I first saw the Rolling Stones in person in Worcester, Massachusetts, a mid-sized city forty-five miles outside of Boston, on April 30, 1965. It was at the start of their third U.S. tour, and we were excited most of all by their unabashed love of the blues. All the marketing publicity in the world couldn’t hold a candle to their embrace of a music that my friends and I felt no one else could love the way we did.

As it turned out, though, reputation inadvertently took precedence, at least for a moment, when just as the show was getting under way, you could sense the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the aisle, and all of a sudden a teenaged girl in the row in front of ours was being yanked by the hair out of her seat by an angry man who could only be her father. It was, certainly, an unforgettable image, and the Stones presented their music with incandescent belief, but for me the most indelible moment of this American visit would come three weeks later when Brian Jones and Mick Jagger introduced the Howlin’ Wolf to a national television audience on Shindig!, and mainstream America for the first time saw the real face of the blues. That was epic.