So that's how they made that album

With all due respect to their routinely heralded "Exile on Main Street," the best Rolling Stones album is "Beggars Banquet," recorded 40 years ago this summer and home to, among other earthy delights, "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Street Fighting Man."

In the new book "Legendary Sessions: The Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet" (Billboard Books), author Alan Clayson ("Backbeat") digs into the album that reflected seismic shifts in the band, among them the creative return to the Stones' R&B roots, the marginalizing of onetime leader Brian Jones, and the growing dominance of Mick Jagger and Keith Richard (above).

Fanatics expecting a blow-by-blow account of the Olympic Studio sessions may savage this volume as more immaterial backstory than pertinent information. And the almost stream-of-consciousness pen behind Clayson's opinionated observations can make the book seem chaotic.

But there's a beguiling fascination to be enjoyed here, even for cranky know-it-alls, in Clayson's flip British wit and the sheer volume of links and disconnects he unearths. A long, snaking path it can be. While his notes on how the Stones aped Robert Wilkins on "Prodigal Son" and the influence of the Velvet Underground on "Stray Cat Blues" are succinct, Clayson devotes several pages to the use of flutes in rock and the artiness the Stones left behind with "Beggars."

He roams not only through other Stones albums (connecting the musical "Hair" to "Satanic Majesties"), but also managers, girlfriends, drug busts, goings-on in other bands, and the whole '60s rock zeitgeist. Nonsense? Maybe. But Clayson's gonzo style and staggering recall of the times capture the how and why of "Beggars Banquet" as well as any book could. [Tristram Lozaw]