The Gospel According to the Rolling Stones
"It's only rock and roll but I like it" — and in that understatement lives the whole philosophy.
They began in a South London flat, bound together by an obsession with American blues. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Charlie Watts — they were not polished; they were hungry. They took the sacred music of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and Chuck Berry and they made it dangerous again for a generation of suburban English kids who had no business knowing about the Delta.
What followed was not a career. It was a religion. Sixty years of proof that rock and roll is not a genre but a posture toward the world — one of beautiful, productive, sometimes catastrophic refusal. Refusal to settle, to soften, to stop.
This is the gospel according to the Stones. Not sanitized. Not curated. The whole bloody truth of the greatest rock and roll band the world has ever seen.
Every scripture has its verses. These are the essential texts — the albums that form the irreducible Stones.
"I know it's only rock 'n' roll but I like it — like it — yes I do"
Jagger / Richards, 1974 — the most honest lyric in the history of popular music
Five men who, at various points, collectively were the most electrifying rock and roll band alive.
What the prophets spoke, so that we might understand.
"Rock and roll is not just music. It's a way of life — or at least it should be. It should affect everything: the way you walk, talk, dress, and think."
"Anything worth doing is worth overdoing."
"I don't think about music when I'm playing. I think about sex."
"I never had any problems with drugs — only with policemen."
"Charlie Watts has been playing to the Rolling Stones for 50 years. For 35 of those years he probably thought we were a jazz band."
"The Stones — they're like a religion. Once you get in deep enough, there's no way out."
The key moments in sixty years of glory, disaster, and resurrection.