The Rolling Stones: Roll Them Bones

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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.