The period between “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and the double album Exile on Main St. (1972) remains the Stones’ creative and iconic peak. The studio albums Let It Bleed (1969) and Sticky Fingers (1971) plus the in-concert Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! (1970) gave them the repertoire and image that still defines them and on which they have continued to trade ever since: an incendiary blend of sex, drugs, Satanism, and radical politics delivered with their patented fusion of Jagger’s ironic distance and Richards’s tatterdemalion intensity. Their records and concerts at this time both explored and provided the soundtrack for the contradictions ...(100 of 1678 words)