Paul Thomas: Stones live album shows they used to be pretty good

Baby-boomers may indeed be the luckiest generation in history but we have our crosses to bear. To name a few: Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, the Rolling Stones.

Ah yes, the Stones. After Elvis became a Las Vegas lounge act and the Beatles were blown apart by Lennon and McCartney's poisonous rivalry, the Stones carried the banner for those heady few years when pop transcended its audience and their teenage preoccupations.

Their music fuelled a protest that shook the Establishment until its smug assumptions crumbled and provided the marching songs for a revolution that never quite happened.

So what do we say to our children and, increasingly, our grandchildren when they ask if the Rolling Stones we wax nostalgic about are in fact the same Rolling Stones who are still performing and recording today?

The self-styled Glimmer Twins, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, turn 62 this year. That's the same Mick Jagger who once upon a time couldn't imagine himself fronting a rock 'n' roll band past the age of 30.

Well, he was obviously very young when he said that so we should cut him some slack. Past 40? Why the hell not? Past 50? Are you sure this is a good idea? Past 60? As they say, there's no fool like an old fool.

Sixty-somethings trying to turn the clock back are seldom an edifying spectacle. Bill Wyman, the po-faced bassist whose little black book supposedly contained as many names as a small-town telephone directory, bailed out a few years ago having concluded that the whole circus was past its use-by date.

Drummer Charlie Watts still manages to retain his dignity, perhaps because he's never taken it too seriously. Even at the height of the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll frenzy, Charlie gave the impression he'd really rather be back at his country seat watching village cricket.

When the New Zealand cricket team played England at Lord's in 1983, Charlie joined in the post-match wind-down which extended well into the night. Realising he'd missed the last train to Wiltshire, he took up the offer of the spare bed in the team doctor's room. In the morning he autographed a photo of the doctor's wife, thanking her for permission to sleep with her husband.

No such allowances can be made for Richards and Ronnie Wood who with their emaciated frames and lined, gargoyle faces beneath the tatty remnants of 1960s mop-tops have come to resemble a pair of wicked witches in drag. Jagger still has his manic energy (thanks to a religious devotion to jogging, surely an affront to the true, hedonistic spirit of rock 'n' roll) but the strut and leer that once inspired and flustered teeny-boppers and panicked parents, politicians and bishops now seem like the attention-seeking antics of a dirty old man who can't bear to be ignored.

Jagger's metamorphosis from bane to pillar of the Establishment has been formalised with a knighthood. These days he's generally to be found in the members' enclosure at Lord's or in a huddle with high-powered investment bankers.

That is when he's not pursuing some model young enough to be his grand-daughter in a futile and demeaning attempt to prove that, despite all the signs of a sell-out, he's still a wild one at heart.

But what really makes us cringe and has made the Stones so difficult to defend is the ongoing output - the studio albums. The problem here isn't so much mediocrity as irrelevance. For the past 25 years the Stones have simply had nothing to say.

BUT now there's something that speaks for itself: the digitally remastered version of their classic live album Get Yer Ya-Yas Out. The album was recorded at Madison Square Garden, New York, in November 1969 when the band was at the height of its powers and on what was perhaps the greatest roll in rock music. Honky Tonk Woman, released lately, was the last of a string of timeless singles that began with 1965's I Can't Get No Satisfaction and they were halfway through their quartet of great albums: Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street.

It was a few months since Jagger's marijuana conviction, the culmination of a campaign of police and judicial harassment that the editor of the Times condemned as breaking a butterfly on a wheel. It was the year that Jagger's typically opportunistic flirtation with the Hell's Angels exploded in his face with the fatal stabbing of a young fan at Altamont.

It was before the drugs got out of hand and celebrity decadence set in and the creative juices started to dry up.

The Stones are introduced, almost in passing, as the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world, hype they triumphantly live up to. The album is an exhilarating as well as poignant reminder of stirring times and the outpouring of creative energy that defined a generation and changed a lot of lives, if not necessarily the world.

So what happened? The Stones stopped rolling and started gathering moss. Like the rest of us.