I just watched Showtime’s film of the Rolling Stone’s 50th anniversary reprise of their first performance at Hyde Park, London, 1964.

Fifty years, and they can still rock and roll. No one can put on a show like the Stones, and the faces in the audience were about evenly split between old farts like myself, and kids young enough to be their grandchildren. And they all knew the words to all the songs.

While watching, I couldn’t get John Ruskin’s remarks out of my head, written in 1851.

For one thing this century will in after ages be considered to have done in a superb manner and one thing I think only. . . it will always be said of us, with unabated reverence,`They built ships of the Line.’ Take it all in all, a ship of the Line is the most honorable thing that man as a gregarious animal has ever produced. By himself, unhelped, he can do better things than ships of the line; he can make poems and pictures, and other such concentrations of what is best in him. But as a being living in flocks, and hammering out, with alternate strokes and mutual agreement, what is necessary for him in those flocks to get or produce the ship of the line is his first work. Into that he has put as much of his human patience, common sense, forethought, experimental philosophy, self control, habits of order and obedience, thoroughly wrought handwork, defiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful patriotism, and calm expectation of the judgement of God, as can well be put into a space of 300 feet long by 80 broad. And I am thankful to have lived in an age when I could see this thing so done.

Well, I missed the Globe Theater, Ruskin’s three-deckers and the Battle of Britain, but I am thankful to have lived in an age when the Stones wrote the soundtrack.