Despite a recording career that has lasted about seven times longer than that of the Beatles, their greatest rivals, the Rolling Stones have never been afforded the kind of scholarly exegesis so familiar to Fab Four fans.

The lads from Liverpool, with their epic albums, seraphic harmonies, and penchant for experimentation, fare especially well when it comes to talking about what happened on a given day in the studio, a setting that doubled as a sort of sonic laboratory if you were a vanguard 1960s band. That is, unless you were the Stones, who have always been hard to set in a studio context, probably because of just how feral they’ve always — or mostly, anyway — been.