The Stone Age: Sixty Years of The Rolling Stones

An acclaimed rock and roll journalist evokes the legacy of The Rolling Stones—iconic, granitic, commercially unstoppable as a collective; and fascinating, contradictory, and occasionallydisturbing as individuals. As Lesley-Ann Jones writes, the Rolling Stones are "still roaming the globe like rusty tanks without a war to go to. Jumping, jacking, flashing, posturing, these septuagenarian caricatureswith faces that might have been microwaved but coming on like eternal thirty-year-olds." On 12thJuly 1962, the Rollin' Stones performed their first-ever gig at London's Marquee jazz club. Down the line, a 'g' was added, a spark was lit andtheir destiny was sealed. No goingback. These five white British kids set out to play the music of black America. They honed a style that bled bluesy undertones into dark insinuations of women, sex, and drugs. Denounced as'corruptors of youth' and 'messengers of the devil, ' they created some of the most thrilling music ever recorded. Now their sound and attitude seem louder and more influential than ever. Elvis is dead and the Beatles areover, but Jagger and Richards bestride the world. The Stones may begathering moss, but on they roll. Yet how did the ultimate anti-establishment misfits become the global brand we know today? Who were the casualties, and what are the forgottenlegacies? Can the artist ever be trulydivisible from the art? Lesley-Ann Jones's new historytracks this contradictory, disturbing, granitic and unstoppable band through hope, glory and exile, into the juggernautyears and beyond intorock'songoing reckoning... where the Stones seem more at odds than ever with the values and heritage against which they havealways rebelled.Good, bad, and often ugly, here are the Rolling Stones as never seen before.