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.

DMI

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.

DMI

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

DMI

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

DMI

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.

An imp in a bloodred crushed-velvet schoolboy outfit held 50,000 rock and roll fanatics in the palm of his hand. Not literally, as he had his hands around a classic Gibson SG guitar. But he had the audience rapt. Diminutive and drool-flecked, Angus Young, then 60 years old, tore into a 12-minute guitar solo. Throughout the wailing, Young duckwalked across the mammoth stage at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. He jammed away while standing on a hydraulic lift that rose three stories above the thunderstruck crowd. He crashed to the ground and kicked like a toddler having an epic temper tantrum—and he never missed a note.

The year was 2015, during AC/DC’s last world tour. But if you had closed your eyes, it could have been 2002, or 1982, or 1975. Over 50 years, 18 albums, and a few thousand gigs, AC/DC with Young, all five-foot-two of him, has delivered the same high-voltage energy, thrilling multiple generations of fans.

It’s tempting to award Angus the lion’s share of the credit for the band’s electricity and endurance. Certainly his Energizer-bunny-with-devil-horns act makes him equal parts lead guitarist, front man, focal point, and band mascot. But AC/DC’s success derives more from its ethos than anything else. And Malcolm Young, Angus’s older brother, defined AC/DC’s ethos right from the start.

“I’ve never felt like a pop star; this is a nine-to-five sort of gig,” Malcolm told Rolling Stone in 2008. “It comes from working in the factories, that world. You don’t forget it.”

Malcolm, who died in 2017, ran the band like a factory foreman. Writing together, Malcolm and Angus stamped out impeccable riff after impeccable riff. They recruited a series of rhythm sections—bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd are the definitive pair—that served to reinforce the blue-collar churn that underpins the band’s catalog. The Young brothers also brought in two singers—first Bon Scott, then Brian Johnson—who echoed AC/DC’s keep-it-simple-stupid approach.

Scott gave the band its nasty, naughty, bawdy color. He also spent his days careening 100 miles per hour until his rock-or-bust lifestyle killed him. Amazingly, the Youngs found a fitting replacement in Johnson and then graduated from underground legends to mainstream rock gods with Back in Black.

Across its long and extraordinary career, AC/DC has proved it has nine lives, abusing every one of them and running wild, yet continuing to outlive new trends. Doing the same old thing, AC/DC thrived (often) and survived (at the very least) through the peaks and valleys of disco, synthesizers, rock operas, hair spray, glam metal, pop metal, thrash metal, grunge, unplugged sessions, and power ballads. “It was Malcolm who had the vision of what the band should be,” Angus told the Chicago Tribune in 2003. “He said, ‘We’re going to play the only music worth playing: rock and roll. And we’re going to play it hard.’ ”

That unwavering value system led AC/DC to sell more than 200 million albums. It put the band on tours that packed American football stadiums, British soccer stadiums, and festival grounds in Moscow. In short, it lifted the band to extraordinary heights.

The journey to get there, not surprisingly, is testament to AC/DC’s own adage: It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.

Here are a selection of images from LIFE’s new special issue on AC/DC.

Steve Rapport/Hulton/Getty

AC/DC members (left to right) Malcolm Young, Bon Scott, Angus Young, Cliff Williams and Phil Rudd posed in London, 1979.

Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty

Bon Scott, lead singer of AC/DC from 1974 until his death in 1980, performed at the Hordern Pavilion in Moore Park, Australia on Dec. 12, 1976.

The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media/Getty

AC/DC’s Angus Young and Bon Scott during a concert in New York, 1979.

Michael Putland/Hulton/Getty

Angus Young led the AC/DC performance in London, 1980.

Michael Putland/Hulton/Getty

Brian Johnson, who joined AC/DC in 1980 as their lead singer following the death of Bon Scott, brought his own special energy to the role.

Kevin Mazur/Wireimage/Getty

In 1988 AC/DC added to its vast collection of gold records.

Bob King/Redferns/Getty

Angus Young shredded during an AC/DC performance at Hampden Park National Stadium in Glasgow on June 28, 2015.

Ross Gilmore/Redferns/Getty

AC/DC was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.

Kevin Kane/WireImage/Getty

The post AC/DC: 50 Years of Massive Rock ‘n’ Roll appeared first on LIFE.

Conversations about KISS tend to revolve around the band’s extraordinary appearance and extravagant showmanship. Their “sexified Kabuki makeup. [Their] black and silver warrior bondage gear and seven-inch platform heels,” as Tom Morello put it in his 2014 speech inducting KISS into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. At a live performance, Morello pointed out, you might experience, “the place blowing up with explosions, screeching with sirens . . . bare knuckled and bad ass.” KISS elevates off the stage on glowing platforms. Gene spits flames. Paul flies over the crowd. Comic book superheroes come to life. Rock and roll has rarely known such giddy gall. 

Nearly from the start, those industry-lifting shows were so outsized, so audacious, that you didn’t even have to be there to feel them. The live albums—KISS Alive!, released in 1975, and KISS Alive II, released two years later—could set your house afire. Wait, was that the sound of a rocket ship going off? A race car?

I first heard Alive II several years after it came out. I’d just come home from school, and I was in my bedroom. I had a small plate of Chips Ahoy! cookies and a glass of milk on the bookcase.

Alive II is a double album. I slid the first record out of its sleeve, put it on the turntable, and set down the needle. Then I stepped back and took a cookie off the plate. I was 11 years old. I had heard about and seen images of KISS—they were on lunch boxes—but I had no idea what to expect.

First the crowd noise. Then: “You wanted the best, and you got the best! The hottest band in the world, KIIISSS!” That went straight into the Gatling-gun opening riff of “Detroit Rock City,” then the drumroll, the big one-two entry chords, and Ace Frehley’s massive guitar slide. My eyes went as wide as the record itself. I put my hand over my mouth and I closed the door to my room. Was it even safe to be listening to something like this? I suddenly had a secret: That this existed! That this was KISS! A brave new world with such creatures in it. I didn’t know if anyone else should find out.

Alive II (like Alive!, as I would later discover) felt completely unbound and joyous. Urgent. There’s the moment when Paul Stanley, unable to contain himself in announcing the song, belts into the crowd: “All right! ‘Love Gun!’ ” Or during “God of Thunder,” when the drum solo closes with three momentous gongs, sounding the tocsin as it were, and Paul yells, “Peter Criss on the drums!” and the verse picks up immediately with Gene, the God of Thunder himself, singing in his guttural snarl: “I’m the lord of the wastelands, a modern-day man of steel.” Comic book hero indeed. In producing their live albums, KISS went into the studio to overdub and rework the tracks for maximum effect—and that is precisely the effect they had.

For professional musicians the moment of being felled by KISS can be unambiguous. When I asked the guitarist Glenn Sherman why he loves KISS, he answered: “ ‘Deuce’: Listen to the F-chord played in the first chorus under the line ‘You know your man is working hard.’ The most perfect power chord I’ve ever heard.” Sherman is referring specifically to the version of ‘Deuce’ on Alive!, the first song on the album that changed everything for KISS, when the notion of their global success went from improbable to inevitable.

***

The Hall of Fame induction was criminally overdue. That’s almost certainly because in the glare of KISS’s style, the substance of the music itself—those driving, unadorned, scrappy, gorgeous songs upon which the entire priapic colossus of the band is built—gets overlooked. “Here’s a statement only a fool would contradict: There’s never been a band inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame whose output has been critically contemplated less than the music of KISS,” Chuck Klosterman wrote in Grantland. “I’d guess 50 percent of the voters who put KISS on their Rock Hall ballot have not listened to any five KISS records more than five times; part of what makes the band so culturally durable is the assumption that you can know everything about their aesthetic without consuming any of it.”

KISS has produced 30 gold records, more than any American rock band ever. Destroyer, Rock and Roll Over, and Love Gun all went multiplatinum. KISS’s songs were what led record executives to bet on the band in the first place. (Early on, their distributor, Warner Bros., liked the music but wanted KISS to ditch the makeup.) Morello in his induction speech reeled off a list of about a dozen Grammy-Award winners who drew from KISS: Metallica, Lady Gaga, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters . . . on and on.

The 1994 album Kiss My Ass, a compilation of KISS songs covered by musicians who’ve openly declared a debt, includes recordings by Lenny Kravitz and Stevie Wonder, the American Symphony Orchestra, Yoshiki, Anthrax, and the Gin Blossoms. That Garth Brooks sings “Hard Luck Woman”—a KISS ballad with a cowboy swing—seemed the obvious fit for the country megastar, but it was not the song that Brooks initially had in mind. “It’s gotta be ‘Detroit Rock City,’ ” he said when asked what he wanted to play. (Alas, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones had claimed “Detroit” first.) Nirvana wasn’t on Kiss My Ass, but in 1989 they recorded a cover of KISS’s “Do You Love Me?”

Even now teenagers across the country—oblivious to KISS concepts of the Demon, the Starchild, the Spaceman, or the Cat—might bop around in their air pods singing “I Was Made For Lovin’ You,” the disco-era song reborn in TikTok compilations more than four decades after it broke as the lead single off KISS’s Dynasty album.

KISS wouldn’t have been the global force it became without the voluminous shtick. But the band wouldn’t have been anything at all, of course, without the music. If KISS’s principals were inspired by the Beatles, you can just as easily trace the band’s beginnings further back to the primordial soup of rock and roll, those fertile muddy waters that eventually enabled KISS to evolve into a species all its own. The hardest thing to do in rock and roll, in anything, is to be original. Fifty years after their debut album there has never been another band like KISS.

Here are some photos from LIFE’s new special edition on KISS:

Photography Ross Halfin

Members of the band KISS (from left to right: Ace Frehley, Peter Criss, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons) in 1975.

Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty

KISS on the town in New York City, 1976.

Richard Corkery/NY Daily News/Getty

Paul Stanley of KISS shredded on stage during a 1975 concert in Detroit.

Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty

KISS posed with members of the Cadillac (Mich.) High School football team, 1975.

Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty

Members of KISS (left to right: Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Paul Stanley) display their showmanship during a 1977 concert.

Michael Putland/Hulton/Getty

KISS drummer Peter Criss (left) and band manager Bill Aucoin were filmed for a 1977 NBC News report, “The Land of Hype and Glory.”

NBC NewsWire/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty

Members of the KISS Army fan club on the march in Australia before a performance by the band in Sydney, 1980.

Peter Morris/Fairfax Media/Getty

KISS in Munich, Germany, November 1983.

Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture alliance/Getty

Paul Stanley, Tommy Thayer and Gene Simmons of KISS live in Munich, 2008.

Denis O’Regan/Premium Archive/Getty

KISS being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, April 2014.

Larry Busacca/Getty

The post The Remarkable Species Known as KISS appeared first on LIFE.