Aretha Franklin started out strong at the House of Blues on Friday night, opening with a fiery rendition of "Respect," and then sliding into a smooth and soulful tribute to "Chicago's gentle giant," Curtis Mayfield. And it only got better from there.

One of the highlights of the club's 10th anniversary bookings, the 64-year-old Queen of Soul fronted a 23-piece band -- including five backing vocalists and her son Teddy White Jr. on lead guitar -- and proceeded to offer a 90-minute overview of a five-decade career that has spanned at least twice that many genres, from transcendent gospel to sensual torch songs, and from gritty R&B anthems to a Puccini aria.

At this stage in her career, Franklin no longer tours to promote new product or to build a reputation that has long since been assured. But unlike some of her contemporaries, she doesn't simply coast through her shows, either, offering truncated medleys, unduly leaning on the backing vocalists and counting the minutes until the end of her set. (The only concession to her age and diva status: a break at mid-set that found her leaving the stage for 15 minutes while the band vamped.)

The singer stretched out to claim the standards "Beyond the Sea" and "Mack the Knife" as her own; sat behind the grand piano for a detour into soulful jazz; dug deep into her considerable catalog for several blues that emphasized her octaves-spanning powers, and reprised the version of "Nessun Dorma" that she delivered on the 1998 Grammys as a last-minute replacement for Luciano Pavarotti.

In the process, a crowd that was happy just to bask in the presence of a legend heard plenty of what earned her that position and the music world's enduring respect.

Rock Books

Time for another installment of this column surveying the recent crop of music books: Turn it up, and read on!

The pick of the litter here is without a doubt One Train Later, a memoir by Police guitarist Andy Summers (St. Martin's Press, $24.95). The title refers to the chance meeting Summers had with drummer Stewart Copeland: If either had caught a different train one afternoon in the mid-'70s, one of the most successful bands in rock history might never have come together. The attitude Summers displays in that title -- bemused, non-nostalgic and distanced enough to be both very funny and brutally honest -- prevails throughout the book, which is evenly divided between his early days on the fringes of the British progressive rock movement and the surprising rise of the Police concurrent with (but never really a part of) the punk explosion.

The book ends with the demise of that beloved trio, leaving more than two decades of solo work unaccounted for. But that's fine, given that most of us want to read about the famously fractious battles between bottle blonds Summers, Copeland and Sting, and the writer/musician doesn't disappoint. "This time the studio feels more like a canvas for dirty fighting," Summers writes of recording "Ghost in the Machine" (1981). "The stakes have been raised, and instead of rejoicing in the unbelievable success we have created together, we lose sight of the big picture and go on in emotional disorder, each one of us battling for his own territory. ... There is a humiliating episode in the studio one day when as a result of all this tension and loss of perspective, Sting goes berserk on me, calling me every name under the sun with considerable vehemence, leaving everyone in the room white-faced and in shock."

Ah, yes, we always knew Sting was an egotistical jerk! But Summers doesn't shy away from his own rock-star foibles, and the combination of this unflinching frankness and the author's considerable insights into the making of the group's best music combine for illuminating reading, leaving fans appreciating the group's accomplishments all the more, and marveling that it ever managed to create anything at all.

"Part of this book's argument is that revolutionary moments in pop culture actually have their widest impact after the 'moment' has allegedly passed and the ideas spread from the metropolitan bohemian elites and hipster cliques that originally 'owned' them into the suburbs and outer regions," Reynolds writes.

That passage underscores the shortcomings in this book. One is Reynolds' occasionally insightful but often dense and academic style (the London-born critic's earlier books include the similarly problematic Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture); the other is the incredibly wide scope of this project, which inevitably leads many important and influential groups under-covered. (Besides the Police, there's the Cure and XTC, to cite just as few). It certainly doesn't help that the American edition trims several hundred pages from the original British version -- without mentioning the abridgement -- so perhaps we should blame the publisher instead of the author for this overview's sometimes sketchy nature.

"I've discovered that a rock star and a brain surgeon have something in common," the author writes. "It's not that either one would be particularly good at the other's craft (and I'm not sure which crossover would produce the most disastrous results), but rather that each one is capable of performing his craft brilliantly, and generating huge sums of money, without the need for any financial skills."

The book won't necessarily make musicians financial and legal experts, but it definitely will serve as a thorough primer about the questions they need to ask and the most obvious land mines to avoid.

Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $26.95) is the second installment of David Crosby's autobiography; like its predecessor, Long Time Gone, it was co-written with Car Gottlieb, but it's not nearly as essential, since it focuses more on recent events than its subject's much more important years with the Byrds and sometimes partners Stills, Nash and Young. And finally, for truly hard-core progressive-rock geeks, Jim Christopulos and Phil Smart have given us Van Der Graaf Generator: The Book, a massive, 317-page, hardcover examination of every intricacy in the history of Pete Hammill and his mates in a band that, let's face it, 99.9 percent of rock lovers have never even heard of. But what a treat for us fans! (Available online at www.vandergraafgenerator.co.uk/book_sell.htm.)