No rocker has sold sex better, lived its excesses with more zeal, or gotten in more trouble because of it, than the ageless Mick Jagger, who once rode a 20-foot-tall inflated phallus on a concert stage just for jollies. He also once told TV interviewer Dick Cavett he absolutely could see himself still rocking after 60.

He was 29 at the time.

Give the ol' devil his due. Jagger's band, the Rolling Stones, rolls on, shattering records with every tour -- Miami's AmericanAirlines Arena was a fast sell-out for Monday night's concert -- and the group's new CD, A Bigger Bang, is the Stones' best CD in 25 years.

But is time still on their side?

Jagger is 62 now. Guitarist Keith Richards is 61, drummer Charlie Watts is 64 and Ron Wood, the baby of the group, is 58. Last year, Watts battled throat cancer and injuries from a car accident, and personal demons limited Wood's studio time during the recording of A Bigger Bang -- he appears on 10 of the 16 tracks.

And the Stones insist this isn't a farewell tour.

''I've said it before -- this is all I can do. I'm a lousy plumber,'' Richards told British rock magazine Q in its October issue.

PLAYING THE NEW STUFF

The Stones aren't one of those bands of aging rockers who depend solely on nostalgia for concert sales. The Eagles, for instance, offer rote versions of old songs in concert and haven't released a new album in 26 years. Paul McCartney's recent tour opener in Miami was another trip down memory lane, liberally salted with one Beatles classic after another. He's made dozens of records in the past 30 years, but only four of those songs found their way into his 38-song set.

The Stones, God love 'em, play four new Bigger Bang songs, including Oh No, Not You Again -- which Watts has joked should be the tour's name -- and the naughty Rough Justice, which finds Jagger up to his old horndog ways. In previous cities, the Stones pulled out the rarely performed '80s New Wave-era She's So Cold, '90s album tracks You Got Me Rocking and Out of Control, and saved its '60s hits like Jumpin' Jack Flash and (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction for encores.

The tour, with ticket prices topping $400, is expected to gross a heady $200 million.

Reviews, so far, have been stellar, with The Baltimore Sun echoing the consensus: ``The Stones still rock harder than many bands less than half their age.''

When the Stones appeared as friendly rivals to the Beatles in 1962 under the sobriquet England's Newest Hit Makers (long before the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band tag came into being), the group epitomized the political climate of its period.

Just listen to the foreboding opening of Gimme Shelter and you're sent hurtling back to a time when the '60s peace and love movement was overshadowed by Vietnam, political assassinations and the Altamont disaster.

Oh, a storm is threat'ning / My very life today /If I don't get some shelter / Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away / War, children, it's just a shot away.

''Music does have a huge emphasis on the way a culture interacts,'' says John Lennon, 30, a visiting assisting professor of American Studies at the University of Miami. (Yes, that is his name.)

That era theoretically ended with the Altamont concert in 1969, when members of the Hell's Angels gang served as security -- and one of the bikers stabbed a fan to death during the Stones' performance. Around this time, the blues-based Stones answered The Beatles' old-fashioned swan song Let It Be with the deeper, darker and more potent Let It Bleed.

THE ANTI-BEATLES

''The Stones took over, became the anti-Beatles and the darker side of what rock can represent,'' Lennon says. ``They were a reflection of the time and from the begining they were good marketers and still continue to be good marketers. That is part of who they are.''

The image cemented itself in the '70s, arguably the Stones' creative heyday in the studio.

The band epitomized the excesses of the '70s during a time when New York hotspot Studio 54 challenged President Carter for newspaper headlines with tales of rampant drug use, a throbbing disco soundtrack and sex on display. Jagger was a jet-setter, married, but with a succession of groupies, and Richards' heroin use resulted in an arrest in Canada.

No album in the Stones' canon better represents this decade than the scabrous Some Girls in 1978, a disc many point to as the last great Stones release. When rock needed to marry disco, the hot trend of its day, the Stones responded with Some Girls' No. 1 single, Miss You, Jagger's lusty ode to his then-partner Jerry Hall.

''Their sexuality was perfect for the pre-AIDS times, before feminism took hold, machoism and all that stuff,'' Lennon says.

SIR MICK

Somewhere along the way, however, the Stones took a turn from Satanic Majesties to meeting Her Majesty.

Jagger was knighted by the British monarchy in 2003, much to Richards' chagrin. ''I'd turn it down,'' he says in the Q interview. ``You have to kneel and I'm not going to kneel for no one.''

It's a long way from the anti-establishment days in which the Stones got started. Jagger went ''from being this icon of rebelliousness to being a grandfather shaking his hips and bringing in millions of dollars,'' Lennon says.

But some things never change. When the Stones played black music in segregated America during the Kennedy administration, they were dubbed subversives. Today, Pope Benedict XVI, locked in a time warp of his own, calls the Stones music ``evil.''

Curiously, as the United States grew divided under both Bush administrations, the Stones' music has become more direct and outspoken.

Street Fighting Man, in 1968, musically captures the tumult of the times but its politics are vague, noncommittal: Well then what can a poor boy do / Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band / 'Cause in sleepy London town / There's just no place for a street fighting man.

Contrast that with 1991's obscure Highwire and its commentary on the Gulf War: We sell 'em missiles, we sell 'em tanks / We give 'em credit, you can call up the bank / It's just a business, you can pay us in crude / You'll love these toys, just go play out your feuds.

The new CD's Sweet Neo-Con blasts the current administration: You call yourself a Christian / I think that you're a hypocrite / You say you are a patriot / I think that you're a crock of [expletive].

''The thing is, when we started we sort of were the politics without ever intending to be,'' Jagger told Q. ``We were endangering civilization supposedly by not smiling. But Neo-Con is my perspective on elements in America.''

There may be another reason for the band's long-lived success. Maybe the late Frank Zappa nailed it when he said, ``Rock music is sex. The big beat matches the body's rhythms.''

The Stones' music is anapestic, meaning two short beats, a long beat, then a pause, the exact opposite of our heartbeat.

'Beatles songs are typically -- though not always -- more harmonious . . . whereas the Stones' anapestic rhythms hit the nervous system in a more discordant, exciting, well, frankly sexier way,'' says Miami marketing strategist and Stones fan Betsy Flanagan, 50.

''The difference comes through in the emotional response the listener feels,'' she says.

'It's sex. Sex! That's an important component of rock 'n' roll and it's timeless.''