis's and Sting's bands, as a hired player, and he has shared the stage with them for more than 30 years without ever becoming an official member. (Touring) From the 1990s on, the band existed more through touring than through albums. Voodoo Lounge (1994), produced by Don Was, won the Grammy for Best Rock Album, and the tour following A Bigger Bang (2005) set a new record as the highest-grossing ever at the time. Their 2006 free concert on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro reportedly drew a crowd of more than a million. At the 2012 shows marking their 50th anniversary, Wyman and Taylor appeared as guests. (Roots) Even so, they never let go of where they began. In 1981 they had shared a stage with Muddy Waters at a small Chicago club, and in 2016 they released Blue & Lonesome, an album of blues covers recorded in three days at a London studio in December 2015. With Eric Clapton on two tracks, the album won the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. In March of that year they also played a massive free concert in Havana, Cuba. (Record) Martin Scorsese captured a 2006 New York concert in the documentary Shine a Light (2008). The cameras, watching them on stage after nearly half a century, showed anew what an aging rock band could be.
VII. After Charlie · 2021–2026
(Watts) On August 24, 2021, Charlie Watts died in London at the age of 80. Stepping back just before an American tour to undergo treatment, he had recommended as his replacement Steve Jordan, the drummer who had played in Richards's solo band. It was a seat that had not changed hands once since 1963. Watts kept his distance from the rock-star life, loved jazz all his life, and stayed with Shirley, whom he married in 1964, until the end. (Carrying on) The remaining members said they could hardly imagine the band without him, yet they did not stop touring. Jordan's drumming honored Watts's relaxed, behind-the-beat feel while being a little firmer. In 2022 a European tour marking their 60th anniversary followed. (Hackney) In October 2023 the band released Hackney Diamonds, their first album of original songs in 18 years. Andrew Watt, a producer in his early thirties, led the work over a short span. It included two tracks Watts had recorded in his lifetime, and on one of them Wyman returned on bass for the first time in some thirty years. Paul McCartney, Elton John, Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder also took part. The album won the Grammy for Best Rock Album in 2025. (Full circle) The album's last track was Muddy Waters's “Rolling Stone Blues.” Recorded by Jagger and Richards alone, it was the very song from which the band had borrowed its name some sixty years earlier. The two who had first struck up a conversation over blues records at Dartford railway station had come back to the same music. (Now) In 2024 the band toured North American stadiums. As of 2026 they carry on, never having announced a breakup.
Their first album of original songs in 18 years, released after losing Watts. The last recordings of a departed bandmate, the return of a former one, and musicians of several generations all come together.
- The song on the video card is “Angry,” the opening track and the album's signature song. Richards's riff and Steve Jordan's drums lock tightly together, and Andrew Watt's production sounds far clearer and louder than the band did in the 1970s.
- On “Bite My Head Off,” Paul McCartney played a rough, mangled bass through fuzz. Listen for the moments when the bass leaps to the front of a song as fast as punk.
- “Live by the Sword” features Watts's drums, Wyman's bass and Elton John's piano. It is the moment the original rhythm section came together on one recording for the last time.
- On “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” with Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder, the high point is the long, gospel-like build of the second half.
- The final track, “Rolling Stone Blues,” is a recording of just two: Jagger's voice and harmonica, and Richards's acoustic guitar. It is a closing word that returns to the source of the band's name.
Lesser-known stories
When the last track of the 1986 album Dirty Work ends, some thirty seconds of piano not on the track list drift out. It is a recording of Ian Stewart, who had died a few months earlier, playing the blues “Key to the Highway.” It was the band's quiet farewell to a man who had stood beside them for more than twenty years though left out of the official lineup, but because it is uncredited, many people still pass it by without knowing. In 1968 Brian Jones traveled to Joujouka, a mountain village in Morocco, and recorded its musicians. The recording came out as an album on the band's label in 1971, after his death, and is counted among the early cases of a Western rock musician personally documenting and introducing non-Western traditional music. Overshadowed by the stories surrounding his death, this curiosity of his as a musician has received comparatively little attention. The mobile recording truck the band built in the late 1960s was not theirs alone. Led Zeppelin borrowed it to record their fourth album at Headley Grange, a country house, and it was also used for recordings by Deep Purple and Bob Marley. The truck is now preserved at the National Music Centre in Calgary, Canada. Charlie Watts said in interviews that he drew every hotel room he stayed in on tour, one by one. As a young man he even wrote and illustrated a picture book dedicated to Charlie Parker, published in 1964. These sides of a man who said little off stage became widely known only after he was gone.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Riff
(In rock) A short guitar or bass phrase repeated again and again from the beginning of a song to the end. Because it lodges in the ear before the vocal does and serves as the song's face, you can tell “Satisfaction” from its first few notes. It is like the stands at a ballgame, where a few claps of a rhythm are enough for everyone to recognize the cheer and join in. Short, repeated and quick to pick up: that is the power of a riff.
Rhythm and blues
(Word origin) A direct rendering of the English rhythm and blues, meaning blues with a strong rhythm. The American music magazine Billboard began using it in 1949 to replace race records, the discriminatory name that had been attached to its chart for Black music. (In rock) Danceable music created in the 1940s and 1950s by Black American musicians who added a strong beat and electric instruments to the blues. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley are its leading figures, and the Rolling Stones at first introduced themselves as a band that played this kind of music. You could compare it to taking the plain stew Grandma used to make (the blues) and adding hot spices and high heat (a strong beat) to suit younger tastes. Today R&B more often means the smooth pop music of the 1990s onward, so the name may be the same, but the sound is quite different.
Fuzz
(Word origin) The English word fuzz means lint or down. The name comes from the way a clean guitar tone turns scratchy, as if it had grown fuzz. (In rock) A device (the fuzz pedal) that deliberately distorts a guitar's electrical signal to produce a thick, sizzling sound, or the sound itself. After “Satisfaction” became a huge hit in 1965, demand for the device soared. If you are talking normally and then half-cover your mouth with your palm, your voice comes out smeared and rough; think of it as doing that to the sound of a guitar.
Open tuning
(Word origin) Open means just that, open. The name comes from the fact that strumming all the strings while they are open, with none pressed down by the left hand, already sounds a chord. (In rock) A way of tuning the guitar's six strings to pitches different from the usual ones. Richards played in open G tuning with the lowest string removed altogether, on five strings, and the riffs of “Brown Sugar” and “Start Me Up” came from it. Because pressing all the strings with a single finger still makes a chord, a simple movement produces a full sound. It is like changing the key of the backing track at karaoke to fit your voice beforehand: tuning the instrument to suit the song before you play.
British Invasion
(Word origin) British Invasion means just that, an invasion from Britain. When the Beatles landed in America in 1964 and set off a frenzy, the phrase the American press used became the name. (In rock) The phenomenon of British bands such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who sweeping the American charts for several years from 1964. Interestingly, the roots of the music these bands played lay in Black American music, so American music crossed the ocean and came back in new clothes. It is like a game invented in our class spreading to the class next door, where the kids change the rules to make it more fun, and then bring it back into fashion in our class.
Overdubbing
(Word origin) A compound of over (on top) and dub (to lay sound onto). It means laying one more layer of sound over what has already been recorded. (In rock) The practice of a band first recording the basic performance and then, while listening to that recording, separately adding other instruments or voices. Merry Clayton's vocal on “Gimme Shelter” was also laid over the already-recorded track afterward. It is like art class, where you finish the sketch and the first coat of color, then, once the paint dries, add one layer of color after another to complete the picture. (Elsewhere) In Korean, dubbing usually refers to replacing the dialogue of foreign films or cartoons with Korean voices.
Falsetto
(Word origin) Falsetto comes from the Italian falso ('false'), and the Sino-Korean word gaseong (假聲) likewise means 'false (假) voice (聲)'. It means a voice other than one's ordinary, true voice. (In rock) A vocal technique in which a male singer lets his vocal cords vibrate lightly to produce notes far above his normal range, thin and soft. The high humming Jagger does in the chorus of “Miss You” is an example. Think of the sound you make when you imitate a baby or a cartoon character in front of friends, relaxing your throat and going high.