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Official website for the greatest Rock and Roll band of all time. Featuring tour dates, stories, interviews, pictures, exclusive merch and more.
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The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in London in 1962. Active across seven decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the rock era. In the early 1960s, the band pioneered the gritty, rhythmically driven sound that came to define hard rock.
- 1962–present
- London, England
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- Overview
- Formation and early music
- First original hits: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Get off My Cloud”
The Rolling Stones are a British rock group, formed in 1962, that drew on Chicago blues stylings to create a unique vision of the dark side of post-1960s counterculture. The original members were Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts. Later members were Mick Taylor, Ron Wood, and Darryl Jones.
When did the Rolling Stones break up?
The Rolling Stones disbanded briefly in the late 1980s after a public spat between singer Mick Jagger and musician Keith Richards. The band, however, reconvened in 1989 for its Steel Wheels album and tour.
When did the Rolling Stones release their album Sticky Fingers?
The Rolling Stones' studio album Sticky Fingers was released in 1971.
Have the Rolling Stones won any Grammys?
Formed in London as an alliance between Jagger, Richards, and multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones along with Watts and bassist Wyman, the Stones began as a grubby conclave of students and bohemians playing a then esoteric music based on Chicago blues in pubs and clubs in and around West London. Their potential for mass-market success seemed negligible at first, but by 1965 they were second only to the Beatles in the collective affection of teenage Britain. However, whereas the Beatles of the mid-1960s had longish hair, wore matching suits, and appeared utterly charming, the Stones had considerably longer hair, all dressed differently, and seemed thoroughly intimidating. As the Beatles grew ever more respectable and reassuring, the Stones became correspondingly more rebellious and threatening. The Stones—specifically Jagger, Richards, and Jones—were subjected to intense police and press harassment for drug use and all-purpose degeneracy, whereas the Beatles, who were in private life no less fond of marijuana, sex, and alcohol, were welcomed at Buckingham Palace and made Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by the queen.
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(A Music) Man’s Best Friend
The Stones’ early repertoire consisted primarily of recycled gems from the catalogs of the blues and rock-and-roll titans of the 1950s: their first five singles and the bulk of their first two albums were composed by others. The turning point was reached when, spurred on by the example of the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Jagger and Richards began composing their own songs, which not only ensured the long-term viability of the band but also served to place the Jagger-Richards team firmly in creative control of the group. Jones had been their prime motivating force in their early days, and he was the band’s most gifted instrumentalist as well as its prettiest face, but he had little talent for composition and became increasingly marginalized. His textural wizardry dominated their first all-original album, Aftermath (1966), which featured him on marimba, dulcimer, sitar, and assorted keyboards as well as on his customary guitar and harmonica. Thereafter, however, he declined in both creativity and influence, becoming a depressive, drug-sodden liability eventually fired by the band mere weeks before his death.
The Jagger-Richards songwriting team created its first bona fide classic, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” in 1965 and enjoyed a string of innovative hit singles well into 1966, including “Paint It Black,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby,” and “Lady Jane,” but the era of art-pop and psychedelia, which coincided with the Beatles’ creative peak, represented a corresponding trough for the Stones. The fashions of the era of whimsy and flower power did not suit their essentially dark and disruptive energies, and their psychedelic album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), with its accompanying single “We Love You,” was a comparatively feeble riposte to the Beatles’ all-conquering Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and contributed little beyond its title to their legend. Furthermore, they were hampered by seemingly spending as much time in court and jail as they did in the studio or on tour. However, as the mood of the time darkened, the Stones hit a new stride in 1968 with the epochal single “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which reconnected them to their blues-rock roots, and the album Beggars Banquet. Replacing Jones with the virtuosic but self-effacing guitarist Mick Taylor, they returned to the road in 1969, almost instantly becoming rock’s premier touring attraction.
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By the end of 1970 the Beatles had broken up, Jimi Hendrix was dead, and Led Zeppelin had barely appeared on the horizon. Though Led Zeppelin eventually outsold the Stones by five albums to one, no group could challenge their central position in the rock pantheon. Moreover, the death of Brian Jones combined with Taylor’s lack of onstage presence elevated public perception of Richards’s status from that of Jagger’s right-hand man to effective coleader of the band.
- Charles Shaar Murray
Nov 21, 2023 · The Rolling Stones are hitting stadiums across North America in 2024 to celebrate the release of their new album, Hackney Diamonds.The 16-city tour (which includes a headlining slot at Jazz Fest ...
Oct 30, 2023 · Arrest of the Rolling Stones. The July 5, 1975, lunch stop and subsequent arrest of Rolling Stones guitarists Ron Wood and Keith Richards in Fordyce (Dallas County) is fabled in the town, and the incident became a footnote in the police record of the English rock and roll band. The quintet had cultivated an outlaw image since its early 1960s ...
6 days ago · Songwriters Hall of Fame - Mick Jagger (Apr. 19, 2024) Mick Jagger (born July 26, 1943, Dartford, Kent, England) British musician best known as the flamboyant lead singer of the Rolling Stones, an English rock band, for which he cowrote the majority of songs. He has also released a number of solo albums.
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in London in 1962, their first stable line-up included vocalist Mick Jagger, guitarist and vocalist Keith Richards, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts. The band currently consists of Jagger and Richards alongside guitarist Ronnie Wood (since 1975 ...
