On July 12, 1962, the band that then called themselves the Rollin’ Stones made their debut at the Marquee Club in London. The lead singer, of course was a former student at the London School of Economics, so Jagger had it goin’ on.

It would take nearly three years for their first big American hit and, no, it wasn’t “Satisfaction,” not really one of my favorite Stones songs. It was this one, as performed in Dublin:

In 1965, we had a Zenith Stereo that looked like this. It had played cutting-edge albums by Frank Sinatra and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, but then it met the Stones and, I think, it began to sway a little bit.

That’s because I would sneak into my big brother Bruce’s bedroom and borrow one of his Stones albums. Everybody loved the Beatles, of course, but to love the Stones, you had to be a kind of breed apart, open to darkness, I guess. Bruce was, which is one of the many reasons why he is cool. Here are some of the albums I remember, in no particular order:

Beggars’ Banquet was my unequivocal favorite. I would, of course, add Stones albums to my own collection later (Sticky Fingers, Let It Bleed, Exile on Main Street, Goat’s Head Soup) The by-now-Rolling Stones got goofy, put on Thomas Hardy (Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess) farm laborer hats, and performed. You can see Billy Preston, Marianne Faithfull and the Who’s Keith Moon in the crowd, too, doubtless jolly for many reasons. And Keith Richards leads the song; he had a lovely voice in those days before he became a pirate.

Exile on Main Street is another album I love, and please forgive me for choosing the Tedeschi-Trucks band, performing at Red Rocks with the Wood Brothers, for this cover of my second-favorite Stones song, “Sweet Virginia.” All of it this version is grand, but most of all I love the trombonist.

And what, might you ask, is my favorite Stones song. No contest. The problem is finding the favorite woman counterpart to Jagger. All of them are Xerox copies compared to the original, Merry Clayton, yet I love so many of them—Lady Gaga, Fergie, most of all, Lisa Fischer (incredible), but they won’t let me play her YouTube video because of copyright. So, damn, we’ll just have to settle on Florence Welch. Here is “Gimme Shelter:”

I can’t leave, of course, without including “Satisfaction,” performed here on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1965. The lyrics, of course, are a peevish echo of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and maybe Anthony Burgesses’s Droogs—his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange had been published three years before. But I think the opening chords of the song are what make it kind of immortal. They came to Keith Richards—this is a true story—in a dream. He clambered out of bed, turned on his tape recorder, and played them.

Then he went back to sleep. The song, of course, didn’t.