Filling a vacuum.......................

       The most bizarre part of the whole story is that having done what we intended to do in our narrow, purist teenage brains at the time, which was to turn people on to the blues, what actually happened was we turned American people back on to their own music.   And that's probably our greatest contribution to music.  We turned white America's brain and ears around.  And I wouldn't say we were the only ones - without the Beatles probably nobody would have broken the door down.  And they certainly weren't bluesmen.
      American black music was going along like an express train.  But white cats, after Buddy Holly died and Eddie Cochran died, and Elvis was in the army gone wonky, white American music when I arrived was the Beach Boys and Bobby Vee.  They were still stuck in the past.  The past was six months ago;  it wasn't a long time.  But shit changed.  The Beatles were the milestone.  And then they got stuck inside their own cage.  "The Fab Four."  Hence, eventually, you got the Monkees, all this ersatz shit.  But I think there was  a vacuum somewhere in white American music at the time.

-Keith Richards,  Life