The Rolling Stones: Roll Them Bones

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.