The Inside Story of the Rolling Stones' Logo

The term “music icon” is often used to refer to artists who have achieved a certain level of enduring success. But only occasionally do those human icons have actual iconography—logos, marks—that rises to the same level as their music.

There are, to be sure, incredible music logos. The Grateful Dead have the Steal Your Face logo with its skull and 13-pointed lightning bolt. Aphex Twin has the amorphous “A.” Prince has the Love Symbol. Public Enemy has its B-boy in the crosshairs. As (ahem) iconic as those icons are, the pinnacle of music logos has to be the Rolling Stones’ “tongue and lips.”

The “tongue and lips” celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. And as pervasive and widely recognized as the tongue cheekily sticking out of the lips has become, the logo’s origin story has remained a deep cut. The New York Times spoke with the logo’s creator, John Pasche, to find out how this rock god came to be.

In a story that will be familiar to marketers and creatives the world over, the Rolling Stones logo basically started with a brief of “let’s get a college kid to do it for cheap.” Pasche, now 74, was a Master of Arts student at the Royal College of Art in London in 1974, when the band approached the school about having a student design a poster for the Stones’ 1970 European Tour. The art school recommended Pasche.

Pasche went on to design the poster after some encouragement from Mick Jagger. (“I’m sure you can do better, John,” the Rolling Stones’ frontman said after seeing Pasche’s first draft.) After successfully completing the poster, Pasche was contacted by the band’s personal assistant “to create a logo or symbol which may be used on note paper, as a programme cover and as a cover for the press book.”

This led to a subsequent meeting with Jagger, during which the Stones’ frontman shared references ranging from the Shell Oil logo to Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. Jagger had brought along an image of the latter, and Pasche gravitated to one particular feature of the deity, the stuck-out tongue. That, and not Jagger’s own pronounced lips, served as the basis for what would become the Rolling Stones’ logo.

For his work, Pasche was paid £50 in 1970 (about $970 in today’s dollars) and also received a £200 bonus. In 1976, Pasche had an official contract drawn up that entitled him to 10% royalties on merchandise bearing the “tongue and lips.” He estimates that the deal earned him “a few thousand pounds” before he sold his copyright to the band in 1982 for £26,000. Today, one intellectual property lawyer whom the Times spoke with estimated the logo to be worth in the hundreds of millions of pounds. But Pasche’s prospects for winning in court were bleak since the logo had become so associated with the band at that point.

It’s a story somewhat similar to that of the Nike Swoosh. Right around the same time, in 1971, Nike founder Phil Knight paid Portland State University student Carolyn Davidson $2 an hour to design what would become the Swoosh. When it was completed, Knight said “I don’t love it, but I think it will grow on me.” Davidson received $35 for 17.5 hours of work, although she recalls spending much more time on it. In 1983, Knight did give Davidson a gold Swoosh ring with a diamond embedded in it and 500 shares of Nike stock. Through stock splits, those shares increased to 32,000, which today would be worth more than $2.5 million.