>i mean yeah, they had that.
>but for a while mick was an incredible vocalist,
>keith richards is always an incredible guitar player,
>and their songs were really that good.

But it's a fact that the Stones invented almost everything we know today about how rock stars are supposed to look and act.

Before the Stones, rock & roll bands were generally well-scrubbed, nicely groomed boys in matching jackets who smiled and gave the thumbs-up in photos.

The Stones (or rather, Andrew Loog Oldham) were the first ones to come up with the concept of a group that was surly and antisocial. They wore mismatching clothes, they always looked like they had just rolled out of bed, they were rude and dirty and they reveled in ugliness and violence and destruction. THEY started all that shit.

And that early attitude carried them a long way even when their music occasionally got kinda fruity. By the late 60s, the Stones were no longer the hardest thing going as far as rock was concerned... and they would slip even further in the 70s, but they were still THE STONES and that rep kept them going.

Which is not to say that their songs were not good. The Bee Gees songs were good too, though.