The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones started as a covers band. Young Englishmen obsessed with American blues and R&B, playing other people’s songs in London clubs, taking their name from a Muddy Waters track. For the first stretch, the writing that mattered came from elsewhere; from Chicago, from the Delta, from the Brill Building. Then Mick Jagger and Keith Richards learned to do it themselves, and the band stopped being a tribute act and became the thing other bands would later cover.

By 1966 the Jagger/Richards songwriting partnership was the engine. What’s easy to miss is how much the rest of the room shaped the records. Brian Jones could pick up almost any instrument and find the one part that made a song strange. Bill Wyman heard the bottom end differently than his peers did and was not shy about reaching for an organ when a guitar wasn’t the answer. Charlie Watts played jazz time inside a rock band and made it swing. The myth is two writers and a backing group. The records tell a more crowded, more interesting story.

They are still the template for what a rock band is supposed to look like. The blues kids who learned to write their own.