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Rolling Stones at 50: The world's greatest rock brand turns 50
The Rolling Stones have gone from dedicated blues purists to a glorified, global showband. How have they stayed on top for so long, asks Neil McCormick .
By Neil McCormick
7:00AM BST 12 Jul 2012
Fifty years ago today, in a cramped, sweaty basement club in London, something was brewing that would change the face of popular music. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones (as they were billed) played their first gig at the Marquee club, filling in for Alexis Korner's blues band, who had been booked for a BBC session. An audience of about 100 beatniks and hipsters watched a young, scruffy, long-haired six-piece charge through an adrenaline and alcohol-fuelled 50-minute set of American Rhythm and Blues, featuring songs such as Robert Johnson's Dust My Broom and Muddy Waters Got My Mojo Working.
Nerves, youth, excitement and perhaps some other mysterious quality that was in the ether, a spirit of revolt against constriction and conformity, led the band to speed up as the night went on, concluding with a breakneck version of Down The Road Apiece and a blast of Elmore James's Happy Home. A Melody Maker review questioned their "suspect tuning and internal balance" but the audience, initially reserved, gave them a warm reception.
Guitarist Keith Richards claims he knew right away he had found his calling. "There's a certain moment when you realise you've just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you," he recalled in his autobiography, Life. "You know you've been somewhere most people will never get."
Perhaps more than any other iconic band, the Rolling Stones are defined by their live identity, billing themselves as "The World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band". What, I wonder, would be recognisable about this legendary institution from that very first performance? Not the musical style. The young Stones were strictly blues, and Jagger recalls being concerned lest people mistook them for "a rock 'n' roll outfit". And not the personnel. The drummer for the first gig was Mick Avory, who later joined the Kinks.
Bassist Dick Taylor went on to form The Pretty Things. Pianist Stewart was deemed (by manager Andrew Loog Oldham) too ugly to become a band member, though he played with them until his death in 1985. Guitarist Brian Jones, originally one of the driving creative forces, became befuddled with drugs and died shortly after being expelled from the band in 1969. Yet the crux of the Stones legend was certainly in place, the twin talents of Dartford school mates Jagger and Richards.
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Both were 18 years old and still living at home, but evidence suggests Richards's bad boy image and obsessive musicality were already apparent.
Biographer Christopher Sandford reports that it was the acne-faced guitarist who called out each number, spurring on the drummer by hammering his leg up and down and yelling "---- you! Faster!" As for Jagger, he was already getting a reputation as a front man from stints with Alexis Korner, hence his top billing. Even in early footage, it is striking how he holds the centre with a very physical, primal, sexual charisma, moving with the spirit of a dancer, even in confined spaces. Jagger may not have the loveliest voice but that, in its way, was bold and fresh; a raw, snarling, yelping and croaking sound suited to the sleazy drama of their dense, rhythmic drive, rising to a soulful, tender falsetto when the band take it down and dirty.
You would have seen something else the first time the Rolling Stones took the stage: a look perfectly in tune with the times. Dressed in cords, sweaters and scruffy jackets, hair unkempt, they rejected the buttoned-up uniforms that branded bands as entertainers. Instead, they looked like their audience: the hippest kids of swinging London, letting it all hang out. Charlie Watts was in the audience for the first show and was struck by what he saw. "This lot crossed the barrier," he recalled. "They actually looked like rock stars."
Still, the Stones in 1962 weren't half the band they would become. Watts took them to another level when he joined in 1963, bringing a jazz swing to the band that would free them from strict, hard tempos. As Richards is fond of saying of his favourite drummer, "A lot of people can rock, but they forget about the roll." Not to underestimate the contribution of bassist Bill Wyman (recruited before Watts), Keith and Charlie have always been the rhythm section of the Stones. Richards virtually invented a guitar style that is half riffing, half lead, with open tunings that set up mantras and drones pulsing all the way through. Between them, they cooked up a sophisticated form of R' n 'B that feels loose, shaggy and alive, punctuated by off beats filtered in from country music, another of Richards's great loves.
Aside from a short-lived period of big productions in the Sixties, when Jagger and Richards were consciously competing with Lennon and McCartney to write genre-defining pop songs, the best Stones records always sound live. Their real glory period is the early Seventies, when Mick Taylor joined on fluid, silvery lead guitar that spurred Richards into concocting long, hypnotic grooves with mesmerising twists and turns. To watch footage of the Stones playing Happy at Madison Square Garden in 1972 is to witness the sheer electric excitement of a band liberated from themselves, utterly lost in the music.
Ironically, perhaps, it was this breakthrough that gave them the platform to move into stadiums, where the world's greatest rock band have become the world's biggest rock brand. It has ensured continuing wealth and status, but these venues are no places for subtle musical interplay while Jagger has scaled up his showmanship to preposterous levels.
When I first saw them with 120,000 other fans at an outdoor show in Ireland in 1982, the thing that struck me most was the distance Jagger covered sprinting from one side of the enormous stage to the other, dressed more like an athlete than a counter-culture icon. Ronnie Wood, who joined in 1975, fits the image of the band, but isn't half the player Taylor was, and all the extra musicians, horns, keys and backing vocals on stage, only clutter up the groove.
The energy that drives a contemporary Rolling Stones gig comes from the audience revelling in a myth, singing along with classic songs that defined rock's rebellious sense of itself. They still don't wear uniforms, but the 21st-century Stones have become a kind of glorified showband. I wonder what the young blues purists of the Marquee club would make of it all?
Neil McCormick »
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