Music Bloodline

The Rolling Stones

For the better part of five decades, the Rolling Stones lived up to their proclamation that they were the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band, creating the sound and style countless groups imitated.

Biography

By the time the Rolling Stones began calling themselves the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the late '60s, they had already staked out an impressive claim on the title. As the self-consciously dangerous alternative to the bouncy Merseybeat of the Beatles in the British Invasion, the Stones had pioneered the gritty, hard-driving, blues-based rock & roll that came to define hard rock. They never really abandoned blues, but as soon as they reached popularity in the U.K., they began experimenting musically, and as the hippie dream began to break apart, they exposed and reveled in the new rock culture. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine