Rock of Ages: THE ROLLING STONE HISTORY OF ROCK & ROLL by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker; introduction by Jann S. Wenner (Rolling Stone/Summit: $24.95; 649 pp.)

Measured by its ambitions, “Rock of Ages” is one hefty undertaking. Except on the most trivially fannish level, few if any books on rock have tried to stitch their subject’s many tangled threads into a single, chronological narrative, from wildly various beginnings to current . . . well, God knows what. Here, no fewer than three writers, parceled out one to a decade, bend to the daunting task--their names fanned out heroically across the dust jacket, like the cast of “Dawn Patrol.”

Still, the triumvirate’s been well-chosen. Ed Ward, assigned “The Fifties and Before,” is an intimate of pop’s weirder byways with a gift for sensible, uneccentric prose. Geoffrey Stokes (“The Sixties”) is the author of “Star-Making Machinery,” still the best piece of reportage on how the music biz processes its wayward art. Ken Tucker (“The Seventies and,” inevitably, “Beyond”) was one of the few white critics to keep his ears open to disco and funk when most of his brethren could not have cared less, and can write about those and other styles with a rare blend of astuteness and generosity.

Whether their approaches mesh is another question. Ward ends up writing a history, Stokes a journalistic survey, and Tucker--though without much room for extended analysis--a critique. But that’s not the book’s biggest drawback. Basically, this kind of chronological, Big-Picture overview just doesn’t make much sense for rock ‘n’ roll because it leaves out everything that makes anybody care. Trying to be all-inclusive, it stints on every particular: Fans of virtually any group or genre could toil through the index, and find only scattered, unilluminating mentions. Outsiders, meantime, would be bewildered--wondering why all these pop names and events are being presented as if their historical importance were self-evident, like the labor movement’s or the Cold War’s.

Ward’s early chapters, on their own terms, are the book’s best--and in the book’s terms, the most problematic. Ward took his research seriously; he’s dug up fascinating stuff about how radio evolved, the shifts in pre-rock musical taste in the ‘40s and the aesthetic war between big-time record labels and the more venturesome independents.

But you’d have to be pretty well-versed in rock-lit to recognize that Ward’s intent is a corrective one: He doesn’t want to re-tell the (to him) overfamiliar story of how the blues came up from the Mississippi Delta, and so he’s chosen to focus more on rock’s other, lesser-known antecedents. It’s valuable work--certainly far more so than the perfunctory recap of ‘50s rock that follows. But anyone using “Rock of Ages” as a primer would get a considerably skewed picture of rock’s beginnings.

In some ways, Stokes has the knottiest job. More than most popular art, rock has always caromed off of, and into, unruly questions of race, class, and politics--that’s one reason we stay fascinated with it even today. But only in the ‘60s were the links and the payoffs so plainly evident.

Stokes certainly has it in him to make a few judicious comments about the whole stew. But instead, straitjacketed by the definitive-history concept (and apparently unwilling, like Ward, to subvert it), he’s reduced to ruminations only a few cuts above Times jargon: “Yes, the symbolism was too easy,” he writes of those who saw the Rolling Stones’ disastrous 1969 Altamont concert as the end of an era, on the way to concluding a chapter that uses Altamont to symbolize the end of an era.

Trying to crowd in a little of a lot, Stokes makes some miscalculated choices. The junky, cheap garage-rock of the ‘60s ultimately had more staying power than most of the period’s just-like-real-Art experiments, but--except for one nod to “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians’--it’s all but left out. And why detail the financing of the first Monterey Pop Festival when the hardball economics of Woodstock--whose “free festival” legend had a lot more impact, and whose movie made a lot more money--aren’t even mentioned? The required revolving-door approach to every topic only muddles our sense of how rock developed in its most explosive decade, or how that converged with the decade’s societal upheavals.

“Rock of Ages” more or less falls apart in Ken Tucker’s section, though that’s not especially his fault. It’s not in mortal power to make a coherent story out of post-’60s rock, and Tucker only tries intermittently. He’s more willing to evaluate than his co-authors, and some of his snap verdicts, like this one on Billy Joel--”condescension perceived by fans as sympathy”--sound bracingly sharp after so much pudding. But the compromise he tries to patch between his analysis and the nature of the book he’s trying to put it into lead Tucker into some bad impasses, as when a quick take on Springsteen’s impact gets shoehorned, awkwardly, into a chapter called “The Postpunk Implosion.” He’s also got the chore of writing the sonorous finale that no book like this is complete without--you know, the one bringing past, present and future together, all in one rotund sentence.

But the writers were all pretty obviously hired hands, doing their dutiful best in a particularly unwieldy paint-by-numbers game. The real fault lies with Rolling Stone Press, which has been trumping up similar “histories,” “illustrated histories” and other quasi-official guides for some years now, leaving the lucky consumer to guess whether they’re supposed to supplement or supersede each other. Each has been more “definitive” than the last; each has had less to do with the subjective passion that makes rock ‘n’ roll count.

It’s a yard goods approach, as is the teaming of three writers with very different personalities, gifts and quirky interests to produce a book that lets them display none of those qualities. If Rolling Stone really wanted good writing on rock ‘n’ roll, they might start by letting writers use their brains and feelings to explain why the music they care about matters to them, instead of commissioning them to help concoct these corporate white elephants. But that’ll be the day.