What makes the rolling stones great

But the phrase still seemed overblown, inappropriate. Okay, what makes them the greatest? It could only happen in your neighborhood bar or at a Rolling Stones concert. Everything Keith Richards plays, from the simplest handful of notes to the most monolithic riff, pushes the music forward. Watts brings his ear for jazz to the Stones; like a first-class jazz drummer, he provides lift without ever overplaying.

Sure, there are other factors. At the Fox, the Stones rocked so hard, they jerked you up out of your seat and kept you dancing for two hours, and made you like it. You could tell it was going to be one of those nights the minute Jagger started singing, because he was singing — finding new notes, rearranging the melody to suit the mood of the moment, hitting those notes right on the head and enunciating, in case you missed the words the first few hundred times around.

He was all over the stage, telegraphing every rhythmic nuance with expressive body English, goading Wood into one spectacular solo after another, encouraging Watts and Wyman to pour it on and, yes, giving Jagger a run for his money.

His hand is evident in several new arrangements, too. In Atlanta, Richards and Wood unveiled a lovely, chiming, two-guitar break that sounded like pure Stax-Volt soul, with Keith chopping like the Memphis Horns and Ronnie nailing down sharp, edgy lead lines like Steve Cropper. The new break somehow made the rest of the tune coalesce around it.

But nobody minded. In fact, everyone onstage was grinning from ear to ear. He turned to Watts and began jerking in time to the rhythm. Charlie sat bolt upright again, the music shifted gears, and Keith took a stunning solo. The band fought the inevitable tendency to play oldies faster and faster by taking it at a deliberately slow clip, and Jagger turned in a vocal that was the essence of soulful understatement.

He can draw upon Burroughs: "You're the great grey man whose daughter licks policemen's buttons clean. His best writing in my opinion is as rhythmic, jagged, stripped down, dirty and vibrant as the Stones sound and complements the music perfectly: "Drums beating.

Cold English blood runs hot. Lady of the house wondrin' where it's gonna stop" 'Brown Sugar'. He even throws elements of mythic autobiography into the pot: "I was raised by a toothless bearded hag. I was schooled with a strap across my back" Jumpin' Jack Flash. Sheer percussive poetry. Sadly Mick's lyrical ambition seemed to desert him sometime around the mid seventies.

He can still write perfectly well but on a sort of autopilot as if he is telling us it's only rock 'n' roll over and over. Exotic, beautiful, bright, cosmopolitan, controversial, well-read, free-thinking women. Marianne advocated everyone taking acid on Personal Choice. She was the 'nude girl in fur rug found in raid on Stones party'. She was personally condemned by the Pope. Anita was considered "dangerous" as well as beautiful: Many believed her to be a witch.

Of course this was the early days. Since the seventies the women of choice seem to have been mostly supermodels.

Follow us. Terms Privacy Policy. Part of HuffPost Entertainment. All rights reserved. The Stones proving they still have it on the London stage this week Later this week Clive Crump. The exhilarating drumming of Charlie Watts, the powerful guitar work of Keith Richards and the singing and showmanship of Mick Jagger helped make them one of the most important bands in the history of music — one still going strong decades later.

Listen to the best Rolling Stones 60s songs. Jagger said that the first album he ever bought was Muddy Waters At Newport. The Stones broke new ground with their album covers in other ways. The band were helped initially by their manager Andrew Loog Oldham , who guided them away from the more strait-laced appearance of 50s pop stars towards a shaggier, bad-boy image that stuck. He captured them dressed in outlandish clothes that blended Swinging 60s London with Dickensian rascals.

The Stones seemed more edgy and rebellious than established stars such as Cliff Richard or Adam Faith. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore, the officer in charge, found Jagger and his then-girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, on a couch. He left France for London after the Paris riots of May to make a film about revolution and redemption. The result was Sympathy For The Devil , with the band, then working on the album Beggars Banquet , cast in the role of agents of anarchy.