Why did it take me, a music lover and even more a classic rock lover, nearly 29 years to finally appreciate the Stones? Perhaps the inevitable (and unfair) comparisons to the Beatles, a band whom they share almost nothing in common. If the Beatles represent the 60s, free love, and LSD, the Stones are the 70s, sleazy sex, and cocaine. Perhaps it might be said they are the darker, more mature side of the immaturity of the rock ethos: self-destruction.
All of this is pretty much the standard line, and I don't have much else to offer at this point. But as far as the music itself is concerned, maybe the difficulty for this listener is due to the odd spaciousness of the arrangements, Jagger's heavily mannered and almost unmelodic singing style, and most of all the lack of truly insistent melodicism in the songwriting...The Rolling Stones, as odd as this might seem to say, don't insist on themselves very much. It's great background music...and given time and patience it blooms and burrows its way into your memory.