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THE 8:28 TO LONDON

It’s a founding episode in rock ’n’ roll.

October 17, 1961. Mick Jagger was on the city-bound platform of the Dartford train station in suburban London, waiting for the 8:28 into the city. An eighteen-year-old student at the London School of Economics, he was late for a lecture in financial history. Keith Richards, a student at Sidcup Art College, does not remember where he was going. He’d known Mick when they were kids in Dartford—a gritty town famous for insane asylums and a fireworks factory that exploded—but they’d lost touch. Keith recognized Mick first. He had a businessman’s glaze, but he was carrying records. It was unusual to see a kid with one album, let alone a stack. Keith went over: “Whatcha got?” He later said it was the first time he’d ever seen a Muddy Waters record. Before that, the bluesman had been a kind of legend, spoken of as the Indians once spoke of a great river beyond the horizon. Mick also had records by Little Walter and Chuck Berry. All were on the same label: Chess Records. The name resonated of far-off Chicago, that strange city where Mississippi farmers plugged into an urban current. When the train came, Keith and Mick sat side by side and talked all the way into the city.

Because it’s a legend, details vary. In one telling, Keith wears a scarf, Mick wears a blazer. In another, Keith wears a trench coat that sweeps along the platform. In still another, he carries a guitar. Mick’s inventory changes, too. Sometimes it’s Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops and Muddy Waters at Newport. Sometimes it’s The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck’s One Dozen Berrys. But the crucial details remain the same. It’s always Chess Records—because Chess pressed the sort of electric blues Mick and Keith loved. (Jagger had begun sending away to the label a few months before.) It’s always the train platform, city-bound side, which can be read literally—Mick was late for class—or metaphorically, as a preacher reads the Bible. Though they did not know it, Jagger and Richards were headed for the city—that is, the big time. And they were going together. It’s perfect that they met on a train platform, as the train has always been of great symbolic importance to the blues. The train is escape—it carries the Delta farmer from slave country to the metropolis. The train is freedom, power. That’s why, when you listen to the great old blues songs, you almost always hear steel wheels in the rhythm.

In every version, Mick is the one with the records, whereas Keith has only a guitar. Because records equal wealth. Mick had it. Keith did not. Keith played rock ’n’ roll for the same reasons as Chuck Berry—because he loved it and because there was nothing else he could do. But Mick had choices, was on his way to a comfortable life when he ran into Keith. Which is why Keith would always question Mick’s commitment. Mick loved the blues in the way of a rich kid: like a hobby. Keith loved it as a sick man loves penicillin. It was his best hope.

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It was a golden moment in rock ’n’ roll—some think it never got better. Elvis had remade the world in 1956 with the release of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Just about every important British rock musician of the sixties and seventies remembers lying in bed listening to Armed Forces Radio when the King lit up the night. It was style as much as anything: the stripped-down production, the tremble in the vocal, the tinny guitar. The emptiness between notes brought the country roads of the New World to life. English showbiz impresarios cashed in with knockoffs: Tommy Steele, Adam Faith. British Presleys riding a craze for everything American, not just the music but the clothes, the lingo. It raises the big question: Why? Why did American trash music, poor-boy music, so idiosyncratic and unique to the American experience, a music that came out of the forbidden mix of white and black, mulatto and octoroon, a music that combined the oldest country traditions with the deepest Delta blues, a music that tells the history of the nation—from slave ships to civil war to the Great Migration to factories in the smoky Midwest—find such fertile ground in England?

If you ask people who lived through that period, who were ten or fifteen when Elvis broke, they paint the same picture: England after the Second World War, supposedly victorious but experiencing a kind of ruin. Bombed-out blocks and rubble, muck in the passageways. The country was broke, the empire being dismantled. Goodbye, India. Goodbye, Mandalay Bay. Just this bleak island, where it began, where it will end. Wartime rationing continued into the mid-1950s. During the Beatles’ first U.S. tour, a reporter asked George Harrison if he’d had a record player growing up. “A record player?” Harrison said, incredulous. “We didn’t have sugar!” Keith later spoke about scoffing at the Germans during an early gig in Munich: “It’s ’cause of you we got bad teeth—no oranges!”

Filth, rot, dissipation, gray shadows on broken walls. Brits who came of age after the war liken their youth to a black-and-white film. No vibrancy, no warmth. The coming of rock ’n’ roll was Technicolor. Bubblegum pink! Eggshell blue! No one ever cared more about music than that first generation, for whom it was brilliance and life, a chance for fun, an escape from history—America as only a sad kid could dream it. “There’d been a tremendous war,” Ethan Russell, an official Stones photographer in the sixties, told me. “Western civilization was in shambles. England was a wreck. Keith Richards was a kid, living in a shitty house on a bombed-out street in Dartford. But he was listening to Chuck Berry. One of my favorite pictures is Keith doing Chuck Berry’s duck walk on that street! He’s fourteen years old, but he’s already out of there!”

Rock ’n’ roll’s first flush had played out by the time Keith accosted Mick on the railroad platform. Part of it was just the normal cycle. “It’s a five-year progression,” Neil Sedaka told me. “The Everly Brothers had five years of hits. Connie Francis, five years. Fats Domino and Brenda Lee, five years. All those artists who broke in the 1950s were done by the time the Beatles and Stones came of age.” Part of it was a cascade of mishaps and disasters. Elvis went into the Army in 1958. He’d come out in 1960 but would never be the same—the service bridled him, snuffed out that blue electricity. Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin, which took him out of the game. Chuck Berry was arrested for violating the Mann Act. Little Richard, the most foppish and over-the-top of the early stars, had a vision that convinced him he was in danger of losing eternal life. “If you want to live with the Lord, you can’t rock ’n’ roll,” he explained. “God doesn’t like it.” It happened on a flight in Australia. An engine flamed out, the plane shuddered. Little Richard got on his knees—and his purple pants did not wrinkle, nor his pink handkerchief crease—and pleaded with God, promising that if his life were spared, he would devote himself to gospel. He threw his rings into Sydney Harbor a few days later, returned to Alabama, and entered the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

By 1963, the pop charts were littered with bubblegum. “Hey Paula” by Paul & Paula. “I’m Leaving It Up to You” by Dale & Grace. That’s when many Brits found their way to the blues. It was a refuge, a place to escape the deprivations of radio. The blues was real. Kids like Jagger and Richards got into the blues for the same reason kids of my generation got into Public Enemy and NWA. It was about authenticity. At the beginning, they listened to whatever they could find. Over time, the pole stars emerged. Muddy Waters. Chuck Berry. Jimmy Reed. The Delta blues became an obsession indistinguishable from faith. For the Stones, it was religion. In this, they’ve been fortunate. An artist needs a belief. It does not matter whether that belief is Rastafarianism or Communism. It’s the structure of belief that matters—it gives their work coherence, shape. It’s there even when you don’t know it. Of course, the Stones have made some terrible records, but the blues always saved them in the end.