The Rolling Stones

New Rolling Stones Tour Bypasses Houston For Now

The Rolling Stones announced the dates of their 2013 North American tour Wednesday morning, and Houstonians who were hoping to see the band on the North American edition of their 50th anniversary celebration will have to either hop on a plane or wait for a possible second leg. The tour, announced o ... More >>

MFAH Offers Rare Screenings of Infamous Stones Doc This Week

It is the most infamous rock documentary of all time that the fewest people have actually seen in its entirety -- and even then mostly through third-generation VHS dubs or grainy DVDs. And its legend has only grown over the ensuing decades, as has its subjects, the Rolling Stones. The film is Cocks ... More >>

Rolling Stones Let Psych Flag Fly On '67's Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones' 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, turns 45 today. The album's subject matter and oddity make it a strange holiday release, but hey it was the '60s. Best-known for the saccharine "She's a Rainbow" and oft-covered "2000 Man," the album gets lost in the Stones' greater l ... More >>

Merry Christmas, High Rollers: The Most Expensive Vintage Concert Tees On eBay

A few days ago I asked Rocks Off fans on Facebook what the most they had ever spent on a concert tee was. Most people topped out at $50 for touring legacy acts, while some shelled out a lot more for hoodies and limited-edition tees. Now the world of concert posters is a whole other animal unto its ... More >>

Pass the Wine: Our Writers Review Rolling Stones Merlot

Rocks Off gets bottles of wine here at the office every few weeks. We once had an AC/DC tasting at the office with middling results, though I finished off the Highway to Hell bottle at home by my lonesome, so it wasn't so bad. I have a bottle of Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon Cabernet Sauvignon w ... More >>

Muddy Waters and the Stones Get Their Mojo Workin'

Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones Live at the Checkerboard Lounge Chicago 1981 Eagle Rock, 106 min., $14.98 DVD/$19.98 DVD/CD What a great time it is be a classic-rock fan with eyes as well as ears. Between a trove of rare and unreleased concert and TV appearance videos readily available on YouTu ... More >>

6 Non-Yank Bands Who Wrote American Anthems

Some of the most definitive "all-American" rock anthems were written by bands who not originally from the United States. Think about it... what are some rock and roll staples that remind you of our beloved country, which gave us the freedom to rock? "The Boys Are Back In Town" "We Are The Champions ... More >>

Some Girls: Live in Texas '78

20 Albums To Leave Your Children Plus Five To Grow On...

It started as a simple question: What albums would you leave your unborn children, if you knew you were on borrowed time and may not be around to show them the way. At first I asked for albums for sons, but then it grew broader, not out of needing to pacify the PC-thug in me, but to make sure everyo ... More >>

Eyeballin' - The Rolling Stones: Some Girls Live in Texas '78

In the multi-fractured musical landscape of time, even "the world's greatest rock and roll band" found themselves in a precarious position in 1978. Joe Strummer and the Clash had declared "No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977," and subgenres like punk, funk, disco, new wave, reggae, and eve ... More >>

The Jayhawks

The Rolling Stones On Ed Sullivan Collected In New DVD Package

"Show me your teeth!": Jagger On Ed Sullivan​The Rolling Stones are literally our favorite band of all-time. Yeah, the title of this here music blog should have already given that away, but watching a decade or so of vital Stones history fly by over six episodes on the new The Ed Sullivan Show ... More >>

Brain-Eating Bands and Songs for the Walking Dead

ssgmusic.com​Zombies or vampires? It's a classic debate along the line of The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones. We're not sure the Fab Four qualifies as either monster, but with The Glimmer Twins' propensity to remain upright and touring despite advanced age, decay, and a million other complicat ... More >>

Some Girls: When Rock Met Disco And Disco Met Rock

Rent money is for posers anyway. ​Tonight for one night only at the Houston Marq*E Stadium 23, Rolling Stones fans can finally catch The Rolling Stones: Some Girls Live In Texas, a 1978 concert from the band's Fort Worth stop. The tour came on the heels of the May 1978 release of the band's So ... More >>

Rolling Stones: Some Girls Live in Texas

Top 10 Songs About Other Musicians

When you make music your life, it's only natural that you'd look at the people around you doing the same and find someone who just moistens the muse's panties. What we've tried to put together here is a list of those best efforts. Bear in mind, with one notable exception we've steered clear of fell ... More >>

Happy Birthday Don Was: His Five Best Production Jobs

Vicky Sapp​Nerds like us - you have to be a music nerd if you're reading a blog on Don Was - have favorite producers, like some sports guys have favorite coaches. Sometimes we listen to an album just because someone we like produced it, or it somehow gives it us extra cred even if we may not l ... More >>

Lyrical Advice For The Class Of 2011

"Move back in with your parents! Let them worry about you!"​There will be no guitars and Marshall stacks at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion this weekend, just "Pomp and Circumstance." As the Class of 2011 walks across the stage soon to be occupied by Peter Gabriel, Widespread Panic and Ki ... More >>

Sgt. Pepper & Three Other Bum Albums By Rock Icons

​It was 40 (four) years ago today - in the UK, and tomorrow in the U.S. - that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play, history stopped, the Summer of Love began, and critics freaked the fuck out. When the Beatles released their LSD-soaked counterpunch to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds in June 1967, K ... More >>

Bobby Keys: iFest Nabs Rolling Stones Sax Maniac

The Rolling StonesBobby Keys takes an Exile on Main Street breather, Nellcote, France, 1971​Born in Lubbock and raised just east in Slaton, Joe Ely's home town, saxophonist Bobby Keys left Lubbock in 1960 looking for kicks. At 14, he was playing with Bob Dylan influence, Bobby Vee, before movi ... More >>

Out Today: Glee Warbles, Gorillaz Fall, Kinks Ride Again

​It's been a week since the Foo Fighters' album, Wasting Light, hit the stores, and Rocks Off has probably averaged at least one or two spins of the solid disc per day. Right now, we are actually on track four. Will anything top Light this week? That remains to be seen. Next week will bring ... More >>

The Worst Concert Rip-Offs We've Ever Seen

jackslackofrestraint.blogspot.com​On this day in 1978, the rapidly disintegrating Sex Pistols finally fell apart for good. Conveniently enough, they did it onstage at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom, on the final night of the ill-fated U.S. tour that also lurched its way through San Antoni ... More >>

The Best Concert Movies Of All Time

​A quick note before CHL starts this hlist. We define a concert movie as a flick that documents one or more shows on a tour. More narrative-oriented rock flicks like D.A. Pennebaker's Bob Dylan mash note Don't Look Back, Charles Peterson's grunge chronicle Hype!, and of course the lighthearted ... More >>

What Is Classic Rock Today?

​What is classic rock in 2010? 15 years ago, it was was the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, anything Eric Clapton touched and every band your dad played in his car while he was making out with the girls he met before your mom. That's how we know classic rock: Big riffs, big voices, in ... More >>

Music We're Thankful For This Year

​After the turkey comas subside and Black Friday opens the holiday retail floodgates, this year in music will be all but over. Yes, there's another month until the calendar flips over, but from here until early January, the only "new" music coming out will be the tide of reissues, box sets and ... More >>

The Rolling Stones At Hofheinz Pavilion In 1972, Firsthand

Ed. Note: Rocks Off's own Lonesome Onry and Mean himself, William Michael Smith, attended the Rolling Stones concert at Hofheinz Pavilion in June 1972 that was filmed for the movie Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. Since the movie screens at 7:30 p.m. tonight at several Houston-area theaters ... More >>

Reduxion: Talking Kinks With Young Girls' Pete Tijerina

Find Young Girls on Facebook hereYoung Girls, dedicated followers of fashion.​When it comes to the Big Three of the British Invasion, the Kinks were always the Chrysler to the Beatles and Stones' Ford and GM - up there, but not quite that far up there. Nevertheless, among Anglophiles and songw ... More >>

Rolling Stones To Screen 1972 Texas Shows In Movie Theaters

​In 1972, the Rolling Stones were arguably at their live zenith, rumbling through the world behind that year's Exile on Main Street and blazing a debauched path of crazy sex, deviant drugs and bluesy rock and roll. The live footage from Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones was culled fro ... More >>

Keith Richards Signs On To Fill In At Faces Reunion

​Today's London Express trumpets the news that Rolling Stones perpetual bad boy Keith Richards will join erstwhile fellow Stone Ron Wood and the rest of the Rod Stewart-less Faces for the band's reunion performance at the Vintage at Goodwood Festival in West Sussex, England, August 13. The ... More >>

The 7 Most Polarizing Albums In Recent Memory

​This Monday night, MGMT hits the House Of Blues behind new album Congratulations, which has been getting one of the most tepid responses for a new album by a buzz band in recent media memory. The people that jumped on the bandwagon in 2008 after the Brooklyn-based then-duo released Oracular Spect ... More >>

Mods Vs. Rockers: Five Mock Battles

​Fresh off our trip to AmeriVespa 2010, Rocks Off has come to this conclusion: we are neither a Mod nor a Rocker. We're a Mocker. When you drive around a town as large and car-centric as Houston on a small scooter you get a lot of comments from people, mostly in allusion to Quadrophenia, which ... More >>

Rocks Off Is Bleeding, Torn And Frayed

​Exile on Main Street is not Rocks Off's favorite Rolling Stones album. Never has been. That honor rests with Let It Bleed, and not for "Gimme Shelter" (OK, that's a lie), "Midnight Rambler" or "You Can't Always Get What You Want." No, for us it's always been the songs sandwiched around "Rambler": ... More >>

Exile In Pearland: A Young Rocks Off Gets "Happy"

The first time Rocks Off the Younger truly heard "Happy," we were loading a case of Dannon yogurt into the display case at the Kroger in Pearland we worked at from 1999 until he first left home. It would have been September 2002, and we had just signed the papers that would mark our entry into the ... More >>

Exile In The 21st Century: Stones Porn For Music Geeks

It's been awhile since footage of an assembly line and industrial machines made Rocks Off all hot and bothered, so when we stumbled upon this clip from the factory making the Super Deluxe Edition reissue of the Rolling Stones' landmark album Exile On Main Street, we had to walk away from our desk a ... More >>

Paul Thorn Loves "Pimps And Preachers" Alike

​Like a lot of folks, we're sure, Rocks Off is chomping at the bit to get our ears around the remastered and expanded version of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, due in stores Tuesday. Rocks Off has done a lot of things while Exile was blasting out of a jukebox, radio, our iPod's earbuds, ... More >>

Eyeballin: James Brown Cape-Walks Away With The T.A.M.I. Show

Often written about, mythologized, and showing up in clips on rock docs and YouTube, the 1964 concert movie The T.A.M.I. Show has amazingly never been released in uncut format until now. And though it was shot in black and white, the exuberance and energy of the concert overcomes any pigmentation pr ... More >>

State of Shock

How Michael Jackson (sort of) introduced me to the Rolling Stones.

State of Shock: How Michael Jackson (Sort Of) Introduced Rocks Off to the Rolling Stones

Rocks Off grew up in a MTV-free household. Never owned a spangled white glove or a "Beat It" leather jacket, never saw 1983's Motown 25 TV special that sent Thriller into the stratosphere and had every kid who did see it doing a peculiar dance called the Moonwalk at recess the next day. But when Ro ... More >>

Remembering 1969, Part 1: Altamont, Rosemary's Baby, Santana at Woodstock and More

1968 might have been - at least politically - one of the most turbulent years of the '60s. Students rioted left - specifically, the Left Bank in Paris - and right against the war in Vietnam, while back home racial tensions escalated, especially after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The po ... More >>

Music to Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil

THE HARP'S LIQUID COCAINE

Who Stole the Roll?

Notable tour sponsorships in U.S. history

Take It On the Run

Some Country for Old Men: Shine a Light

Seniors Scorsese and the Stones together again

Reverberations: Beatles, Stones, Dirtbombs and Fleshtones

Gimme Shelter

See the Rolling Stones’ wildest concert ever

Get Lit: Ronnie, by Ron Wood

Drenched In Blog: Sir Mick's Greatest "Hits"

Roy Head, Archie Bell, Barbara Lynn, Barbara Mason

concert preview

Get Lit: Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones, by Robert Greenfield