7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7on the horizon. Though Led Zeppelin eventually outsold
the Stones by five albums to one, no group could challenge
their central position in the rock pantheon. Moreover, the
death of Brian Jones combined with Taylor’s lack of
onstage presence elevated public perception of Richards’s
status from that of Jagger’s right-hand man to effective
coleader of the band.
The period between “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and the
double album Exile on Main Street (1972) remains their cre-
ative and iconic peak. Including the studio albums Let It
Bleed (1969) and Sticky Fingers (1971) plus the in-concert
Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! (1970), it gave them the repertoire
and image that still defines them and on which they have
continued to trade ever since: an incendiary blend of sex,
drugs, satanism, and radical politics delivered with their
patented fusion of Jagger’s ironic distance and Richards’s
tatterdemalion intensity. Their records and concerts at
this time both explored and provided the soundtrack for
the contradictions of a collapsing counterculture at a time
when almost everybody else still seemed to be in a state of
psychedelic euphoria.
Their recordings of this period found them adding
country music to their list of influences and—most notably
on Beggars Banquet—adding more and more acoustic guitar
textures to their already impressive command of musical
light and shade. Yet their blues-powered foray into the era’s
heart of darkness bore bitter fruit indeed: when a young
black man was murdered by Hell’s Angels at a disastrous
free concert at the Altamont Speedway in Livermore,
Calif., during their 1969 American tour, it seemed to many
observers that the Stones’ own aura of decadence and
danger was somehow to blame for the tragedy.
The quality of their music began to decline after Exile
on Main Street. Jagger and Richards began to act out the