It's only rock 'n' roll

Exile on Main Street : A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones
By Robert Greenfield
Da Capo, 258 pp., illustrated, $24

33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume 1
Edited by David Barker
Continuum, 264 pp., paperback, $14.95

Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Pop, Country, and More
Edited by Mary Gaitskill
Da Capo, 329 pp., paperback, $15.95

Viewed from our own rather straitened time, the lifestyle maintained by the Rolling Stones in the early 1970s takes on the character of a selfless and earnestly undertaken experiment. What happens, for example, if you go into tax exile in a villa in the south of France, invite a floating crew of libertines, beauties, drug dealers, and zonked aristocrats, install a recording studio in the basement so you can work on your next album, and then find that your lead guitarist has taken too much heroin to come downstairs? What happens if you then try to hold a wedding in this villa?

These are the scenarios that the Stones are working through in the summer of 1971, at the Villa Nellcote , and Robert Greenfield in his "Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones" gives us all the variables. The villa's atmosphere, with its cross-hatching of Riviera sunlight and druggy darkness, is well caught, and some of the retrospective glances are quite sharp: Of Anita Pallenberg , all-round Stones consort and "authentic life artist," one source comments that she "really had some kind of power over both Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] and she was very much an architect of their image. She herself had an architect mind. She was very much like Karl Rove."

But having detailed the various chemicals, personalities, and erotic ranco rs that went into the Stones' 1973 album "Exile on Main Street," Greenfield exhibits a surprising incuriosity about the record itself. Of the music of "Exile," its technical or creative components, its uniquely fatigued bluesiness, we learn -- from this book -- nothing at all. Nor is the omission accidental: "Those seeking a track-by-track analysis," snorts Greenfield in his final chapter , "are hereby advised to consult the works mentioned at the end of this book, this sort of travail having always been the bailiwick of rock critics as opposed to rock writers, assuming there are in fact any of them still left alive." If there's analysis to be done, in other words, let the nerds do it: Greenfield's discussion of "Exile" turns out to be a hasty collage of Wikipedia references and quotes from CD Times.

The attitude on display here is an unfortunate legacy of the 1970s, a decade in which the rock journalist became both a countercultural buccaneer and a wallower in backstage booze, to the lasting confusion of rock journalism itself. Awed by the power of the new mega-rock and with an unprecedented number of magazine editors barking for his copy, the rock writer gratefully cast off his critical faculties and plunged into the mainstream, where all that was required of him was a kind of groovy lifestyle journalism. There's no question that Greenfield can write about rock stars; a pity, then, that he has refused in this case to write about rock music.

No such prejudice hampers the authors gathered together in the anthology "33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 1." The "33 1/3" imprint, which began in 2003, is a series of pocket-size monographs featuring writers in a no-holds-barred, one-on-one engagement with their favo rite album: John Cavanagh on Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," Elisabeth Vincentelli on "ABBA Gold," and so on. Here is the rock critic at liberty, the nerd unleashed, blasting brainwaves back down the years or decades from his (generally his) vinyl-lined crib. Not that all the writers excerpted in "Greatest Hits" are professional rock critics; Bill Janovitz, for example, whose essay on "Exile on Main Street " patiently does much of the work that Greenfield declined to do in his book, is the singer/guitarist of Boston band Buffalo Tom. But an essential rock-critical impulse, an urge or need to understand, is behind most of these pieces, and it produces some very penetrating prose. Chris Ott's description of the recording of Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures," which took place under the spell of demon producer Martin Hannett , is that most gratifying of literary hybrids, technical writing at the level of poetry. Here he is on the track "Candidate": "Haphazard, creeping guitar squeals rise and fall in the distance, swirling between both channels; Hannett's snare treatment is at its most exposed, punching with first contact and quickly dispersing as controlled, shimmering high-end decay." If rock criticism is to have a future, one feels, it will have something to do with the discipline and compression of lines like these.

Anthologies like "Greatest Hits," and like Da Capo's "Best Music Writing 2006," grant the reviewer the happy option of simply pointing out the good bits. Of the pieces collected in the latter volume I would direct the reader to three in particular: David Marchese's rollicking panegyric to the heavy metal band High on Fire , Katy St. Clair's "A Very Special Concert: The Enduring Bond Between Huey Lewis and the Developmentally Disabled," and John Jeremiah Sullivan's extraordinary "Upon This Rock," a 30-page account of his visit to a Christian rock festival. These features were written for, respectively, a website, an alternative weekly, and a glossy men's mag , and they share the snap and confidence of the best entertainment journalism, as opposed to the mossier cogitations of some of the critics in "Greatest Hits." An easy read, however, is no barrier to depth: contemplating some of the evangelical rock fans at the Creation Festival , Sullivan is struck at last by their "unimpeachable dignity." As Marchese slumps back into the office after his road trip to see High on Fire, one of his co-workers offers the pallid consolation that heavy metal can be a great escape from life. "Heavy metal is an escape from life?" muses Marchese. "The poor bastard. Heavy metal is life."

James Parker is the author of "Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins."