When the Rolling Stones began playing gigs around London in 1962, the notion that a rock & roll band would last five years, let alone fifty, was an absurdity.

“I didn’t expect to last until fifty myself, let alone with the Stones,” Keith Richards says with a laugh. “It’s incredible, really. In that sense we’re still living on borrowed time.”

You have to put yourself back into that time,” Mick Jagger says about those early days when he and Keith and guitarist Brian Jones roomed together and were hustling gigs wherever they could find one. “Popular music wasn’t talked about on any kind of intellectual level. There was no such 'popular culture.’ None of those things existed.”

“But suddenly popular music became bigger than it had ever been before. It became an important, perhaps the most important, art form of the period, after not at all being regarded as an art form before.”
Mick Jagger

“I mean, there was no sort of master plan. We were flying by the seat of our pants. That is what amazes me, that the whole thing was improvised. We’ve been an amazingly resilient bunch of lads, that’s all I say. We’ve been part of everything that’s happened, and we’re an important part, I suppose. If you say I’m great, thank you very much, but I know what I am. I could be better, man, you know?”
Keith Richards

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