While it’s not tech­ni­cal­ly incor­rect to call Pink Floyd a rock band, the term feels some­how unequal to the descrip­tive task at hand. One does­n’t so much lis­ten to albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as expe­ri­ence them, and this went even more so for their elab­o­rate, increas­ing­ly colos­sal live per­for­mances. A ret­ro­spec­tive of Pink Floy­d’s his­to­ry, which stretched back to 1965, must do jus­tice to Pink Floy­d’s tran­scen­dent ambi­tion: this was the goal of Pink Floyd: Their Mor­tal Remains, an exhi­bi­tion that first opened at Lon­don’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um in 2017 and is now prepar­ing to make its Unit­ed States debut at Los Ange­les’ Vogue Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Muse­um this sum­mer.

“You arrive into Their Mor­tal Remains via a life-size repli­ca of the band’s Bed­ford van, their black-and-white tour­ing vehi­cle in the mid-Six­ties,” Rolling Stone’s Emi­ly Zem­ler writes of the V&A show. “The sto­ry is told by let­ters, draw­ings, posters, video footage, news­pa­per clip­pings, music instru­ments, tick­et stubs and odd objects, some of them repli­cas.”

The items on dis­play come not just from the pro­fes­sion­al life of the band but the per­son­al lives of it mem­bers as well: “Syd Barrett’s red-orange bicy­cle,” for instance, or “the actu­al cane used on Waters dur­ing his ear­ly years” to deliv­er pun­ish­ment for mis­be­hav­ior at school.

Also on dis­play are no few notable musi­cal instru­ments, includ­ing a kit paint­ed for drum­mer Nick Mason with ukiyo‑e artist Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s The Great Wave off Kana­gawa. “Once it’s behind glass, it just looks a mil­lion dol­lars,” Mason says in one of Their Mor­tal Remains’ trail­ers, appear­ing in his capac­i­ty as a con­sul­tant to the project. It main cura­tor, graph­ic design­er Aubrey “Po” Pow­ell, co-cre­at­ed the cov­er art for The Dark Side of the Moon, and brings to bear a thor­ough knowl­edge of Pink Floy­d’s music, their his­to­ry, and their sen­si­bil­i­ty. “It’s way out of scale to any­thing that you’ve ever seen before,” he says of the exhi­bi­tion’s design, “and that sort of jour­ney is very rem­i­nis­cent of psy­che­delia, of being on psy­che­del­ic drugs.”

In its way, the alter­ation of con­scious­ness is as essen­tial to the Pink Floyd phe­nom­e­non as the incor­po­ra­tion of tech­nol­o­gy (sub­ject of a recent Mason-host­ed BBC pod­cast series) and the expan­sion of rock music’s son­ic ter­ri­to­ry. On a deep­er lev­el, there’s also what V&A direc­tor Tris­tram Hunt calls “an Eng­lish pas­toral idiom,” which will cer­tain­ly make for an intrigu­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion when Their Mor­tal Remains com­pletes its instal­la­tion in the thick of Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard. There it will run from August 3rd to Novem­ber 28th, though tick­ets are already on sale at the Vogue Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Muse­um’s web site. Though in Los Ange­les the con­scious­ness-alter­ing sub­stances that have tra­di­tion­al­ly accom­pa­nied their music are now more legal than ever, be warned that what Sal­vador Dalí said of him­self also holds true for Pink Floyd: they are drugs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch an 8‑Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Clas­sic Album

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Oth­er Pink Floyd Songs Glo­ri­ous­ly Per­formed by Irish & Ger­man Orches­tras

Pink Floyd Drum­mer Nick Mason Presents the His­to­ry of Music & Tech­nol­o­gy in a Nine-Part BBC Pod­cast

Bruce Spring­steen and Pink Floyd Get Their First Schol­ar­ly Jour­nals and Aca­d­e­m­ic Con­fer­ences

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Rolling Stones define the rock-and-roll band, as they have for near­ly six decades now. Exact­ly how they’ve done so is thor­ough­ly doc­u­ment­ed, not least by the band’s own expan­sive and still-grow­ing cat­a­log of songs and albums (all of which I hap­pen to have spent the last few months lis­ten­ing through). But the sto­ry of the Stones con­tin­ues to com­pel, told and re-told as it is in every form of media pro­duced by each era through which the band has passed: books, arti­cles, pod­casts, and also the sort of doc­u­men­taries we’ve col­lect­ed here today. Some were orig­i­nal­ly pro­duced for tele­vi­sion; oth­ers, like Watch­Mo­jo’s “The Rolling Stones: The Sto­ry & the Songs” above, for the inter­net. Each of them address­es the same ques­tion: how did a cou­ple of blues-obsessed lads from Kent come to run the biggest rock group in the world?

Even when straight­for­ward­ly pre­sent­ed, as in the Biog­ra­phy broad­cast above, the his­to­ry of the Rolling Stones con­sti­tutes a pop-cul­tur­al thrill ride. It begins, by most accounts, with for­mer class­mates Mick Jag­ger and Kei­th Richards bump­ing into each oth­er at a train sta­tion in 1961. Their shared inter­est in music, and espe­cial­ly Amer­i­can blues, inspired them to put a band togeth­er.

Before long, Jag­ger and Richards’ Blues Boys made the acquain­tance of anoth­er band, Blues Incor­po­rat­ed, whose mem­bers includ­ed Bri­an Jones, Ian Stew­art and Char­lie Watts. Though Watts would­n’t join up until lat­er, the oth­er four con­sti­tut­ed most of the first line­up of the Rolling Stones, who made their debut at Lon­don’s Mar­quee Club in July 1962.

You can see a great deal of archive footage depict­ing the Stones in their ear­ly years in the doc­u­men­tary above, Rolling Stones: Rock of Ages. The title implies an obvi­ous and much-repeat­ed joke about the once-rebel­lious young­sters’ insis­tence on rock­ing into rel­a­tive­ly advanced age. But onstage — and the live per­for­mance has always been essen­tial to their appeal, more so even than their albums — they remain very much the same band once pro­mot­ed with the ques­tion “Would you let your sis­ter go with a Rolling Stone?” That line was only one of the strate­gies used by its author, the Stones’ first man­ag­er Andrew Loog Old­ham, to launch his boys into world­wide pop­u­lar­i­ty by fram­ing them as the brash oppo­site of the Bea­t­les — to whom, despite their con­sid­er­able musi­cal dif­fer­ences, one can hard­ly avoid mak­ing ref­er­ence in the sto­ry of the Stones.

Though the bands became fast friends in real life, the press of the 1960s could­n’t resist craft­ing a rival­ry, as recount­ed in The Bea­t­les vs. The Rolling Stones, the Canal+ doc­u­men­tary above. What­ev­er com­pe­ti­tion exist­ed between them (or with Amer­i­can bands like the Beach Boys) only encour­aged them to make their music more pow­er­ful and dis­tinc­tive. This they did in the face of count­less per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al set­backs, which for the Stones includ­ed the loss of found­ing mem­ber Bri­an Jones and the vio­lent Alta­mont Free Con­cert, wide­ly inter­pret­ed as the end of the utopi­an 1960s. As prod­ucts and sur­vivors of that era, the Stones also remain embod­i­ments of its insou­ciant ambi­tion. “For my gen­er­a­tion, what was hap­pen­ing and the feel­ing in the air was: it’s time to push lim­its, says no less a sur­vivor than the sub­ject of Kei­th Richards: The Ori­gin Of The Species. “The world is ours now, and you can rise or fall on it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al His­to­ry of The Rolling Stones Doc­u­ment­ed in a Beau­ti­ful, 450-Page Pho­to Book by Taschen

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Revis­it the Infa­mous Rolling Stones Free Fes­ti­val at Alta­mont: The Ill-Fat­ed Con­cert Took Place 50 Years Ago

The Rolling Stones at 50: Mick, Kei­th, Char­lie & Ron­nie Revis­it Their Favorite Songs

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.