Episode Details

The Rolling Stones were marketed as the band your parents should fear. What started as genuine blues devotion became the most carefully managed outlaw brand in entertainment — a billion-dollar empire built on the image of not caring about money.

This episode covers the Stones from their early days as London blues purists through drug busts, Altamont, tax exile, and the arena-rock machine that kept them touring into their eighties.

• Mick Jagger attended the London School of Economics before committing to music
• The Altamont disaster in 1969 killed the peace-and-love narrative of the counterculture
• Keith Richards was so addicted to heroin that a Canadian court sentenced him to play a benefit concert
• Their touring revenue in the 2000s exceeded most Fortune 500 annual profits