“BUT DON’T YOU MISNAME IT...”

Unless you count the supercool fact that it’s named after a Def Leppard song, there ain’t a whole lotta laffs in Rolling Stone’s latest rock-history text Rock Of Ages, which is a shame; rock-scribing’s always more credible when it at least tries to connect to the excitement the music’s been known to provide, but the trio of well-respected vet scholars who contribute a chronological 200-pages-or-so each here are too self-serious to climb down from their pseudo-objective third-person lecterns (and, in ’60s-chronicler Geoffrey Stokes’s case, ditch the uppity foreign-phrasedropping and hokey technical jargonese) and clue us in on why this garbage really matters to them.