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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 frontman, 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,
The Kinks, and
The 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 30 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.
Source:
All
Music Guide
Concert photography: © Helge Øverås. Must not be used without permission.
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