ii. The Rolling Stones have one of the stranger fan bases I know. It's half composed of people who, when they say they like the Stones, mean they like "Satisfaction," "Brown Sugar," "Honky Tonk Women," "Wild Horses," and maybe a few more of the band's obvious big hits. Not that there's anything wrong with this: all those songs are excellent, and retain their power and intensity despite being chronically overplayed by classic rock radio. The other half of Stones fans are quite different, the sort of people who like the obscurer elements of their catalogue. I will make a serious argument that "Blue Turns to Grey" is the best song on December's Children; "Brown Sugar" is, at best, the fourth-best song on Sticky Fingers. For these fans, among which I number myself, the key impressive factor of the Rolling Stones is their longevity: they spent the middle 1960s producing an endless stream of excellent singles and albums; in their earliest days, they numbered among the few bands to ever improve a Chuck Berry song. In the late 60s and early 70s, they produced five of the greatest albums ever one after another: Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed, Get Your Ya Ya's Out, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street. They followed that up with seven years of excellent singles, if imperfect albums, and then managed their own creative renaissance on the back of punk, new wave, and Motown. With the possible exception of Bowie, no rock musicians have ever had that sustained period of creativity.
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