On Tour With the Stones

Missed the Rolling Stones when they were in town for two concerts at the Anaheim Pond last week? And you didn’t make the dinner Tommy Hilfiger, who’s sponsoring the No Security tour, threw for Mick’s pal Dora Lowenstein at Asia de Cuba? That wasn’t you next to Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley? Oh. Too bad.

Well, pump up the volume on the “Tattoo You” CD and flip through “The Rolling Stones, a Life on the Road” (Penguin Studio, 1998), and you might as well be in the 10th row. A fat fanzine between hardcovers, the book was compiled by musician Jools Holland and Princess Dora, daughter of longtime Stones business manager Prince Rupert Lowenstein.

Photographs from 35 years of touring are interspersed with interviews with the band members and their entourage. The resulting visual and oral history is part backstage pass, part star autobiography. Jagger’s comment on the perils of touring could instill some sympathy for the devil: “It’s kind of attractive for a very young man to have all this attention . . . and girls chasing you. . . . I think we all enjoyed it--up to a point. You get used to getting your clothes ripped and pulled. But it was a bit scary.”