Back in 1964 the Stones embarked on their first U.S. tour, in support of their self-titled debut record. Sixty years later they are, astoundingly, back it at. Will the 2024 U.S. tour be the last for band that has brought satisfaction —and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction“—to so many? It certainly could be, although at this it seems unwise to ever question the longevity of a band that has been carrying on this long.

Of course, as the photos in this collection show, the band has changed over the years. In early photos from Walter Daran and LIFE staff photographer John Loengard, the band’s lineup includes Brian Jones, a founding member who would dismissed from the band in 1969 and later drown in a swimming pool. Also shown in photos across the band’s eras is Charlie Watts, the elegant drummer who was there from the beginning and died in 2021.

But all these decades later, frontmen Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are still at it, despite both being 80 years old. Their longevity is a rock and roll miracle, when you think about it, surviving as they have in a business that has a way of chewing people up.

In 2024 the Stones released a new album, their first since 2005 and their 31st studio effort overall, called Hackney Diamonds. What else would they do but get out on the road to support it?

The Rolling Stones performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, 1965.

John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Rolling Stones perform on a chandelier-filled set on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show,’ May 2, 1965. From left, guitarists Keith Richards and Brian Jones, singer Mick Jagger, bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts.

John Loengard/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Drummer Charlie Watts during a Rolling Stones performance at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York, 1966.

Walter Daran/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brian Jones during a Rolling Stones performance at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York, 1966.

Walter Daran/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mick Jagger performed during a 1966 Rolling Stones concert.

Walter Daran/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones performed at Live Aid concert in Philadelphia, 1985.

DMI

Mick Jagger and Tina Turner performed together at Live Aid in Philadelphia, 1985.

DMI

The Rolling Stones in concert: Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Keith Richards and Bill Wyman.

DMI

Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones performed in 1989.

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Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

DMI

Mick Jagger during the Rolling Stones’ ‘Voodoo Lounge’ tour, 1994.

DMI

Mick Jagger performed during The Rolling Stones’ 1994 “Voodoo Lounge” tour.

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Keith Richards took center stage during the Rolling Stones’ ‘Voodoo Lounge’ tour, 1994.

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Keith Richards during the 1994 “Voodoo Lounge” tour, 1994.

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Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones during band’s ‘Voodoo Lounge’ tour, 1994.

DMI

The post The Ageless Rolling Stones, Through the Ages appeared first on LIFE.

There’s all kinds of laughter here, in situations expected and unexpected. In one photo Bob Hope cracks up a few of his fellow entertainers, and himself, as he tries out material before hosting the Academy Awards. But you also see general Douglas MacArthur cackling with glee the day after the successful invasion of Inchon. Whatever prompted MacArthur’s laughter in that moment, the relief following the previous day’s assault had to have been a factor.

Humphrey Bogart laughs more gleefully in a photo from the set of The African Queen than he was known to do when playing any of his memorably hard-bitten characters. Frank Sinatra, while hanging out with friends in a Miami hotel room, laughs so hard at a joke told by his pal and opening act Joe E. Lewis that the singer was literally rolling on floor laughing.

One of the more frequent celebrity laughers in the LIFE archives is Sophia Loren, represented here with three photos. No small part of the icon’s appeal is that, among her other virtues, she seemed to enjoy where life had taken her.

Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Bob Hope and David Niven laughed at a Cold War-era Russian joke from Hope during a break from rehearsals for Academy Awards show at the RKO Pantages theater, 1958.

Leonard McCombe/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Singer Billy Eckstine (right) having some backstage laughs with his ex-boss, orchestra leader Earl Hines (center) and trumpeter Louis Armstrong backstage, 1949.

Martha Holmes/Life Picture Collection/Shuttetstock

Warren Beatty with Natalie Wood at the 1962 Academy Awards ceremony at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden with Marilyn Monroe in her Manhattan apartment, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Humphrey Bogart laughed while on location for the filming of The African Queen along the Ruki River in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1951.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

(left to right) George Jessel, Dean Martin, and Jack Benny at a Friars Club dinner for Dean Martin, 1958.

Leonard McCombe/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elton John (right) sharing a laugh with his mother Shelia (left) and stepfather Fred Fairebrother (center) in their apartment, 1971.

John Olson/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lyndon B. Johnson (left) and running mate Hubert Humphrey enjoying a laugh at Johnson’s ranch after their landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election.

John Dominis/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

General Douglas MacArthur (center), slapped Vice Admiral Struble (left) on the knee while laughing gleefully the day after the invasion of Inchon, 1950.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy played with their children, April 30, 1957.

Paul Schutzer/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren with her husband Carlo Ponti on a boating trip off of Naples, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren laughing while exchanging jokes during lunch break on a movie set, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sophia Loren laughed about her guitar-playing ability with her secretary Ines Bruscia beside her, 1964.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dick Clark on his TV show the “American Bandstand” in 1958.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American generals George S. Patton (left) and Omar Bradley (center) and British general Bernard Law Montgomery (right) laughed while discussing strategy and the progress of the campaign in France, July 7, 1944.

Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. laughed over dinner with his wife, Swedish actress May Britt.

Leonard McCombe/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rolling Stone band members Mick Jagger (left) and Keith Richards shared a laugh.

DMI

Nancy Reagan and her husband, then California Governor Ronald Reagan, walked behind Dean Martin and Phyllis Diller, California, 1970.

Ralph Crane/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A rare laugh from somber Kim Novak greeted a joke by Otto Preminger, who visited Kim while she was in New York. She had great fondness and respect for Preminger, who directed her in The Man With the Golden Arm and put her genuinely at ease.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Alan Shepard laughs with fellow astronauts Gus Grissom (right) and Deke Slayton upon his arrival at Grand Bahama Island, shortly after his successful flight and splashdown, May 1961.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte laughed during Bop City nightclub’s opening night, 1949.

Martha Holmes/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a Miami hotel room Frank Sinatra fell off his chair howling at a joke told by his opening act and longtime friend, comedian Joe E. Lewis, 1965.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Laughing With the Stars appeared first on LIFE.

Of the many things that Mick Jagger has said in public—aside, that is, from the lyrical improvisations and the onstage declarations he has made across more than 2,000 live performances over 59 years—among the more enduring is this bit of bravura from 1975: “I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45,” he told People magazine. Jagger was 31, and he and the Rolling Stones had recorded the game changer 10 years before, in the early stages of a decade in which the band reframed the blues, the British Invasion and rock ’n’ roll itself.

The hubris of Mick’s comment, the implication that there were other worlds to be conquered and, more ominously, that the Stones might leave behind the world they had forged, struck the metaphorical chord. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was the band’s axe-grinding soul: Keith Richards came up with the hook and the title while drifting to sleep one night and recorded it, bare bones, on a cassette player by his bed. Jagger later wrote the lyrics poolside at a Tampa hotel while the band was on tour. Add drums. Add bass. Book it at 3:45. When the song landed in America in June of ’65, it went to No. 1 and stayed there. 

Jagger certainly was singing “Satisfaction” at age 45 (actually he’d just turned 46), snapping it out as a set-closer on the Stones’ bristling Steel Wheels tour in 1989. He was singing it onstage in 2015 as well, as a guest of Taylor Swift, who was born in 1989. Over the many years, Jagger’s “I’d rather be dead” pronouncement evolved away from arrogance and toward happy irony. In 2018, when Jagger and Richards both turned 75 and the Stones began a tour with dates in the U.K., there was “Satisfaction” on the set list—the predetermined final encore, the classic and quintessential rock ’n’ roll song.

Despite the portentous demise of guitarist Brian Jones in 1969 and the band’s historical fondness for hard drugs, despite the departure of backbone bassist Bill Wyman in the early ’90s, and despite the Keith-vs.-Mick feuds that have long dotted the landscape, time has remained improbably on the Rolling Stones’ side. Up until the moment of drummer Charlie Watts’s death, at 80, on Aug. 24, 2021, the band was not only still intact, it was still more or less doing what it had always done. Their 2016 album Blue & Lonesome, by way of example, is made up of covers of songs written by the same folks the Stones were covering 50-some years earlier—blues colossi like Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf.

And of the 19 songs that anchored that 2018 tour, 17 of them were Jagger/Richards numbers composed during the 1960s and early 1970s, soul-lifters off of one monumental album after another (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers . . .) Another song on the list was 1981’s “Start Me Up,” which, along with “Satisfaction” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” hinges upon one of the Richards riffs that have burrowed unstoppably into auditory history. Keith, in 2018, was still out there on his Fender, after the sound. Mick remained glorious: preening and plaintive. Charlie Watts still drove the action, cool and swinging on his simple kit. And there was Ronnie Wood playing the tasty guitar. Ladies and gentlemen: the Rolling Stones.

They had aged by then, to be sure, and some fans grumbled about those U.K. shows. A ticket at 250 quid? Reviewers allowed that there were some imprecisions in the gigs, the occasional softened edge. Yet by and by the crowd and the critics could not help themselves. They’d been elevated. And they were acutely aware, as the old Stones ripped through the songs that will never die—“Sugar,” “Shelter,” “Sympathy”—that even now you could see and hear straight into their beating hearts. Straight into, yes, that’s right, wait for it, the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world.

LIFE’s special issue The Rolling Stones: Their Rock ‘N’ Roll Life is available online:

© Stefan M. Prager/Vanit.de/Retna Ltd.

The Rolling Stones performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, 1965.

John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Rolling Stones performed on The ‘Ed Sullivan Show, 1965; from left, From left, guitarists Keith Richards and Brian Jones, singer Mick Jagger, bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts.

John Loengard/Life Pictures/Getty Images

The Rolling Stones, 1966

courtesy Art Kane Archive

The post Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones! appeared first on LIFE.