It’s Not Only Rock n Roll

Excerpts from The Immaculate Roll: Albums of the Rolling Stones

One of the great pleasures of long love relationships is the amassing of an unbearable weight of trivial information: the things that we know about those whom we love, things that few others have taken or would take the time to know, are testament to the faithful longevity of a true and substantive connection that has endured and renewed itself against the test of the years. It would appear that people in the generation to which I ostensibly belong seek long-term partnerships with either less desire or less success than preceding generations, such that to be able to speak of a relationship that has spanned half of my life at my own age is relatively uncommon.

Of course, the relationship I’m talking about in this case is not with a person but with an institution; with a mass of seething, weathered vinyl which if taken together could be market-valued at around $1.45 billion and retail priced at somewhere just over £1,000. I will be concise about the origin point of my fascination with the Rolling Stones, not least because it is entirely in keeping with many other people’s— suffice it to say that this Richmond R&B band’s work offered entry into a worldview that made accommodations for freedom, strangeness and eclecticism of spirit and desire that my material circumstances…