Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that today is your 80th birthday. You were born in 1945, in England, and one of your favorite things to do was sing. when you were a boy, about 7 years old, you had a good friend who liked singing too, and you were both in the church choir, liked listening to music on the radio, and their favorite movies featured music, too. You and your friend lost contact when you were 11 and your family moved, and you concentrated a bit more on your studies. You thought you might become a journalist, or possibly an accountant, which you were studying. Then when you were 16 you were standing in a train station — carrying a couple of R&B records you’d bought — when your old friend appeared! He saw your records and you found out that he liked the same kinds of music you did. Your friendship was back.
It being the early 1960s and you and your friend being teenage boys who liked music, you did the obvious thing and started a band. You both sang, and your friend played guitar. Some other boys joined too, and you actually got some gigs at local pubs, although none of them paid you anything. Sometimes the audience members would drop some coins in a hat for “you lads.” A couple years later you decided that your music career was the direction you wanted to go and you dropped out of school. You and your friends had kept the band going, although the members had changed a couple of times, and you got good enough to get a longer-term (and paying) job playing at a hotel. Your gig lasted five months, and you kept getting better. You started out playing songs by American rhythm and blues musicians, but you and your old friend started writing your own songs and playing them at the hotel, and some of them were pretty good. And you got a recording contract and a manager, and some of your records (singles) became number one hits in England!
After that you were off, and just got more and more successful. Now, on your 80th birthday, you might reflect on how strange it is that when you met up with your childhood friend back in that train station, it would lead to you both still being in the same band and still performing more than 60 years later. Maybe your friend Keith stops by your mansion with a birthday cake, and you leaf through decades of Rolling Stones memorabilia. You’re Sir Michael Philip Jagger, better known around the world as Mick. OK, now you can open your eyes.
