The Rolling Stones

If you were forced to compress the 50-year history of rock into a few measly seconds, it would sound something like the opening riff to 1965's "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" . . . or the pistols-at-dawn blast that fires up "Brown Sugar", for that matter. Pulling their mojo from the Mississippi Delta and the rubble of Chicago's South Side — via youth-quaked London — Mick, Keith, Bill, Charlie, and the ill-fated Brian ripped out the still-beating heart of the blues, injected it with a dangerously sexy swagger, and cranked-up the whole mix up to the flash point. By the time "Sympathy for the Devil" arrived in 1968, with a sambalicious rattle of maracas and a generous hint of sulphur, they had the world under their spell . . . and so it remained.

Rockers, rollers, heartbreakers — all are delivered, Stones-style, in Next Steps.

Found a track you haven't heard before? Probably not. Even at the rate of a single hit per year, the Stones would be well into the high forties by now, and there were years when they produced a lot more than that and still they could do no wrong. The band's creative brilliance comes into sharp focus here, as we remember that they played a cunning game of "Pin the Cojones" on Buddy Holly, taking an adolescent hiccup of a song like "Not Fade Away" and setting steel in its backbone. Ever inclined to play the devil's advocate (if not the Devil himself), Mick wagged a finger at the folks' hypocrisy in "Mother's Little Helper" . . . yet he could break your heart with "As Tears Go By".

Mick's a lover alright, but he knows how to chew a girl up . . . in Deep Cuts.

Even as we get to the Deep Cuts, the hits just continue to roll. When Mick tosses his girl on the rubbish dump in "Out of Time" — the long version from 2007's extensive Rolled Gold + compilation — she can't say she wasn't warned (and plainly) in the perfectly spiteful "Play With Fire". Meanwhile, the hellhound that once haunted bluesman Robert Johnson clearly has Mick's scent in "Hand of Fate" — from 1976's Black and Blue, the first studio album to cement Mick Taylor replacement Ronnie Wood in the lineup — and while Nat King Cole took a Cadillac on his tour of "Route 66", the Stones roll over it in a muscle car in one big, organ-grinding, coast-to-coast carnival of love.

The Stones packed so much grit in their songs, it's a wonder the tape heads weren't ground down to stubs. Between feuds, tours, divorces, busts, accidents, and deaths, the Stones have proved to be the perpetual motion machine that physics tells us simply can't exist. Over five decades, the swagger and sweat, the jolt and crackle, and the sound of a million hands clapping have followed these midnight ramblers from one end of the planet to the other. Grabbing some dirt off those Mississippi Delta back roads and drinking up the gin joints of Chicago's South Side, they mainlined the blues and gave them a British accent. In 1963, they hit the road, and it doesn't seem they'll ever stop rolling . . . but if it's the sweetest, most potent distillation of the Stones' towering career to date you're after, you've come to the right place.