From 'Midnight Rambler' to 'Goats Head Soup': The Stones’ Shifting Storytelling

The Stones’ early character-driven songs treated protagonists like archetypes from a pulp novel or blues standard. ‘Midnight Rambler’ (1969) is a kinetic crime portrait—the narrator is a predatory drifter, sung in first person, but it’s still a character Jagger inhabits, not himself. ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’ (1968) goes even further: it’s a gallery of absurd, bickering archetypes—a gangster, a queen, a “Jigsaw Man”—almost like a comic strip