Rolling Dinosaurs Still Roam the Earth

I went down to the hip section of Costa Mesa on Tuesday -- the stretch on the opposite side of town from my office. A coincidence of geography? I’d like to think so.

The amount of tuna I eat in a week notwithstanding, I think of myself as knowing what’s up in the world. Hey, man, I get it. With that in mind, I need to know: Why another Rolling Stones world tour?

Can’t these guys ever get enough? Let Johnny Mathis tour into his 70s, but, please, not the Stones. Mathis can sing “Chances Are” as long as four people in a piano bar want to hear it, but is that the Stones’ plan with “Get Off My Cloud”?

Why does this rattle me so?

Quick answer: Mick Jagger turns 62 in July.

The truth is, another Stones tour merely underscores what everybody hates about us baby boomers. Namely, that we live in the past and insist on endlessly trotting out our cultural icons, all the while nodding knowingly to one another about how we grabbed and shaped contemporary American culture in the ‘60s.

With a few notable exceptions (Dylan can tour forever), I get the point, especially when it comes to the Stones.

I saw them at the Los Angeles Coliseum in what I thought would be a final tour some 25 years after I’d first heard them on radio. That tour was in 1989.

On that night, which now seems like a lifetime ago, I liked the opening act more than the Stones -- a little band called Guns N’ Roses fronted by a bad boy named Axl Rose.

The Stones were supposed to be the bad boys, not guys who’d do sendups of their own material. Now they’re back, and I fear they’ll be doing a spot-on impression of Spinal Tap. Their lone Orange County date is scheduled Nov. 4 at Angel Stadium, with Ticketmaster listing prices from $60 to $450.

As I was saying, I headed Tuesday for the hip part of town. I wanted to let them know that, like them, this baby boomer disapproves of another Stones tour.

“Would you go to a Rolling Stones concert,” I asked Aaron Van Geen, 20. “Yes,” he said immediately. “If I had the money.”

Temporarily discombobulated, I asked why. “There’s some music that spans time and relates to kids of all generations,” he said. Agreed, but the question is whether the Stones, at 60, can still deliver the goods.

“Now that I think about it,” Van Geen says, “I don’t know if I would go to their concert, because it wouldn’t be the same as it was. In the ‘60s, it was more of an underground thing. It’s just such a different experience than what it would have been.”

Yes, yes. Now, the young hipster gets it.

I bopped farther up the street to a body jewelry shop. You don’t get any hipper than the two guys behind the counter. “I wouldn’t pay for it, but I’d go,” said 28-year-old Brian Slusher. “I wouldn’t even pay 20 bucks to see them. I’m just not in touch musically with them at all.”

His comrade, 26-year-old Jeff Myers, chipped in. “I tend to think a lot of these bands, like the Stones and Aerosmith, are pretty much parodies of what they used to be. They haven’t innovated much in the last few years. They’re still playing the same blues riffs.”

If that sounds like Myers discounts the Stones, no way. “I would listen to ‘Sticky Fingers’ over and over again,” he says, referring to the 1971 Stones album that spawned ‘Brown Sugar.’ “It’s still a great record. I would have loved to have been born early enough, when they were closer to my age. Not dinosaurs.”

When the man’s right, he’s right.

I was a high school freshman in Nebraska when the radio was playing “Not Fade Away.” As an introduction to the Stones, I wasn’t impressed. But over the next 15 years, through the ‘60s and well into the 1970s, their indisputable legacy grew. But last time I checked, this is 2005.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want to see former bad boys smiling and winking -- as their audience sips bottled water -- when they should be indignant and impetuously youthful while insisting, “Hey, you, get off of my cloud!”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.