Rolling Stones: are they really the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band?

The Beatles were more creative, the Velvet Underground more radical. But the mythic power of the Rolling
Stones trumps them all, says Neil McCormick.



By Neil McCormick
8:00AM GMT 24 Nov 2012


On July 5 1969, the Rolling Stones were about to take to the
stage on a sunny day in Hyde Park, for a free concert in front
of a quarter of a million fans. It was just two days after the
death of founding member Brian Jones, and new guitarist
Mick Taylor was making his live debut. Stage manager Sam
Cutler ambled up to a microphone and declared, to enthusiastic
roars: “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome the Greatest Rock
’n’ Roll Band in the World!” It was the first time that legendary
phrase had been uttered in public, but it wouldn’t be the last.



Cutler repeated the introduction nightly throughout
the US 1969 tour, much to the discomfort of Mick
Jagger. “It’s just a stupid epithet,” was his opinion.
“It just seems too Barnum & Bailey to me, like it’s
some sort of circus act.” “Mick got upset,” according
to Cutler. “He said, 'Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s
over the top.’ I said, well, either you are or you’re
not, right?’”

Cutler has always claimed he was doing it to provoke the Stones. “At the beginning, the band was rusty. In a way, the slogan just made them work harder. They had to play. And they did.” It was the Stones who first defined what it means to be a rock band in a modern sense, a gang with a shared world view and sense of purpose encapsulated in hard-rocking electric guitar music.

Before them, in the rock ’n’ roll boom of the Fifties, pop cults were built around solo performers with backing groups, who, for all the inherent rebelliousness of the medium, were carrying on showbusiness traditions.

The Stones had a frontman who didn’t play an instrument yet wasn’t the band leader, he was part of a whole experience that owed just as much to the dirty, resonant riffs of guitarist Keith Richards and the swinging rhythm of drummer Charlie Watts. Here was a band determined on making music that moved them first and the audience second.

Shifting over time from lusty blues stompers to dark pop idols to rip-roaring roots groovers to the world’s first stadium-scale entertainers, the Rolling Stones proved a slippery bunch. I think Philip Norman is right when he suggests, in his recent biography of Jagger, that the essence of their appeal was a kind of narcissistic self-absorption that made them much more elusive and attractive than more self-consciously purposeful bands. “The Stones were about nothing but being the Stones,” claims Norman.

The Stones created the template, but who are the serious challengers for the title of world’s greatest? In terms of creativity, invention, art, sales and cultural impact, the Beatles trump the Stones every time, yet they were never purely and definitively a rock ’n’ roll band (at least not in the Brian Epstein-managed version that conquered the world). And the Beatles broke up while the Stones rolled on, remaining at the centre of things for two decades as recording artists and three more as one of the world’s most popular live attractions.

Longevity is surely a factor that sees off the claim of such tragically short-lived sensations as the Doors and Nirvana, groups who briefly demonstrated how deep rock could go. Global popularity is another factor that has given the Stones lasting purchase, a place in the mainstream far greater than that enjoyed by such radical and influential bands as the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the Sex Pistols, the Clash or even cultish jammers the Grateful Dead.

And there are other less tangible factors. There are American stadium bands who have maintained extraordinary popularity, but surely no one would consider such slick and superficial showbands as Aerosmith, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Bon Jovi as representing anything other than a good night’s entertainment?

If we overlook the claims of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band (on the grounds that Springsteen is essentially a solo artist), there are only four other bands who could realistically lay claim to the title of all-time greatest: the Who (at least until the death of Keith Moon in 1978), Led Zeppelin (1968-80) and U2, all of whom would have their supporters and detractors. Zeppelin in particular had an instrumental ability, creative range and sheer live force that represents some kind of rock ’n’ roll peak. And U2 have added a post-punk conviction and hi-tech drama that has been a huge influence on more recent stadium bands such as Coldplay and Muse.

Yet the Rolling Stones are more embedded in rock than any other band: the very idea of this ensemble of reprehensible survivors resonates at an almost mythic level. The phrase “World’s Greatest” has become a kind of trademark, as immediately identifiable with the Stones as their lascivious lips logo. Keith Richards has graciously suggested the title should be shared around: “That’s one of the great things about rock ’n’ roll – every night there’s a different 'world’s greatest band’, because one night somebody has an off gig, and some other sh-- band has a great gig.”

Yet it is surely telling that, on Sunday night in the O2, that band could be the Stones once again, 50 years since they first got together, conjuring up a magic that they themselves find hard to define.
“Everyone talks about rock these days,” Richards has famously pointed out. “They forget about the roll.” Maybe that is the Stones’ secret.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rolling-stones/9694545/Rolling-Stones-a...

Apples & oranges.

It's all about what you prefer.  

"the very idea of this ensemble of reprehensible survivors resonates at an almost mythic level" - nicely done.

Not a bad article.  He gets what we know is the truth.

I'm on the run, I hear the hounds, my luck is up, my chips are down............

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vQEoAT49cE&feature=related

Anyone who says When KISS first emerged in the mid '70s, they also were a dangerous band that scared the wits out of parents, you got to be kidding!!?? the parents were buying their kids Kiss dolls/Lunchboxes, etc,  a Dangerous band? if you call a Halloween Act a dangerous band.
This guy is just jealous about The Stones still going, did Jerry Lee Lewis/Chuck Berry/Little Richard hang up their shoes? their still around performing.

I can think of nothing more ignorant than lebeling the Velvet Undersgound a 'footnote'....

" based on the reviews of last night's show.....can we consider this thread closed ? "


Concur . BEST STONES YET !!!!!!!!

Have you read Gazza's review ?  --- these cats are on FIRE !!!!!

JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJACKY

Are they really the world’s greatest r&r band?

Without a doubt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Rolling Stones: the greatest rock band in the world? That's a bit rich
November 28, 2012

by Mick Brown

Ticket prices are enough to make a grown man cry but isn't it time for these cadavers to give it a rest now? asks Mick Brown.



ON SUNDAY night, while the Rolling Stones were performing for 20,000 people at the O2 in London - the first of five concerts they will be playing in London and New York to mark their 50th anniversary - one of their early heroes was also making an appearance a few miles across town.

Bobby Womack is the veteran soul singer who wrote, and with his group the Valentinos recorded, the original version of It's All Over Now, which gave the Stones their first number one hit in Britain in 1964.

The Rolling Stones, who started out as a rhythm and blues covers band, borrowing heavily from black artists such as Womack (a debt which, to their credit, they have always warmly acknowledged), are now among the wealthiest entertainers in the world, a thriving corporation, steered by a CEO - Mick Jagger - who has demonstrated a mixture of shrewdness and business acumen that makes him the peer of any more straitlaced captain of industry.

The Stones are reportedly being paid more than £15 million ($A23 million) for their five shows. Ticket prices for the London performances range from £95 to £375, with a ''VIP hospitality'' ticket priced at £950, and no concessions for the pensioners who are the group's most devoted audience.

Advertisement We can put aside Jagger's blithe explanations that when it comes to ticket prices the group are merely hapless victims of market forces, or Ronnie Wood's shrugging dismissal that ''we've got to make something''. The Stones long ago set the benchmark for shameless cynicism when it comes to exploiting ''the brand''. Among the luxury items on offer when the box-set of Exile On Main Street was released two years ago was a limited-edition box of three lithographs, ''signed individually by Mick, Keith or Charlie'', priced at £1999.99. Note, that's ''or'', not ''and''.

It is not only the price of the tickets, but the online lottery by which they have been dispersed that leads older - and poorer - fans to feel hard done by. In an earlier age, the devoted fan camping outside the theatre on the night before the show would have seen his loyalty rewarded with a ticket. Now, devotion requires very deep pockets, faster broadband speeds and, ideally, useful corporate connections.

This tour has been accompanied by a marketing campaign - a veritable deluge of radio and television appearances, photographic exhibitions and documentaries - that has pitched the Stones' appearances as akin to the Second Coming. (Jagger is much too canny to have spelt out that these could be their last-ever appearances, although the feeling that they might be can't have hindered sales.) ''The greatest rock and roll band in the world'' has become one of the greatest advertising slogans of all time.

It is an odd paradox that while the Stones have not made an album worth listening to since Tattoo You in 1981, they are bigger business now than they ever were - the prime example of sixties and seventies rock music as heritage industry. The Stones performing their greatest hits, Brian Wilson performing Pet Sounds, Van Morrison performing Astral Weeks - these are rock music's equivalent of the blockbuster Jackson Pollock or David Hockney retrospective.

Some manage this trick better than others. It is a tired and familiar trope to point out the irony of old rockers, who can barely make it to the stage unaided, singing the anthems of their rebellious youth: the Who, for example, singing My Generation at the Olympics closing ceremony (or to be more precise, half the Who, the rhythm half having sadly fulfilled the song's prophecy). Paul McCartney has become a national institution, wheeled out at state occasions to sing the creaking Hey Jude - the postwar generation's We'll Meet Again - with ever-diminishing effect. Surely it's time to give it a rest?

The counter-argument is equally familiar. No one demands that the veteran bluesman B. B. King should hang up his guitar because he has reached a certain age. On the contrary, while the youthful fire may have gone out of his playing, there is still pleasure to be derived from a more relaxed, seasoned approach to his repertoire; and the blues are the blues, at whatever age you may be singing and playing them.

Both Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen write and perform songs that reflect the people they have become, as much as the people they once were, and become peculiarly timeless.

But the Stones seem to be a special case, subject to the peculiar curse that no matter how much their artistry may hold up - and their performance was, by all accounts, superb - their music is essentially and inescapably defined by the times in which it was made.

To listen to these songs is to immerse oneself in a legend of rock music as a vehicle of danger and subversion. Gimme Shelter and Sympathy for the Devil are potent reminders of our younger, more idealistic, more reprobate selves, when ''bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!'' - or in the Rolling Stones' case, with their delicious whiff of brimstone and debauchery, flirting dangerously with the prospect of going happily to hell. It's the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected not in tranquillity, but in a noisy attempt to hold on to the last, vanishing spectre of youth.

The songs still sound marvellous, of course, but it is the disjunction between the group who first performed them and the group who perform them now that seems so peculiar and incongruous.

In their prime the Stones were glamorous, dangerous and romantic; a different species altogether from the cadavers who emerged, as if from creaking coffins, on to the O2 stage. Jagger is, as they say, marvellous for his age but nobody would describe him as ''a soul survivor'' - unless one counts surviving the inconvenience of tax exile, two expensive divorces and, ''dozens'' of paternity suits.

It was always said of Jagger that his ambitions were to mingle with the aristocracy. He achieved that and more; in a sense, the Stones became the aristocracy, exhibiting some of the more disagreeable characteristics of their caste, with all the air of entitlement and the barely concealed disdain for the paying punter.

Another song comes to mind. ''Let's drink to the hard-working people/Let's drink to the lowly of birth/Raise your glass to the good and the evil/Let's drink to the salt of the earth.''

The song is Salt of the Earth by … the Rolling Stones. It was not a song they found time to play at the O2. They did, however, perform It's All Over Now. Surely now, it's really time it was.

Mick Brown writes on cultural issues for The Telegraph, London.



Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-rolling-stones-t...

Galveston man is big fan of Rolling Stones

By LAURA ELDER, Galveston County Daily News

Published 9:15 a.m., Wednesday, November 28, 2012



GALVESTON, Texas (AP) — Brian Jarvis first heard of The Rolling Stones in 1962.

His father, who was in the U.S. Air Force, was stationed in Hawaii, and Jarvis, then 12, was hanging with a surfer crowd. He and friends were tuned into KPOI Radio, which usually played The Beach Boys, rock and roll duo Jan and Dean or The Beatles.

The Rolling Stones, formed in 1962 by blues purist Brian Jones, was edgy, the group's songs transcending the naiveté and innocence that initially defined The Beatles.

When Jarvis heard The Rolling Stones singing the American blues on KPOI, it was love at first riff.


"They just stood right out; I'd never heard anything like it before" Jarvis said. "They were counterculture, bad boys. The Beatles were singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand;" the Stones were singing 'I Just Want to Make Love to You.'"

Jarvis, an island resident who still catches waves and owns C-Sick Surfing, has followed the band's 50-year career, amassing one of the most extensive collections of The Rolling Stones memorabilia in the Houston area, which he values at about $100,000.

Early this month, Jarvis laid out his collection, lending a rock-and-roll museum air to his home.

The collection, which takes several rooms to display, includes 160 albums from The Rolling Stones, some original releases and many in mint or near mint condition. His collection includes imports from England, Japan and Russia, along with bootlegs of concerts and off-labels. He owns hundreds of posters, including those promoting concerts or record releases and also venue posters, which are more rare.

Then there are newspaper rack inserts promoting concerts, which are even harder to find. He also owns games, puzzles, pins, buttons, calendars, key rings, bumper stickers, guides, lithographs, books, magazines with Mick Jagger or Keith Richards on the cover, schedules and contacts the band's roadies used while on tour. He also has a roadie jacket.

There's a story behind almost everything produced by or for the Stones, and Jarvis is happy to tell it.

For instance, he owns various versions of what was then a scandalous album cover for "Sticky Fingers," released in April 1971 and containing "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses." Conceived by Andy Warhol and designed by Craig Braun, the cover featured a close-up of a jeans-clad male crotch. The cover of the original vinyl release featured a working zipper that opened to reveal cotton briefs.

Censors in Spain banned the provocative cover, which was replaced with an image of female fingers emerging from an opened can of molasses. That Spanish album cover is worth about $150, Jarvis said. Jarvis owns both versions of the album and a poster of the macabre finger and molasses image.

Recently, he was going through his collection and rediscovered an unopened, first studio album by The Rolling Stones, released in the United Kingdom in 1964 on the Decca label, titled "The Rolling Stones," which Jarvis estimates is worth about $1,500.

Collectors like Jarvis know that few things make values rise better than deaths, band breakups or cancellations. Jarvis owns a poster promoting The Rolling Stones' canceled 1973 concerts at the Cardiff and Pembroke Castles. The colorful poster, featuring a dragon whose mouth is the image of the Stones' famous lips and tongue logo, was canceled because locals feared an outbreak of "violence and raucous behavior," according to reports.

His love of music goes beyond the Stones. He owns 1,500 other albums, including by Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and The Beatles, which he's selling at downtown island shop Past Perfect.

Jarvis said he doesn't have a favorite item in his Stones collection. It's the sum of the parts that make his collection so valuable. Sold off alone, the items wouldn't fetch as much, he said. And if the price were right, Jarvis would be willing to sell, especially if it would help him finance a surfing camp venture he'd offer out of state during the winter months.

But Jarvis does have a favorite song by The Rolling Stones — "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

His least favorite? "Angie."

What would be the ultimate prize for such a collector of The Rolling Stones memorabilia?

To meet the band's charismatic frontman Jagger, Jarvis said.

"I would like to talk to him," Jarvis said. "What man my age didn't want to be the next member of The Rolling Stones?"



Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/texas/article/Galveston-man-is-big-fan-of-Rolling-...