Enduring Stones

In a recent episode, we spent time with a man who changed popular culture and then became a warning about what fame, isolation, and addiction can do to a single human body—Elvis Presley. Brilliant, iconic, but ultimately tragic.

Today… similar voltage. Very different story.

This is about a band that came out of the same storm system of sex, drugs, and rock and roll… but somehow did not end as a cautionary tale on a bathroom floor. Instead, they turned danger into discipline, scandal into strategy, and raw rebellion into one of the longest-running creative partnerships in modern music.

In this series, we’ve already met Frank Sinatra, who turned phrasing and breath into a method—and Chuck Berry, who wired the circuitry of rock and roll into the American imagination. Elvis showed us how a single, fragile human can be crushed under the weight of that circuitry.

Today’s story is different. This is what happens when that same dangerous current is handed to a band that refuses to burn out.

The Rolling Stones.
This is not just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. This is the story of staying power.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity. I’m George Bartley. And this is episode 504 Enduring Stones

In a recent episode, we spent time with a man who changed popular culture and then became a warning about what fame, isolation, and addiction can do to a single human body—Elvis Presley. Brilliant, iconic, but ultimately tragic.

Today… similar voltage. Very different story.

This is about a band that came out of the same storm system of sex, drugs, and rock and roll… but somehow did not end as a cautionary tale on a bathroom floor. Instead, they turned danger into discipline, scandal into strategy, and raw rebellion into one of the longest-running creative partnerships in modern music.

In this series, we’ve already met Frank Sinatra, who turned phrasing and breath into a method—and Chuck Berry, who wired the circuitry of rock and roll into the American imagination. Elvis showed us how a single, fragile human can be crushed under the weight of that circuitry.

Today’s story is different. This is what happens when that same dangerous current is handed to a band that refuses to burn out.

The Rolling Stones.
This is not just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. This is the story of staying power.

I remember going to see the Rolling Stones in Washington, D.C., with a friend.
Big arena. That low, restless rumble before the lights go down. You can feel that particular charge you only get when everyone in the building already knows the songs they’re waiting for.

And then the opening act walks out.
Not some anonymous bar band. Not a nostalgia act.
Stevie Wonder.

Not “legend in retirement” Stevie Wonder, but Stevie Wonder in full creative bloom—bold, rhythmic, harmonically adventurous, changing the language of soul and pop in real time. Most headliners would have been quietly terrified to follow that.
The Stones weren’t.
They let Stevie Wonder ignite the place. And then they walked out anyway.
Mick Jagger hits the stage with that coiled, impossible stride. 

And all at once you hear the strains of Brown sugar - that powerful intro that draws you in and give you a feeling that it just can't get any better than this!


And then there is Keith Richards with riffs that sound like they’ve always existed. Charlie Watts behind them, stone-faced and unshakable. The band doesn’t sidle into the music—they own it.

In that moment, with Stevie Wonder as the warm-up and the Stones storming on after him, it’s very clear: this isn’t just a successful band.
These are people who know exactly who they are.

Let me pause on that opening act, because it tells you a great deal about the Rolling Stones’ place in the musical universe.

Stevie Wonder was not filler. He was one of the most innovative musicians on the planet—reshaping pop, soul, and funk; pushing technology and harmony; writing songs that will outlast all of us. Most bands would worry that a force like that might eclipse them.
The Stones invited him.
They weren’t afraid to stand next to greatness. They expected to follow it.
That’s creative gravity.

You can measure a band’s stature by the company they keep—and by who is willing to stand under their banner. The fact that Stevie Wonder was the one warming up that crowd tells you that, by that point, the Rolling Stones weren’t just surfing a wave of fame and hoping they would be accepted.

They were one of the fixed points the wave had to move around.

To see how they got there, we go back to something almost comically small: a train platform and a couple of records.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards first knew each other as boys in Dartford, England. They drifted apart, the way people do. Then, on October 17, 1961, they ran into each other again on the platform at Dartford Station. Keith noticed that Mick was carrying albums—Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry. Those sleeves might as well have been a flag. A conversation about American rhythm and blues turned into a renewed friendship, and very quickly into a musical partnership. Out of that shared obsession—and thanks in no small part to Brian Jones, moving in London’s blues circles—a band began to coalesce.
By 1962, the core lineup is in place:
Mick Jagger on vocals.
Keith Richards on guitar.
Brian Jones on guitar and assorted instruments.
Bill Wyman on bass.
Charlie Watts on drums. They start as a blues band: young English musicians channeling Black American masters—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed—night after night in cramped clubs.
Their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, sharpens the picture:
If the Beatles are charming, camera-ready, the sons you can introduce to respectable company, the Rolling Stones become the opposite—dangerous, disheveled, impolite.
And then Oldham pushes Jagger and Richards to do the thing that changes everything:
“Write your own songs.”
That dare turns a London blues band into The Rolling Stones.

The Jagger–Richards Fuse
Once that songwriting engine switches on, the landscape changes.
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — frustration as an anthem.
“Paint It Black” — Eastern-tinged dread.
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
“Sympathy for the Devil.”
“Gimme Shelter.”
“Brown Sugar.”
“Tumbling Dice.”
“Angie.”
“Beast of Burden.”
“Start Me Up.”
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Keith Richards supplies those immortal riffs and that loose, swinging feel.
Mick Jagger shapes vocal lines, lyrics, and the public face: sly, knowing, provocative.

But almost immediately, the turbulence creeps in.
Drug busts. Moral panics. The band painted as corrupters of youth.
Altamont in 1969—intended as a free concert answer to Woodstock—ends in chaos and death. Brian Jones, founder and sonic architect, is gone at 27.
For most bands, that would read as the final chapter.
For the Rolling Stones, astonishingly, it’s only the end of Chapter One.

Here’s where the contrast with Elvis comes into focus.
With Elvis, we saw what happens when a single brilliant performer is sealed in a pressure chamber of money, pills, expectation, and isolation. The machine keeps rolling; the man does not.

The Stones had many of the same ingredients:
Heavy drug use.
Criminal charges.
Toxic relationships.
Internal feuds.
The constant temptation to become caricatures of themselves.

But their story bends differently.
Part of it is structural: they’re not a lone king; they’re a band. A flawed, fighting, interdependent organism. When one member is spiraling, another is dragging the wagon. When one leans too far into the myth, someone else, or the sheer reality of the touring machine, pulls them back toward the work.

Part of it is deeply unromantic, but essential:
Mick Jagger is not just a frontman.
He is also, very clearly, management.

Onstage, Mick Jagger is pure theater:
The strut. The mockery. The flirtation. The exaggerated lips and limbs. Half evil jester, half aerobics instructor, all self-aware.
But offstage, there is a different figure:
Careful about business after getting burned by early contracts.
Attentive to staging, pacing, and lighting.
Treating a tour not as a rolling party, but as a massive, meticulously run operation.
He understands something simple and rare in rock and roll:
If you want to go on doing this for decades, you can’t just live inside the legend. Someone has to count the tickets, choose the lawyers, and go for a run. Layer that on top of Keith Richards’ improbable resilience and Charlie Watts’ elegant discipline, and you get a strange hybrid: A band that looks like chaos and operates, underneath, with a stubborn professionalism.
They still made mistakes. They still caused damage. But they never entirely stopped doing the work.

Nothing captures that arc more clearly than the moment the establishment blinked. On December 12, 2003, at Buckingham Palace, Mick Jagger is knighted—Sir Michael Philip Jagger—for services to popular music.
The same Rolling Stones once treated as cultural saboteurs are now, at least in part, the culture being honored.

Critics grumbled. Traditionalists thought he was too scandalous. Some fans and even fellow band members saw it as a betrayal of their rebel image.
But look at what it admits:
By the early 2000s, you cannot tell the story of British culture—or global rock music—without the Rolling Stones. The crown, quite literally, has to acknowledge the crown prince of misbehavior.
The moment is awkward, funny, and also completely logical.

How Are They Still Here?
So what explains the staying power?

1. Deep Roots
They began not as pop opportunists, but as blues disciples. That grounding gave them a vocabulary older and stronger than fashion. When trends shifted, they could fall back into something real.
2. The Jagger–Richards Engine
Decade after decade, they kept generating songs that worked:
on radios, in clubs, in stadiums, and now on playlists of people who weren’t born when those riffs were written.
That catalog is cultural capital—and it’s huge.
3. Professionalism in Disguise
For all the stories of chaos, they rehearsed. They tuned. They built one of the great touring machines in music history. It’s less romantic than the myth, but it’s why the myth didn’t kill them.
4. Adaptation Without Disappearing
They flirted with psychedelia, country, funk, disco, ’80s gloss, and beyond. Some experiments hold up better than others, but they almost never erased the core identity:

Keith’s guitar,
Charlie’s pocket,
Mick’s prowl.

They did not simply turn into a jukebox of past glories.
In 2023 they released Hackney Diamonds, a sharp, energetic album that sounded like the Stones reckoning with age without embalming themselves. The record topped charts in multiple countries and, in 2025, won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album—an almost absurd milestone for a band formed in 1962. If Elvis is the story of how a man can be crushed by his own legend, the Rolling Stones are the story of how a band can weaponize its legend and keep walking.

Not saints. Not innocent. But enduring.

When you place them alongside the others we’ve met, a pattern emerges:
Sinatra builds the modern singer’s toolkit—the method of phrasing, the sense that popular music can be approached with almost classical discipline.

Chuck Berry wires the circuitry of rock and roll—guitar lines, storytelling, attitude.

Elvis becomes the warning label: what happens when that power is poured into a person who is never allowed to step outside the costume.

The Rolling Stones pick up all of it:
Sinatra’s professionalism,
Berry’s riffs and bite,
Elvis’s excess— and prove, for better and for worse, that rock and roll doesn’t have to die young.
They came out of the same temptations:
the money,
the chemicals,
the ego,
the roar of the crowd.
They made more than their share of mistakes.
But again and again, they came back to the same three anchors:
the stage,
the songs,
the partnership at the center.
If you respect the work even a little more than you worship the chaos… sometimes you get to keep playing.

Finally, it can be helpful to compare the Beatles with the Stones = even on a superficial level

The old cliché has the Beatles as melody, harmony, curiosity, optimism, studio experiments, evolving into art-pop, while the Rolling Stones  groove, swagger, danger, live band, blues core, outlasting the apocalypse - or at least that's the cliché.

Both are cartoon versions, but they’re useful.

The Beatles were self-contained writers/players (Lennon–McCartney–Harrison) who redefined what a band could do in the studio.  The Beatles
compressed a lifetime of innovation (pop, folk-rock, psychedelia, avant-garde, proto-metal, concept albums) into seven years.  They also turned the album into an art form, played with structure, sound, philosophy—a kind of “let’s push it further” mindset.

The Rolling Stones took American blues and R&B and made a darker, leaner, harder sound that basically is rock’s default setting now.  And the Rolling Stones built one of the great touring machines in history, as well as turning survival itself into part of their artistic statement. Where the Beatles are the hesitant revolution; the Stones are the permanent government.

The “controversy” has never been about which is objectively better; it’s been about what kind of story you’re drawn to: refinement and reinvention vs. grit and endurance.

Looking back at the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I can see that I have been greatly affected by their music, their performances, and their attitudes.  Like The Beatles, I would like to think that I care about
craft and structure (with my scripts, my research, my pacing). And I am probably drawn to narrative arcs: rise, complication, consequence. And like most of us, I feel that I respond strongly to professionalism under the myth (Sinatra method, Stones’ discipline, my admiration for how they kept playing).

At the same time, like most of us. I am suspicious of hollow spectacle and self-destruction for its own sake. 

“People sometimes ask: ‘Are you Beatles or Stones?’
For me, that’s the wrong question.
The Beatles are where my mind goes—restless curiosity, harmony, the hope of constant reinvention.
The Rolling Stones are where my spine goes—groove, grit, and the sheer refusal to stop.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you already know I need both.”  And come to think of it, I think we all do.