Couple things to report. One: the Rolling Stones are old. Two: there’s a new book just published about them. Three: Despite being old, the Rolling Stones are still ridiculously popular.

Hmmm …

Here’s the skinny. On Saturday, The Observer covered Christopher Sandford’s latest called The Rolling Stones: Fifty Years, a book about how, after so much exposure and wear, the band still sits, amazingly, high up on pop music’s totem pole.

According to the article, the Stones popularity relies on nostalgia:

Their music has little enough to do with it. As Christopher Sandford comments in his fine biography of the group, they peaked creatively in the mid-1960s and everything since then has been a matter of scrupulous, mercenary “decline management”. The decline, however, is shared with their ageing fans. Their original appeal, as the New York Times pointed out in 1972, was as a scandalous symbol of “generational independence”; now that we baby-boomers are too rickety to do much dancing, the Stones serve as a precious relic of our teenage days. Encouraged by them, we can all grow old disgracefully.

I’ll accept for the moment that the Stones’ perpetual heyday comes from refreshed enthusiasms arriving from generations of aging fans. But what does that say about their music? Does Sandford really contend the Stones fell into decline as early as the mid-1960s?

All this begs the larger question as well: how do we accurately describe rock groups, or authors, for that matter, as being in their prime?

According to www.jktoole.com, a site for a documentary about John Kennedy Toole, that author’s prime came before anybody had even heard of A Confederacy of Dunces:

“One thing is certain in this story; in one fatal moment the world lost a great observer of mankind, a brilliant author in his prime and a writer with the potential to tell the story of the mysterious South.”

And yet Toole gained very little money or success as a living author.

For their part, the Rolling Stones made significantly less money — even when factoring adjusted rates – in the mid-1960s (their suposed prime) than they did on A Bigger Bang Tour in 2005-2007, which grossed over $550,000,000.

Considering both versions, when does something really hit its prime, and is that prime defined by earnings, creative output, or both?