The Rolling Stones: Roll Them Bones

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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.