Beast of Burden

“The real break came in the late 1960s, when the counterculture went sour, and popular music began attracting people who were less interested in music than in using such a powerful medium for culturally radical purposes. The harbingers of this break were the Rolling Stones, who relished the blues but did not hesitate to make it over in the image of the stale perverse modernism that some of their members had picked up in British art colleges. Thus the Stones enhanced their musical reputation by shocking the public and being arrogantly rude to their audience—behaviors now accepted as part of rock, but thoroughly alien to the blues” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, pp. 12-13).