Mick mania: fans amass amid pyrotechnics Photo: Jon Gardiner

It was a complete sensory experience and a smooth meshing of past and present: classic rock 'n' roll, edgy new music, striking video images, dazzling pyrotechnics, an audience fired up with fervor about the band even before the first brash notes sounded. And plenty of opportunities to buy stuff.

When, in early October, the Rolling Stones came to Duke's Wallace Wade Stadium, it was all about the music--almost. It was also about gawking: A colleague told me that she and her friends were fixated as much on Mick Jagger's well-toned abs as on the so-familiar tunes--evidently, one of the dividends from several decades of strutting, jabbing, pointing, and gyrating on stage. And traveling with your own fitness team.

This was a happening that straddled the generations. There were fans attending their eighteenth Stones concert and parents determined to turn their accompanying kids into Stones aficionados. Concert-goers came decked out with tie-dyed T-shirts, T-shirts with the band's lips-and-tongue logo, and T-shirts with more obscure, but evidently meaningful, identifiers like "Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge." The Stones are, of course, a property as well as a musical act, and fans clustered around a makeshift souvenir stand just outside the stadium, vying for $65 Stones sweatshirts, $35 Stones baseball caps, and $10 Stones magnets.

With 40,000 fans in attendance, this was the biggest thing to hit Wallace Wade since the Grateful Dead played there in the spring of 1971. At the time, a reviewer in The Chronicle declared that "The rite of rock 'n' roll was enacted in Wallace Wade Stadium ... with a vitality new to Duke University." This time, the campus buzz was more subdued. Matt Dearborn, a junior and general manager of the student radio station WXDU, spoke for many of his peers in suggesting that the Stones--average age sixty-two--form "one of the great bands of our time, although it's not really our time, per se. It would be better to say that they were one of the great bands." He told me that WXDU doesn't even own a Rolling Stones album, because it's committed to "sub-mainstream" music.

A man seated next to me identified himself as the brother-in-law of Mick Jagger's local limousine driver, who had met the star at the steps of his private plane. Around 8:30, I asked him when he thought the 8:00 (as advertised) concert would start. "Whenever Mick wants to come out," he replied.

Fifteen minutes later, various astronomical objects exploded on the screen, flames erupted from the stage, and the band launched "Start Me Up." And then Mick Jagger, a small animated shape from my distant perspective but looming large on the screen in black low-rise jeans, a tight T-shirt, and a Kelly-green satin jacket, expressed pleasure at performing in "Durrrrham" and acknowledged the heroic efforts of the stage crew in putting up with five days of pouring rain. Zippo lighters spouted their ritually significant flames, cameras flashed, and a cell phone snapped open to communicate the music to a distant listener.

To the accompaniment of strident drums and guitars, Jagger sang a raunchy new song, "Oh No, Not You Again," from A Bigger Bang, the band's first new album since 1997. He was joined by a backup singer for a moody, bluesy rendition of Ray Charles' "(Night Time Is) The Right Time." He led the crowd in shouting out insistently, joyously, "You can't always get what you want." And in a predictable but eminently satisfying highlight, he pranced along a ramp that projected from the stage onto the field, for a rousing "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." He sang, " 'cause I try and I try and I try and I try." And you knew he did.

The tour selected Duke after canceling a planned concert in Atlantic City. Representatives from the promoter contacted Duke last June and then surveyed the site; according to Duke officials, they liked what they saw--the stadium layout, the size--immediately. Beginning in mid-July, meetings were held every few weeks with up to two-dozen representatives from the campus police, parking services, building and grounds, student affairs, news and communications, and others. "If you're going to host the Rolling Stones," said Mitch Moser, associate director of athletics, "you know that's pretty much as big as it's going to get." Duke representatives made a road trip to Charlottesville, scouting out a Stones show at the University of Virginia two days before the Duke concert on Saturday.

By that Tuesday, crews were moving into Wallace Wade: 265 workers, eleven buses, seventy trucks, and a giant tent that served as a dining area for that rather sizable crew. The show would include a nine-story stage with a retractable roof (in case of rain), the video screen for showing off a super-sized Mick Jagger, a sound system that rewarded the crowd with crystal-clear clarity, and the apparatus for delivering fireworks and flames. The complexity of all that infrastructure, and the promise of all that music, produced ticket prices that ranged from $60 to $350.

Aaron Levine, a senior employed for the show at $15 an hour, worked the pricey-seats section that rose from the stage. Those seats were arrayed along two spiraling metal-and-glass towers, framing the giant video screen, that might have been inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling Guggenheim Museum. Looking down from the heights was, Levine said, a notably over-thirty-five-year-old crowd, fans who elevated, in every sense, the meaning of "Gimme Shelter." One of his responsibilities was to discourage them from lighting cigarettes close to the propane tanks that powered the pyrotechnics.