It really is amazing how age and the passing of time will change your perceptions about certain things. When I was growing up as a teenager who was basically obsessed with rock and roll, I figured that the Rolling Stones had to be just about the five coolest guys on earth (okay six, if you count Mick Taylor and seven with Ron Wood).

I mean these guys were the very definition of bad-ass.

They got all the best looking girls, and they had more money than God. They also always looked cooler than just about anybody else - even (and sometimes especially) when they were wasted out of their skulls (which, by most accounts was a great deal of the time back then). You had Mick in his scarves and sequins, prancing around like some kind of ambi-sexual peacock up on that stage.

And Keith? Well, Keith was just Keith. Back before the wrinkles and the deep lines carved into that face had set in, Keith Richards was the very definition of what a rock star was supposed to look and act like. Keith had the attitude down to a science, thumbing his nose at the authorities on more occasions than you could count, and wearing that well earned outlaw image like a badge of honor.

Yeah, as cool went in the sixties and the seventies, it just didn't get more bad-ass than the Stones. But as I said, time and sometimes experience as well, has a way of changing your perceptions about certain things. Take the whole wasted sort of glamour of the sixties rock and roll drug scene for example. When you are able to watch it from a distance, reading about it in a magazine or watching it on TV, it does indeed look somewhat glamorous.

Having been fortunate enough to land a job in that same music business once I grew up however, I can tell you firsthand that when you see the reality of drug abuse up close and personal, there is nothing "cool" about it. The media doesn't even bother to glamorize it anymore as they did in the sixties and seventies. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan's recent public excesses — just to cite two modern day examples — are rather, reported as the trainwrecks in motion that they actually are.