With the massive Rolling Stones Bridges to Babylon tour rolling into St. Louis in less than a month, the time may be appropriate to examine what has made the band one of the most long-lived and significant bands in rock history.

And there is no better way to take a look at why a band has hung around so long than to look at the core of its prime material. Sure, that could be done by picking up one of the Stones’ two Hot Rocks greatest hits compilations, which do feature some of the band’s greatest grooves.

But to understand what has kept the band from fading into a nostalgic act, one must listen to its phenomenal album Exile On Main St.

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Exiled from their English homeland for drug charges, the members of the Stones retreated to the basement of guitarist Keith Richards’ mansion in France to begin work. The end result was a two-record set containing such rock classics as Tumbling Dice and Happy.

It is in songs like the rueful Shine A Light, the hyped-up Rocks Off and the country-blues number Sweet Virginia that the band proved to be at its best musically.

Mick Jagger made it undeniable that employing incomprehensible lyrics could carry a song just as much as the vocal delivery in songs like Torn and Frayed.

The Stones never quite reached a creative peak like this again, but the band still makes good music. The new Bridges to Babylon shows that. But even if the new music was putrid (as it almost was in the 80s), the band’s momentous position in rock n’ roll could never be questioned thanks to this album.