Keith Richards

How times change. Our forebears once thought that full-figured Bill Haley was at the razor-sharp, frighteningly decadent and anarchic edge of pop culture. Compared to the Rolling Stones’ subsequent carnival of drug busts, court appearances, car crashes, house fires, paternity suits and chosen or enforced overseas exile, not to mention the matter of Keith Richards’s alleged blood transfusion, or of his unusual choice in dispersing his father’s ashes (cocaine, nostril), Haley’s act now seems as quaint as the background accompaniment to an Edwardian tea-dance.

Are the Rolling Stones the new Rat Pack? Or put it another way: how did the Stones achieve this curious headlock on our affections? If anything, it seems to get stronger over time. In the band’s current US stadium tour, aptly sponsored by the old-age interest group AARP, a million customers are each paying $100 for a seat that allows you to aim a pair of binoculars at a distant video screen. Want an actual view of the stage? It’ll cost you up to ten times as much. Still, it’s all gravy. The last major Stones tour grossed $550 million at the box office.

Most of us have at one time played the you-couldn’t-make-it-up game. What were the odds back in, say, 1973, that millions of us would casually engage in Jetsons-style video chats, conduct business at the swipe of a thumb, or consider the prospect of a space-tourism flight courtesy of Virgin Galactic? Or for that matter, rue the fact that the all-conquering Oakland Athletics might fall so low as to become the worst team in baseball last season, with a dismal 50-112 record? Perhaps the biggest shock to someone contemplating the future in 1973 might have been the knowledge that Keith Richards, the guitarist and primary creative force of the Rolling Stones, would still be alive and well at the time of his eightieth birthday on December 18, 2023. Wrecked. Sick. Zombielike. Undead.

On the Who’s 1965 single “My Generation,” the band’s twenty-one-year-old lead singer Roger Daltrey half-sang, half-sneered, “Hope I die before I get old.” The song, written by the then-twenty-year-old Peter Townshend, has remained a classic for nearly sixty years, boasting both a fantastic tune and unforgettable lyrics. Yet even as the Who continue to tour the world — often in the company of that invaluable accessory for any self-regarding rock band, a full orchestra — it is now with self-aware amusement that the seventy-nine-year-old Daltrey and seventy-eight-year-old Townshend perform it.

Among the other jewels in the crown of Sir Mick Jagger’s songwriting career is a number he and his longtime creative partner Keith Richards knocked off in December 1963 to promote the Kellogg’s company products. Don’t laugh — it’s an infectious little tune in its way, even if the key lyrical message — “Wake up in the morning/ There’s a pop that really says/ Rice Krispies for you and you and you!”) falls some way short of the same duo’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which followed barely twelve months later. But then Jagger, who turns eighty on July 26, was always a quick study. Last year’s four-part EPIX documentary series My Life as a Rolling Stone may be numbingly banal (“They set the bar for what a rock ’n’ roll band should sound like, look like..