Stone solid satisfaction

One day about 40 years ago, the Rolling Stones found themselves ogling the Beatles’ tour van, regally parked outside Royal Albert Hall. “It was covered in lipstick,” recalls drummer Charlie Watts, “and we all thought, ‘Blimey, that’s what our van should be like!’ ” Sure enough, in a few short months, the Stones’ van would be covered with an equally envy-provoking amount of lipstick.

The head-to-head competition between what George Harrison once called “the two most prominent bands in the universe” ended in 1970, when the Beatles split up. If the Beatles had been semi-corporeal god-men before, they now became deities on high. It was at this moment, when the Beatles retired to their various Mt. Olympuses and the ‘60s withered away, that the Stones solidified -- forever -- their position as rock ‘n’ roll’s undisputed earthly kings. (Led Zeppelin? U2? The Strokes? Please.) If the Beatles would reign into eternity as untouchable genial spirits, the Rolling Stones would take over the day-to-day operations of the here and now -- and continue doing it for the next 30-odd years. (The remaining original Stones, who toured extensively in the last year, are in their 60s.)

Yet despite the four decades that have elapsed since the Stones and Beatles timed their releases so they wouldn’t conflict, played on each other’s records, supported one another through drug busts and deaths and attended one another’s weddings, their respective fates and reputations remain curiously entwined: With the arrival of “According to the Rolling Stones,” a lavish, overstuffed first-person history of the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, it’s impossible not to recall “The Beatles Anthology,” a lavish, overstuffed first-person history of the world’s greatest pop-culture phenomenon. (The Beatles tome was published by Chronicle Books in 2000.) The effect is underscored by candid photographs of assorted Stones hanging out with assorted Beatles (after all, if you’re the Beatles and Stones, who else are you going to hang with?) and by passing references to the competition, extolled as “mind-blowing” or dismissed as “cute.” True to form, the Stones’ book is racier, sexier and, at times, smarter. It’s also a bit sloppy, thin in substance, somewhat tardy -- and not quite as good.

But who doesn’t love the underdog? Especially one that sprang from early ‘60s London singing about down-home girls whose perfume smelled like turnip greens. If the Beatles were working-class aspirants, the Rolling Stones were middle-class slummers, besotted with down-at-the-heels Americana. It was over a copy of “The Best of Muddy Waters” that Mick Jagger and Keith Richard (later Richards) bonded in October 1960. Mick was a bright London School of Economics student, and Keith was an arty kid from the neighborhood who strummed a guitar. Ever the wistful historicist, Richards sums up this grainy period of black-and-white London, still emerging from the shadow of World War II: “The streets were full of horse [manure] ... because there were hardly any cars then. I really miss that about London: horse [manure] and coal smoke, mixed with a bit of diesel.... A deadly mixture -- it’s probably what turned me on to drugs!”

Mick and Keith began messing about with their favorite blues tunes, adding dashes of Chuck Berry to the mix, and were soon joined by a blond waif named Brian Jones who played guitar and christened them the Rolling Stones. They picked up a long-faced older bassist named Bill Wyman and, after a fling with drummer Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, they lucked into Watts, a skilled jazz drummer and graphic designer. Their chubby gnome of a pianist, Ian Stewart, was asked to recede into the background when they were taken under the managerial wing of hype master Andrew Loog Oldham (a teen publicist-provocateur in the Beatles’ organization) and signed to Decca (the label that famously turned the Beatles down). Compromise was then, as always, the name of the pop game: The Beatles lost their leather trousers, and the Stones lost the unphotogenic “Stu.”

The first hit was an underwhelming song written for them by Lennon & McCartney called “I Wanna Be Your Man.” As Watts recalls, “We were in the world of the Beatles.” That world gave scruffy blues trainspotters like the Stones a chance to become international rock stars, and it gave them something to agitate against. The golden era of the Stones as naughty-schoolboy anti-Beatles was launched. Over the next couple of years, the Rolling Stones enjoyed their glory days, cranking out albums full of astute covers and a batch of iconic, airwave-clogging singles, including “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” arguably the greatest rock 45 ever pressed. As recordings, the stuff sounded like tinny, low-buck versions of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”: No George Martin magic for these mop-tops. But who cared? The Jagger-Richards songwriting team was taking on all comers. They looked cooler too; beautiful and ugly at the same time, vaguely threatening, a bit camp.

The ensuing narrative is familiar: The Stones’ mid-’60s slackening, as they tried, with a stunning degree of failure, to match the Beatles’ studio explorations; their amazing rebirth as debauched honky bluesmen inventing arena rock and creating such anthems as “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Brown Sugar”; their punk- and disco-era third wind, resulting in the surprise late-period masterpiece, “Some Girls” ; and the endless denouement that began with the 1981 release of “Tattoo You” and a monstrous stadium tour that saw Jagger -- ever the James Brown manque -- strutting in a Philadelphia Eagles uniform.

As a story, the Stones’ epic is, problematically, a chronicle of endurance and slow evolution rather than the condensed conquer-the-universe saga of their Liverpudlian counterparts. Yet some fascinating insights emerge from these eye-poppingly illustrated pages: Jagger, who looked incredible in a fuzzy turtleneck circa 1965, doesn’t particularly care for “Exile on Main St.,” ranked by many as the band’s finest hour. Richards, who becomes increasingly reptilian with each passing year, continues to mourn the 1973 death of his country-music mentor and favorite drug buddy, Gram Parsons. Jones, the Stones’ addled, insecure Christopher Robin, happened to live in A.A. Milne’s house. (He drowned in 1969 and still seems to be in the doghouse for it.) Wyman, who retired in 1993, hated when his bandmates swore. (Watts, a life-long jazzbo, has never been much of a Rolling Stones fan.) The post-Jones guitarist, Mick Taylor, was a bland virtuoso recalled by Jagger -- Mr. Locomotion himself -- as “a stand-still chap.” And Ronnie Wood, who in 1975 joined the band he’d always dreamed of belonging to, was once asked by a hostile Groucho Marx, “Are you a man or a chicken?” (Wood favors a roosterish hairstyle reminiscent of Foghorn Leghorn from Looney Tunes.)

The real miracle of the mature Stones is the seamless, interlacing guitar work of Wood and Richards, what they call “the ancient art of weaving.” Apparently they love to get out their vintage Gibsons before shows and pick out favorite old blues gems; as the ever-gregarious Wood, a deft mediator in the periodically testy Jagger-Richards detente, describes it, “We’ve both got a lot of Barbecue Bob in us.” As “According to the Rolling Stones” inches toward its open-ended fade-out (who, after all, knows when the Stones will stop being the Stones?), the talk turns to greatest-hits packages and the giant “inflatables” they use for stage sets. Tim Rice and Sheryl Crow weigh in with testimonial sidebars, and more ink is devoted to last year’s ho-hum “Forty Licks” collection than to Altamont, their notorious 1969 concert captured in the finest rock documentary ever made, “Gimme Shelter.” In this long twilight, when the Stones paste their logo on Visa cards and launch yet another massive tour, you wonder why Wood and Richards don’t let us (and Jagger) in on their Barbecue Bob sessions: It might make for more engaging listening than “Dirty Work,” “Voodoo Lounge” or “Bridges to Babylon,” those dire milestones of the last 20 years.

What a drag it is getting old. But the Stones were always earthy archivists, so why shouldn’t they go out there and do their shtick like the aging bluesmen they’ve always impersonated? The Beatles, for their part, were airy visionaries who ended up with nowhere to go but up into the firmament. Let the Stones stay down here a while and play among us mortals. They might not have another “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (or even “Emotional Rescue”) in them, but they’re still free to do what they want, any old time. *