Roll Them Bones It's middle-aged and still crazy. It's only rock 'n' roll. And it's still the Stones

By JAY COCKS

There was so much history this summer, and so little change.

The anniversary of Woodstock arrived and waned, much like the first time around. It was mostly a convenience for the media, a way to get a handle on an upstart pop phenomenon. For music, a fan remembered, all the festival symbolized was a washout. Lysergic mud and bad amplification. The rest was a fairy tale.

And, as the fairy tales say, it seemed that it might be time again for legends. Twenty years later there were suddenly on every side the familiar sounds of the '60s: Bob Dylan, the Who, Van Morrison, the Bee Gees and the Jefferson Airplane. But the flashiest news was that the Rolling Stones, well aged and embattled, would be lumbering out of the woods and into the lights again. "The world's greatest rock 'n' roll band" (an unofficial title the band never originated but did little to discourage) had not only cut a new record but was embarking on a tour that would take it to nearly 40 U.S. cities.

Just look at these guys. Giants. Golems. Geezers with a quarter-century of history together, "a long shadow," as Keith Richards says, "that we drag around." Their tour starts Aug. 31 in Philadelphia; when the New York City shows were announced, some 300,000 tickets (at an average price of $28.50) were sold in a record six hours. The band, which fussed over choosing photos and picking among twelve different covers for their new record, knows it's no longer got the look knocked. Image is vital, and taking the stage will be a severe test.

Steel Wheels is the name of the record; Nothing Ventured would have suited too. It boasts five reprobates cranking themselves up for yet another crack at the distance, showing their years -- flaunting the things, in point of plain fact -- while they swan around some of the nation's largest concert stages, soaking up the applause and the revenues, blowing off their greatest hits, taking the new material out for an audience airing.

Of course, the audience has had a summer of softening up. The Who, who had played at Woodstock, had already come back, getting a jump on things when they were meant to be gone for good. Keith Moon, their great drummer, had taken some of the band's careening keenness with him when he died in 1978. Pete Townshend, their great songwriter and guitar player, his hearing shredded by more than two decades of high decibels, could not even re-create all his lead parts. Still they soldiered on, three bowed veterans suffering the onset of shell shock from a barrage that hasn't even landed yet.

With a splendid new album, Oh Mercy, due out in September, and on the strength of permanent regard, Bob Dylan hit the road again, doing the vintage songs in new ways, singing the newer songs as if they'd just been minted. Dylan perpetually remakes himself, reshapes his work. He has made history, but even the most dedicated fan knows that Dylan's history is peculiar, part of the past with a claim on the future, but existing in a kind of new space, a new tense: the present imperfect.

What did this have to do with now? The fan grew up with rock 'n' roll. He gawped at Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show. He thought Jerry Lee Lewis on Steve Allen's TV program was the wildest and altogether greatest thing he had ever set eyes on. When Chuck Berry showed up on American Bandstand, one young world got jolted into a different orbit. The music was that strong. All velocity and no drag.

And it had no past, either. Not at first. Rock 'n' roll put down roots like some jungle creeper, overnight, and was suddenly there one new morning, loud and outsize, full of lurid colors and maybe even a little poison. It was new, and it could be owned, wholly and instantly, by a new generation. It was what everyone was who heard it first and would love it forever. It was young.

No more. Not on the calendar, and not in the heart. Now rock has some 30 years of history behind it. That's time enough, and weight enough, to make it hidebound.

Grim prospect. All summer, the fan looked about for reassurance. There were familiar sounds all around. Van Morrison, a favorite since the early '60s, released yet another album, Avalon Sunset, a lyrical, ruminative shard of spirituality that he refused to push or publicize. The Grateful Dead persisted, a whole band of Peter Pans camping out in a hippie never-never land. The Bee Gees returned; so did the Jefferson Airplane and the Doobie Brothers. These weren't revivals; they were exhumations.

Paul McCartney issued a sprightly new album, Flowers in the Dirt, on which he collaborated with Elvis Costello, and announced a world tour to begin Sept. 26 in Oslo. And Ringo Starr, fresh from an alcohol rehab, hit the road backed by a peerless band of studio all-stars. Strawberry Fields forever.

The fan felt often, now, as if he were out in the middle of a foggy sound, in a weathered boat, with an old radio that kept drifting from station to station. To be sure, there was a lot of new stuff on. Madonna: slick and smart. Rap: angry, slangy and assaultive, good and righteous, but restrictive in its heat.

Honest, now: Can you be a veteran fan and still respond as rock 'n' roll demands you respond -- by belief, by passion, by always raising the stakes -- to performers who may be a quarter-century younger than you are? You could do it with Springsteen; you both were younger then. You did it with U2. But for somebody new? Was rock 'n' roll, forever young, finally middle-aged?

The questions went deeper than chronology. Rock wasn't just the sound track for the '60s. It spurred on and helped shape a whole culture. It was central to change in a way that nothing -- certainly no music -- has been since. Rock was always a music of turbulence, and history, for a while there, caught the beat. Woodstock was a dodge, a growth industry that tie-dyed much that was fierce and righteous in the music into something stuporous and evasive. The seeds of nostalgia were planted in those sodden, trodden New York State fields before the festival was over. Memories were rolled like joints. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Nostalgia was the only dirty word in the rock vocabulary. This music had never looked back before. But history could walk away from rock once it had been put snugly into that Woodstock pasture. Rock reacted by turning inward, to the softer personal speculations of the '70s singer-songwriters, then reacted again, first by exploding (punk), then by chilling out into the cerebrations of the New Wave bands like the Talking Heads and the slick, slightly spooky amusement-park soul of Michael Jackson.

But is it nostalgia that is keeping the sound of the '60s alive in 1989? It has to be something more. Something like . . . that sound on the radio now. Some kind of homing signal. Coming in strong now, and now you know the sound. It's only rock 'n' roll, but no mistake: it's their rock 'n' roll. It was even once the title of a Stones song, a hit . . . forget the exact date. Not so long ago, after all.

Mick Jagger, the Stones' co-leader, co-writer, singer, front man and flakmaster, is supposed to have said he didn't want to be a full-time rocker past 40. He denies saying it now, maybe because here he is, 46 and still doing it fine. That makes him older than the fan by a few years. The fan feels better already. Smiles, settles back, listens close.

The boat starts to move. That's encouraging. After all the band's public bickering and rheumatic concertizing, after all this time and all these damn years, the Rolling Stones can still rock the boat. They are back all right.

The Stones know their audience, though. It's pretty much the same as it's always been, and it will be happy to see them. It will also be happy to know that the material on Steel Wheels is a lot like them -- up to date but fundamentally unchanged. The record kicks off with Sad Sad Sad, a creditable attempt to capture again the dynamics of the group's early sound, when the rhythm came in solid sheets and the lyrics sounded as if they were being spit out of a semiautomatic weapon. After that, it bustles through a very commercial, danceable tune or two, a couple of extravagant experiments (including Terrifying, with some heavy jazz underpinnings) and a few desultory rockers, performed with practiced agility.

The fan heard it right away. The Stones still have the stamina, but there's always at least a hint of strain in the music too, a self-consciousness about the energy, as if they were the oldest guys at the gym and trying to look good on the Nautilus. Rock 'n' roll may be their life -- and their business. It may come naturally to them still, but it sure doesn't come easy. That's what's different. That old winning smugness -- their magisterial self-assurance -- is gone. There's a lot of sweat in these songs.

The band must know it too, because finally, on the last song, they face it. Slipping Away is a song about -- indeed, almost consumed by -- a sense of impermanence, of loss, of lives eliding into compromise. It's about ending. It's about dying, and it's a great Stones song. Jagger and Richards have some supernal ballads to their credit (As Tears Go By, Wild Horses, Moonlight Mile), but busy being naughty, they did not cultivate their more sensitive side. Slipping Away is an autobiography that could be anyone's life story.

Jagger and Richards have spent a fair part of the '80s separately pursuing extra-Stones interests, playing the Bickersons in the rock press whenever they were queried about the plentiful tensions within the band. It was tough to pin down, even when the sniping drew a little blood, precisely what the boys were bitching about. Keith wanted to tour, Mick wanted to cruise the night life; individual ambitions ran contrary to the good of the band. Whatever it was, it seemed likely that they had been together too long -- 27 years, to be exact. So when Slipping Away begins and the husky fragility of Richards' vocal takes instant hold, it is clear that this is more than just a good closer for a record. Richards takes the lead for once, and Jagger glides in on harmony. It's a political gesture, a way of dealing with all that friction, even as it's being moved out front. And it's something more, an envoi, the start of a long goodbye.

The Stones always encouraged a dynamic of dissipation -- "their satanic majesties" -- and loved flirting with the flame. That shadow Keith Richards talks about was always there, deeper and darker than with most bands. Mick was a dandy about his decadence; Keith was devout. One book about the Stones even insisted (over Richards' later bemused denials) that Richards had his blood washed, changed and purified.

No surprise, then, that the last time the Stones took an American stage, in 1981, they looked like the supporting cast from a George Romero epic, specters from the boneyard of the pop psyche thirsting for a transfusion of celebrity. Now the boys have regrouped and regroomed; better care is being taken all around, and light is being made of age, of gossip, of old reputation. Charlie Watts, the Stones bedrock drummer, who was never one of the group's wilder revelers, looked momentarily startled the other day when a visiting writer extended a hand in greeting. "Sorry," he said, recovering. "I thought you were going to take my pulse."

"There's a lot of energy in the band right now," says Keith. "This new record's been miraculously fast for us. Mick and I are still holding our breath, saying, 'This can't last.' We pretty much wrote it in a month and laid down the basic tracks in about five weeks." To get the steel wheels on track so quickly, Jagger and Richards set aside those publicized vexations to find a common footing.

Richards made a solid solo album last year, which was helpful. It got him a piece of the cynosure that has always been Jagger's property. Mick turned out two solo albums himself -- the second enterprising and entertaining -- but neither enjoyed superstar success. Jagger, when interviewed, had put the Stones in a coffin, but never lowered them into the ground. When rapprochements were reached and offers tendered, he was ready to listen.

"It's the easiest thing in the world to work with the Stones, and for me to work with Mick," Keith says. "Mick and I work together perfectly. It's when we're not working that we have problems." If Steel Wheels does not have the full surprise and thermal energy of a Stones classic like Let It Bleed or Exile on Main Street, at least it holds on to a sense of continuity. No advances maybe, but as another great songwriter put it, no retreat either.

The Stones are aware of the risks. What looked cool, dodgy, outrageous a while back could look antique and stupid now, more like a Monty Python skit. "The parody aspects of it are overwhelming," Keith admits. "It'll kill the music, you know?" Watching the Stones take their chances with all this -- for revenue, for glory and for something more -- has become a new part of the show. They could become what they used to mock.

What will save them is that in a positive way, in a way that rock was never expected to tolerate, they are acting their age. The fan keeps coming back to Slipping Away and thinks about the deaths in the band family. There was, famously, the passing of Brian Jones, one of the formative members and chief sybarites, overdosed in 1969, found dead floating in his swimming pool. And more recently and just as crucially, there was Ian Stewart, the keyboard player, who died of a heart attack in 1985.

"That was probably the final nail," says Keith. "That really took the glue and the heart out of us all. It has taken us this long to reconcile being able to put the Stones together without him. Nobody knows much about Stu out there, but to the boys in the band, the Stones was his band. He was a real taskmaster, strictly rhythm and blues, jazz. You could see his face when you were writing, and if it sounded like a pop song, you knew he was cursing under his breath. In a way, we're all still working for Stu."

Easy to imagine Stewart smiling over Slipping Away. Easy, too, to hear such a stalwart pro lose patience with all this fretting about age and nostalgia. That may be the better way. Play the music, keep it up front and don't sweat the future. "Talent will survive," says Aretha Franklin, who mounted a successful tour herself this summer. "People with true talents and gifts will stand the test of longevity, with good business management." Right. Leave the fretting to everyone else. There is, indeed, a good measure of concern to go around.

Even Jagger, when pressed, can come out with an observation, characteristically jaded and spoken like rock's foremost mandarin. "There's not a lot in rock that is new," he says. "It's the same kind of chord sequences and the same kind of rhythm references and the same recycling of subject matter. But I don't think it's a problem. I mean, traditional musical forms like folk music in three chords or blues are endearing to Americans. They find some comfort in them."

Neil Young, who has a new album coming out in October, isn't bothered about restrictions of form, or of age. "Rock 'n' roll is about life, and age is a state of mind," he says. "The music's still wide open. All you need is the nerve, the nerve to do what you want to do." It takes more than nerve, though, to get played on the radio. Ken Barnes, editor of the industry trade magazine Radio & Records, figures that at least 40% of what is available to the whole American radio audience is "classic" or "oldies" rock. Demographics restrict station playlists and tie up formats; besides, as Barnes puts it, "the sheer cultural weight of what we're now calling classic rock is somewhat stifling."

Rock's been a megabusiness for much of its adult life. In 1973 there was $2 billion worth of record and tape sales in the U.S.; in 1988 total sales (including CDs) were $6.2 billion. Bucks like that encourage uncivil marriages of commerce and creativity such as tour sponsorship (the Stones are going out under the aegis of MTV and Budweiser -- careful driving home from the show, now) while discouraging the innovation, the sheer recklessness, that rock music needs in abundance.

Legends are tough to fight; legends with fat wallets become moving targets. "I grew up on most of these people. But I don't really like what a lot of them are doing anymore," says Perry Farrell of the cutting-edge Los Angeles band Jane's Addiction. "A lot of bands are willing to be commercial or a commodity. It's kind of like a drug problem. I think rock 'n' roll has money in its veins."

Peter Case, a wondrous songwriter and singer whose recent album The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar is good enough to carry like a talisman into the uncertainties of the '90s, sees the difficulty in broader terms. "Rock 'n' roll has just become a new form of Disneyland," he says. "The whole thing has got mythologized to the point where it's just a bunch of rubbish." Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold a bill of goods about the '60s, as if it were some kind of social Golden Age, when there was no Viet Nam, no social conflict. There weren't any Negroes, nothing bad happened. You have Woodstock, but you don't have the war. You have Jim Morrison as some image of sexual nirvana, but you don't have Janis Joplin for the miserable junkie she was. But Dylan, the Beatles, Aretha, the Stones, all the good music cannot be separated from the fear and the terror that people were feeling."

What matters is that the best of the music -- and the Stones made a fair portion of it -- blowtorches nostalgia away, enlarging the memory, terror and all. The music reasserts history, not sentiment, and makes the same tough demands on head and heart as more traditional literature. Says the writer and essayist Steve Erickson: "Rock displaced the impact of American fiction because it wasn't afraid to believe in itself."

As some of the greatest American novels of the past quarter-century, Erickson would put up Blonde on Blonde, Frank Sinatra's Where Are You, Little Richard's Grooviest Seventeen Original Hits, Springsteen's The River and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. And anyone who's scandalized by such an idea . . . well, they just haven't been listening. Try this simple test at home. Ask what made more sense to your life: any novel by V.S. Naipaul or any record by Bob Dylan. Any voters for Naipaul probably wouldn't have read this far.

Now maybe rap is shaking and shaping different lives the same way. It has some of that same risky, visionary power. "Rap today is what lyrical rock 'n' roll was in the '60s," Neil Young says. "The message is really important, and it's a rebirth of language," says Peter Case. All right. History will see to that.

What's happened already, and a fair, far time ago, is still happening too. There was never any cardinal rule about rock -- that was its only cardinal rule -- and it can't be written off or knocked off because, from its sheer quality and audacity, it has persisted. No rules, no predictable half-life. Rock may have become Big Business, but it still has no set agenda and no fixed address. Lots of names, lots of labels, lots of styles, and by now lots of history, some of it even proud.

But despite everything, it still can't be tightly classified or tied down. It's still a cultural orphan, hiding out on the far end of respectability: it has age, but it has no home. Or, as the greatest rock writer of all put it, splitting the distinction like an atom, no direction home. Like a complete unknown. Like a rolling stone.

Caps on those last two words at any fan's discretion.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles