At 17, Andrew Loog Oldham was working publicity for Mark Wynter. At 18, he was handling The Beatles. And at 19, he discovered The Rolling Stones and stayed by their side for the best of the rest their career. Which means, by the time he quit as their producer/manager in 1967, he had already seen, done and achieved more in five years than most rock entrepreneurs achieve in 50.
   Certainly he did more than one book could encompass: Stoned, the Loog's long awaited (and even longer gestating) autobiography is simply the first volume of conceivably several and is less a library of life with the Stones than a travelogue through the wreckage of postwar, pre-Beatles Britain. The book ends in 1964, which means Jagger and Co. don't even get a look-in until page 184.
   But if you ever read Colin McInnes' epic of London Mod, the classic Absolute Beginners, and tried to peel away the hopelessness that permeates its every page, Stoned is what you'd be left with. Oldham himself writes with heart-pounding immediacy — as his teenaged self walks through Hampstead Village home from a night at The Witch's Cauldron, its 50-something counterpart is striding alongside, and the reader is there beside them as well. It's a magical feeling.
   But Stoned is more than an autobiography; it is also the story of ambition and how reality — even at its grimmest and grimiest — is nothing more than what one makes of it. Oldham was not born with any special social privileges, was not placed on the road to success by greasing the wheels of contacts and cronies. He was merely a dreamer who made his dreams come true, an ability that almost everybody has, but of which

precious few are aware until it's too late. True, his first encounter with the Stones themselves did come about through friendly tip-off. But if he hadn't met them, he'd have found someone else, and history would not have been changed, it would have had a few different names.
   Stoned is not a "fast" read, neither is it a salacious one. There is none of the sex and drugs and fleshy protuberances with which other Stones biographers have laced their cocktails — which doesn't necessarily mean that such delights are not present, simply that there were usually more interesting things going on at the same time. Gene Pitney's attempt to wring a song out of that most frustrated of songwriters, Brian Jones, is merely one of the manifold genies that Oldham despatches to put legend back in its place.
   Neither, admirably, do we have to take Oldham's own word for any of this. The list of interviewees in the acknowledgements reads like a who's-who of almost-swinging London, from Mary Quant and Vidal Sassoon to Vicki Wickham and Jimmy Greaves. It's to Oldham's credit that not only does he leave in some less than complimentary details, he doesn't try to wriggle away from them either.
   Almost alone of the book's most significant characters, the Stones themselves deigned not to contribute anything to Stoned, but their absence does not show. Indeed, like the best of the records that they made with Oldham, it doesn't really matter whether they're there or not. He'd already decided what they were going to sound like long before the band arrived in the studio, and after a few chapters in the company of Stoned, you'll know how he knew.
   Maybe they should call him up for their next album.