Last year saw the UK publication of Stoned, a wonderfully insightful film/fashion/music overview of the first Britpop era (1960-1964) by Andrew Loog Oldham, perhaps best known as the man who — as their first manager and producer — helped to create The Rolling Stones. Stoned will go a long way in further educating people as to the impact this man had on ’60s pop and rock.

The London Sunday Times placed Stoned among their Top Five Pop/Jazz books last November and described the book as "a rattling yarn on the birth of the Swinging Sixties, told by a cast of characters centred around the man who managed the Stones and taught them how to succeed through misbehaviour...the fascinating strangeness of the mod scene he helped create is all here." This month St. Martin's Press publishes the book in the U.S..

We got a taste of ALO's literary endeavors many years ago when we scanned the liners notes of the Rolling Stones albums he produced and annotated. Those short paragraphs were often cryptic messages mixed with current band profiles that described the sounds you would hear on Decca or London label vinyl. He's shown tremendous growth as a writer with Stoned. Even the photos Oldham has provided illustrate the fertile and exciting environment he chronicles. Don't worry if the book only takes you to the year 1964: he's hard at work on 2Stoned, another volume covering his life 1964-1967.

Andrew Loog Oldham might have left the audio and producing/managing playing field of The Rolling Stones around 1967, but don't imagine he got out of the music game. He's been very involved in the presentation and remastering of the prestigious ABKCO boxed set collections, active in the preparation of albums like The Rolling Stones Singles Collection/ The London Years, and Marianne Faithfull, as well as seminal Sam Cooke packages.

Oldham gave the world the trend-setting Immediate label in the 1965-1969 era — the first pop independent record label in the U.K., no less. The mainstays of Immediate were the Small Faces, the Nice, Amen Corner, Fleetwood Mac, P.P. Arnold, Twice As Much, Duncan Browne; The Aranbee Pop Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Keith Richards; Eric Clapton-Jimmy Page-John Mayall-Jeff Beck and the British Blues Anthology; and Humble Pie and Chris Farlowe (1965-1970).

In the 1970s Oldham produced albums on Donovan, Jimmy Cliff, Benny Mardones, Humble Pie and The Werewolves. In the '80s he produced Bobby Womack's magnificent Poet 2. From 1989-96, he's been behind the board with top selling band Los Ratones Paranoicos, all gold and platinum LPs for the Sony Music label in Argentina. The group appeared with the Rolling Stones in 1994, and will appear with Oasis in Latin America in January 2001. In 1994, Oldham charted in Argentina on a duet with Charly Garcia of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ on Sony Argentina. Charly has been the Elvis/Johnny Hallyday of Argentina for 25 years.

The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra recorded four LP's; 16 Hip Hits (1964, featuring Mick Jagger, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page); East Meets West (1964, a tribute To the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons); The Rolling Stones Songbook (1966, from which the track of ALO's arrangement ‘The Last Time’ was used without permission by The Verve on 1997's ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’; and Lionel Bart's Maggie May (1964), an orchestral homage to the composer's stage show of the same name.

HK: Why did you write Stoned? And how long did it take to put together?

ALO: It took 21 years to put it together, 30 to blow it apart, and another five to put it all back together again.

Did you always want to tell it in first person narrative? Were there a series of rough drafts? Take me through the book’s process and construction.

A young man named Simon Dudfield entered my life in 1991 and wanted to write a book about my life. In 1996 I agreed to let him do it. When I read somebody else's, his, take on how I felt and what I did, I had to take the work over myself. Simon graciously agreed and that's how the work was born.

Simon went on to interview the voices that speak throughout the book, and Ron Ross — whom I'd met at the end of the 70's when he worked at RCA in New York on Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and then the Werewolves for me — became my Max Perkins and my editor in the true sense of the word. I hope the book feels like a movie, a successful time-transportation, because that's what it is for me.

Did you keep a diary of life in the '60s? Did you keep a file or retain your own clippings?

No, I only kept a diary when I met my wife Esther — I'd finally met somebody who made every day count. I’d kept a lot of press cuttings, ads and business mumbo-jumbo, but none of it really helped. What did the work was my mind: I knew exactly what had happened and now that I had decided to survive could tell it very well. I did spend a lot of time with the late Tony Secunda in the early ’90s, and with Dave Thompson in Seattle. I was taking an awful amount of drugs and wrote up the years that will form the second part of my triography. Once I'd removed the drug editorial, psycho baggage and babble, perceived pain and ills done unto me and flattened out the data into actuality it makes a valid part of Stoned.

Did you always make it a conscious effort to write about a subject specific period that ends in 1964, and plan another volume dealing with your life 1964-1967?

I always had three possible endings. The first was "And then I met the Rolling Stones..."; the second was "And then we went to America..."; the third was " And then we recorded ‘Satisfaction’... ". The first might have been a bit cheeky and the third would have been kind of like the end of Thelma and Louise. It worked out to be a version of the second as a natural piece of the working process. The words, like a basic track in the recording studio, just demanded that this was the moment to fade.

There has been some misinformation on the book in its early presentation in the U.S.. St. Martin's, of their own volition, subtitled the work Rolling With The Stones as it was sent out to press and media. They did it with the best intentions, I'm sure, but it is misleading data. The book is 15 chapters and, as you know, only five cover my life with the Stones. The mislead has now been corrected for its public showing and I'm happy with St Martin's’ enthusiasm and being on track. The book is not about the Stones, it has five chapters on my early days with them. Those five deal with my meeting them in early 1963, to our first recorded and career efforts through the spring of 1964 when the Beatles had just conquered America and changed the rules of engagement. The Stones and I were just about to go on our mostly disastrous first American tour. You see, before the Beatles went to America, the best possibility that pop music offered was not having to get a regular job. You must remember that Ringo would have happily called it a hard day's night if he'd made enough money to open a ladies’ hair salon and settle down with Maureen. Life was that simple until America entered the equation.

If you want a Rolling With The Stones stick with Tony Sanchez or Chet Flippo. They do that very well. I don't. This unfortunate mislead is almost a tired replay of the first Rolling Stones LP when it got released in America. In England I had created some controversy for the group, got a lot of press and pre-orders by refusing to allow the album to be titled or even have the Stones name on it. It was no master stroke — doing it the normal way would have just felt so ordinary and that was not the way I wanted to introduce the Stones to the LP world.

The Decca arm in America, London Records, stuck the stupid title across the top — England's Newest Hitmakers — and almost relegated us to the Freddie and the Dreamers trenches the same way that Rolling With The Stones does. One, it’s misleading, and two, it sounds like some roadie, drug dealer or war-zoned journalist telling all. That was not my job description: I told the Stones who they were and they became it. And when they no longer needed telling.

It's almost bizarre how you can't run the past without a present day version of it then rearing its head to test you. Stoned does tell you what we did and how things felt for the Stones and I in that first electrifying, exciting year working and getting known in the U.K. I've also told of the state of our nation and the time and conditions into which all of us rock'n'pop war babies were born.

Soho was the playground, and London was where we made all the pieces fit. I've tried to bring that feeling alive on the page — the growing pains of pop and vision. It cannot be that dissimiliar to your first Manhattan stride, except it all happened in a time when long-distance telephone calls were something your elders made when somebody had either been born or, more often, had died. It was an age of innocence that ended when America became a possibility. I've tried to write a book of British popular music and filmic influence as I, the Beatles, Who and Stones et al, were born into it. How vaudeville and World War II begot a middle-class trad-jazz which begot skiffle and imitative well-meaning pop and eventually this little cluster of about 300 white kids with a passion for rhythm'n' blues. How before the Beatles there were Jack Good, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard and the Shadows, who all ran that first all-important mile. How bigger than life, defining our behavior, up there on the screen were Elvis and Jimmy Dean.

I worked as a press agent for the Beatles, Chris Montez, Bob Dylan and the Little Richard/Sam Cooke/Jet Harris tour before I met the Stones. I worked for fashion designer Mary Quant in 1960 when fashion was the pop business — the only pop Britain had. It was a time when American Cinema gave us hope and attitude, and the pill gave us time and disposable income.

One of the best things about Stoned, irrespective of any mention of the Rolling Stones, is that the book reinforces the power American music and movies, foreign films, and U.S. independent cinema had on your life. I don't think there's a better book around that really explains how these components changed lifestyles. I mean, Johnnie Ray and John Cassavetes blew your mind, as well as the big film musicials and The Sweet Smell Of Success.

The art of the American song fired our imagination, and the French New Wave Cinema gave birth to the British working class theatre and cinema — in my case, along with the immaculately vain Laurence Harvey and the inspirational Expresso Bongo, Jean-Claude Brialy in Chabrol's Les Cousins gave me attitude, cheek, a dress code and verve. There are many life-forming images I've brought to Stoned. Picasso checking his work out smoking a spliff off the Croisette in Cannes, where I was working the pavements and the tourists. The Antibes Jazz Festival where I got my first look at the results of smack as Ray Charles shivered in an overcoat in the warm Cote D'Azur sun; the joy of Les McCann, whose elegant innovations glissed and glided across the Mediterranean blue like birds of rhythm and grace. I was a gofer there, fetching sandwiches for the likes of Mr McCann. He called me Sea Breeze, 'cause I was gone and returned in a breeze. I remember the grace of McCann: not too many men look you in the eye when you are delivering a sandwich. This was my first summer of love.

Did you have any false starts in the actual writing?

No, I’d done my homework, studied the masters who would have cause and effect on my work and I was prepared.

Like who?

The main masters were Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, and as form the Edie book by Jean Stein, as edited by George Plimpton. The examples of the autobiographies of Terence Stamp and Dirk Bogarde as regards taste, truth and decorum were of great assist as standards that are possible and what one should aim to maintain.

Then there was the eternal influence of cinema as rhythm to the word — a constant source of revival and idea. I was also assisted by reading all the Paris Reviews; by the time I started writing I stopped reading finished works, because they would confuse and complicate what I was about. But I found the process of work as detailed in the Paris Reviews with all the great writers an incredible source of light, work-ethic, order and encouragement.

How did you go about selecting the photos for the book?

David Milner at Random House and I cast a very wide net. I knew I was young, but when I saw all the pictures I realized just how young we really all were — actual babies. David Milner was a great part of the process in that he gave me the opportunity to be published based on the read.

My previous experience had been limited to American hustlers and publishing cretins in the ’80s who were only interested in a book by me if I could either tell them who killed Brian Jones or make out I was there. I'll get to them in the second book, 2Stoned.

I was very interested in your relationship with your mother. She made an impression in the book.

My mother gave my life form — something to work with and against.

How did Stoned come together? Did you do a formal book proposal? Were you turned down all over town? I really like the music era you emerged from, especially the U.K. music/pop world just before The Beatles and Stones were released on disc. Did you find publishers and houses not understanding the pivotal and seminal U.K. pop/fashion/cultural landscape of the very early Sixties?

I produced Stoned the way I was fortunate enough to produce records — as a finished master. This is it — what you see is what you get: words, music, image intact. I was not interested in writing about just what I had done; I wanted to explain the life that made us do it and gave us the space in which to breathe. The independent film mavericks that gave light to what I pursued in the record business. If anything from my world and the telling of it serves some young pup into tomorrow's version of what we did yesterday, then the tree was worth chopping. I can afford that position and enjoy it. I look forward to being a very young old fart with a doctorate.

Perhaps I'm talking from a U.S. viewpoint, but there seems to be a tendency to hide and not acknowledge the British pop scene before the first Beatles U.S. visit.

Stoned acknowledges and applauds the very essence of which you speak. I do agree with you about the time squeeze. My friend, the late great Fernando Harker, was about five years younger than me and that's the five which made the difference. He would ask about the Beatles, Pink Floyd, acid, love and peace and I would have to point out that love and peace came when fame didn't deliver and that on the way up John Lennon was as ruthless as the likes of Fernando. John just carried a guitar instead of a gun.

It's the same with Marianne Faithfull if you are the left side of 50. Her life gets concertina'd into heroin overdoses in a poor choice of location; an affinity for Mars bars and throw rugs as opposed to Sunday tea, and a dramatic relationship as cultural au pair to the young man Joan Rivers so aptly described as having "child-bearing lips". The fact is forgotten that Marianne had — between August of 64 and the summer of 65 — four Top Ten hits in the U.K. She was certainly up there with the boys.

Are there any other music books or biographies out that influenced or impacted on Stoned?

Oh, probably Nick Tosches' Dino as well. The wonderful image of how he'd given more than 100% of himself away at one point on the way up. Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life; The Strange Life Of Ivan Osokin by P.D. Ouspensky; Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News Of A Kidnapping — all great powerful flat data. And Mario Puzo's The Godfather — the most moral read this side of The Bible. They all provided great images, but it's Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess that amazed me into wanting to make my words work.

Nothing to do with influence, merely plugging others if I may, I recently read Bernie Brillstein's memoir, hated it at first, found it utterly self-serving, all the Brad Grey after-thoughts. But I gave it a second chance by flicking through the index to find people I was interested in and found it an endearing tale of a man in love with the show and business in a very moving way that I related to and recommend.

I was also taken with Dusty, about Dusty Springfield, a terrifying read about a great talent who abused herself, presumed an entitlement based on great pipes, never had a manager to slap her around and went to America — Los Angeles of all places — and got lost. Tragically, and this was the painful part of the read, she never got a life or a career. To have grown up gay in the British fifties was a big deal and something to "get over and settle down". It's hard to recall but homosexuality was against the law. I was glad Penny Valentine informed us on the dust-jacket she lives in North London with her son. I live in Bogota with mine. Who knows? Maybe Brian Epstein is managing Dusty now. "C'mon, Dusty, St. Peter's got two tables, it's a full house, you look great!" " Oh, Brian, are you sure?" "Yes, now get on the fuckin' stage, girl, or I'm calling Peter Grant..."

In Stoned you use a process whereby in addition to your research and writing, you quoted other published works and integrated some pre-interviews with some contributors. Was this by design? Was it just the case, as with Marianne Faithfull, that you couldn’t improve on what she’d said in her own book?

That was the case as regards Marianne. The Stones, as you are aware, would not speak about our time together and that remains the privilege of the act. Nik Cohn was a combination of his books and present-time interviews, as was Mary Quant. Vidal Sassoon I interviewed myself. The other voices — Pete Townshend, Chris Stamp, Lionel Bart, Tony Calder, Mickie Most, Peter Noone, Alan Freeman — all provided valuable memory about times and circumstances I was either too busy "doing" to recall and re-tell, or too stoned to recall that well, as in the case of my then girlfriend and later first wife. I have a very healthy respect for my accomplishments; but it's healthy, so I would get bored with a "I did this, I said that" format. I thrive on and feed off the collaborative art.

The other points of view were ammunition and tension, full of surprises, education and turns. Mickie Most's recall of how he felt walking through Soho with a recording contract in his pocket is just such a magical filmic moment. John Paul Jones’ description of the rules of music and conduct in the Soho of 1959 through 1961 really breathe and take the reader onto the streets of which he speaks. With Pete Townshend, John Paul Jones, Chris Stamp and Philip Townsend I spent a long time trying to capture my boyhood chum, Peter Meaden, who was such a big influence on us all. Peter managed The Who when they were known as the High Numbers. He was a kind of pilled-up Johnny Boy in Mean Streets — a vision ahead of his time and mind.

Were you ever tempted to do some writing in CAPITOL LETTERS a la some of your past liner notes? Did your life as a former publicist help prepare you for this long form book endeavor?

No and No. The joy of writing is a well-kept secret misrepresented by all the propaganda about writer's block and bleeding onto the page. It's a wonderful heady experience wherein a word can distort or define a truth and with each word you have that choice to make. You can sit there all morning writing through rubbish looking for that word or phrase that puts you back into play. You can be done, and realize the placement of one word can change the truth. It's a wonderful occasion in which the word is king but you have to run an ethical empire.

2Stoned is a tad tougher than Stoned — it's about blowing it as opposed to finding it... about America as a reality as opposed to a dream. But the process is still as magical as that first school job delivering morning newspapers on a bike. It's the same job. You work, you have a result and you deliver that result. You have to keep it simple and enjoy the game.

How did you actually collaborate with some of the people in the book. Did you do some interviews? Did you use the phone a lot?

The phone bill could remove major debt from a third world nation. Tracking down some of the people — like Jet Harris, the bass player with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, was a pilgrimistic must. He'd been a hero to me and to the likes of John Paul Jones. Jet was the James Dean of British Pop. The chase and tracking down of people I had spent a lot of life-forming time with was a movie in and of itself.

I provided Simon Dudfield with the background on my interactions with these people and how they'd affected my life and I may have had cause on theirs. That was 70% of the voices. The remainder came from actual books as in the case of Marianne and Mary Quant, although Mary was part voice/part book, and the remainder provided their own essays. John Paul Jones gave a fabulous backdrop into the London we discovered at 15 years of age, and Pete Townshend just wanted a hotel room, a pot of tea and cucumber sandwiches, then played mum and gave his all. It was an engaging process. I couldn't wait to read the results. You have to remember that a lot of the voices had, like me, been so busy "doing", that we'd never had time nor reason to compare notes. The agenda was not me — it was the time. It's like a huge tracking shot through a coming of age.

The collision of fashion and music is really detailed in Stoned.

It was not a collision — it was a union. The British Fashion business was the first pop business. Look at the photographic work of Terence Donovan and Bailey in 1960, 1961 in Vogue and you'll see the first Beatles and Stones covers and the clues at all early video attempts. Vidal Sassoon exported his haircuts, Mary Quant exported the miniskirt, David Bailey was already traveling the world for Vogue. At the same time poor British pop music had its moments, grand magical moments like Jack Good's TV shows Oh,Boy! and Boy Meets Girl, but the music we had was hardly exportable. All that ever got out and onto The Ed Sullivan Show and the American airwaves were the one-offs and the freaks: Acker Bilk, Jackie Dennis and Laurie London.

I'd like to ask you to talk about survival. You were in a different state of mind before you undertook the journey and the obligations of writing this book. As you were writing Stoned, did events and people become bigger and more dramatic in context?

Memory never goes. It just gets adjusted by the drugs and alcohol; it gets given a point of view that is not reality — what actually went down. The electric shock treatment didn't help either. And that is all I had to remove. Therefore it did not get bigger and more dramatic in context, it just got back to being flat data and being real. One U.K. reviewer confused that ability to de-dramatise with the lingering effects of coke. I think he may have been speaking from experience, but for me it's just not like that. In 1997 I rid my body of the remaining toxins that still lived in my body and affected my thoughts, actions and ideas. That's when I could really tackle the book.

Apart from that cocaine analogy and a couple of old hacks who did not think much of my graduating into survival from the John Travolta school of thought as opposed to that of Kurt Cobain, the U.K. press gave me a wonderfully fair hearing and were it not for the weather...

Drugs and booze have a longer shelf and body life than a breathalyzer or drug-test, you know. If you don't spring-clean your body they simply stay put and reside. I am not on a born-again "Drugs will kill you, booze will make your life ugly" rampage, even though they probably will damage the fabric of your life once you've moved beyond the age of being invincible and your intake is not respecting that factor. I can only speak for the 3,7,10% whatever it is, of people who have addictive tendencies. Those whose grannies’ handbags always rattled with a little bottle, who had mums with overstocked medicine cabinets, those who had an Aunt Vera who went funny after five o’clock, you'd better watch out. It's in the genes and it's inevitable: we cannot drink and dope, we cannot over-do; it will kill us or take a huge chunk out of our life. There is north of a 40% chance we'll fall to some excessive mistress. I hope it's only shopping, not shoplifting. The remaining 95% of you have a luckier run, but I still urge caution, and don't expect you to heed my warning.

The photographer Terence Donovan, who hung himself a few years back, was a larger than life gem of a man and a masterful talent but a boozer and a manic depressive. He sat me down when I was about 19 or 20 and told me he recognized the alcoholic and the manic depressive in me. Did I listen? No, I was invincible — I hadn't done my drinking and could not handle the actuality of dealing with being depressed. Now that was a great piece of humanity from Terence Donovan, it's not something you like or need to do, to sit some upstart down who is young and invincible and tell them they are fucked. There are no accidents. Just look at the statistics. Manic depressives self prescribe and a majority end up in the entertainment business or the arts.

Personally, I thought you would be a lot more bitter about some of the actions and scenes around your life covered in Stoned. Do you process the anger?

Not me, honey. Look at Richard Ashcroft. The poor lad experienced fame and being bitter in the very same beat. You made a record and millions of people listened and beat as one. It really does not get much better than that. When all is over and done with about The Verve using my recording as a backing track for ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ and passing it off as a sample, it remains one of those great pop moments that rise above the charts and into the time of our lives. I know how he made the record: I'm the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and he's a very young Blue Eyes...

As for advice, I'm only really qualified to talk about survival and the potential of the opposite for a drug addict and alcoholic. The rest is written in Stoned as experience. I would try to be an example by my acts, not give advice, save perhaps that the preface of Stoned might serve as a warning... and a great tracking shot a la Goodfellas into the Copa.

Whether you are a writer or a shoe repair artist, the meat and potatoes should be in the moment of work. The applause and recognition should be no more than the veggies or dessert. Any other split of percentages is dangerous. Or as Keith Richards once said in a beautiful display of self-protectory candor, "Art? It's the diminutive of Arthur..."

I've always felt some of your contributions to The Rolling Stones have been overlooked, especially in the revisionist world we now reside in. I think Stoned addresses specific scenes and moments where you delivered the goods and helped the band.

I can't go over all of that better than I have written it up in Stoned, so I'll leave it at that. Every dog has his moment; I'm a lucky dog enjoying another day. The bottom line is that the Rolling Stones and I know exactly what I did do, and what I did not, where I was great for them and where I was not. I hope that they read Stoned and enjoyed my take on our shared good lot... and if they didn't, they didn't.

I had a brief chat with you at the recent Brian Wilson Pet Sounds concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Can you talk about Brian Wilson, and your relationship with Pet Sounds?

Pet Sounds changed my life for the better, and travelling to the Hollywood Bowl was a privilege and a pilgrimage. For me it was like going to the Vatican and seeing the Pope. Pet Sounds changed the possibilities of pop music and the potential of what could be done in the long-play form.

On the personal side it spoke for me when I was too busy to have a personal life. The sound and music, the words of Tony Asher blended into the melodic slices of Wilson, spoke of the pain and coming of age in a way that allowed all young ambitious dudes to let him speak for us whilst we hid whatever and hung tough. It was my "Primal Scream". It certainly got Paul McCartney to work on another level.

The Hollywood Bowl Pet Sounds experience will fill my trunk for another 34 years. Thirty four years before that, Lou Adler arrived in London with an acetate of Pet Sounds. He came to my house from Heathrow Airport. I sat in smoke with Paul McCartney and that first listen changed our lives. And 34 years later Brian duplicates the record live and in perfection! Just wonderful.

You have a wonderful anecdote about Lennon and McCartney running in to you on the street and giving you ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. Can you talk a bit about your stint with The Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein? What did you learn from Epstein?

Yeah, I'm told Paul has revised bumping into me into bumping into Mick. What did I learn from Brian Epstein? Oh, the danger of being in love with the act — a lesson I'm glad to say I didn't learn. That paisley scarves didn't suit me. That if you've been lucky enough to have had an education, use the accent — it works.

Brian was a lovely and passionate but tortured man who probably should have died a few months earlier whilst he was still king and did not — propelled by self-medication — perceive of himself as a rejected old queen supplanted by some tatty little guru who in any other decade could not have got a job as a head waiter. Tough, yeah, but with love. The recent revisionist shit about "Our Brian" with his life and too many old queens’ wishful thinking served up as British Christmas TV fodder is vomit-laden and appalling. Does Paul McCartney really have to look so available and flirty and explain Brian's predilections whilst a nation burps up turkey? John Lennon had a much blunter take on it all.

Let us look at the bottom line: Brian was a passionate man who would not take a "no" on behalf of his lads and that is how we got to hear The Beatles. End of story. The rest is all anal-retentive scatology and self-serving revisionism. My book celebrates the few months I worked for the Beatles and applauds the Brian I experienced and worked for.

I liked the part of the book where you talk about your brief gig doing PR for Bob Dylan's BBC debut. Can you expand on that show and the Dylan and Albert Grossman relationship. Were you a fan of Dylan even then? Did you like his later music?

Not really, I've always preferred the idea of Dylan and what he did for America and the world with word and imagery, as opposed to the actuality. I loved his late ’70s Latin cowboy schtick; I loved Oh, Mercy and ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, but there were a lot of years in there where he seemed in need of a life. I loved him forever young once again in those January ’98 shows with Van Morrison. But like Bruce Willis, I like the idea rather than the detail. They are both American heroes and I respect their cause and effect on American and wannabe lives. They give hope and they explain in a few chosen words. That's not a bad gig to get paid for.

I know in the mid-to-late '80s you remastered for disc many seminal box sets and repackages on The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, Marianne Faithfull, Phil Spector, The Animals, the Cameo-Parkway label and Sam Cooke. What were some of the memories and feelings you had during some of the playbacks when you were assembling these sets?

The period was from 1984 through 1987, and Cameo-Parkway even earlier. The most interesting section of the Cameo-Parkway assignment was having the opportunity to study the formative grope-and-learn years of Gamble and Huff out of writing and performing and into producing. There were some great efforts and some panics on the Gamble and Huff front, such as some of the white-originated psychedelia Norman Whitfield engaged in successfully at Motown with the Temptations.

I remember one effort by G and H in which it sounded as if they'd been so smoked out by the intro to the Lovin' Spoonful's ‘Summer In The City’ that they'd just decided to use it en totale. I guess it would have sounded new on their side of the tracks anyway. There were some other gems including an LP Clint Eastwood had made whilst he was Rowdy Yates — Merv Griffin was another Cameo star. None of the work I did on Cameo-Parkway ever came out. I did the work with Phil Chapman, a great English engineer from the Olympic days.I hope it does, it's an incredible period of naff Americana.

With the Herman's Hermits remastering I was able to utilise my respect for Mickie Most and affection for Peter Noone. These two guys had a great run together and nailed down that American affection for British song and vaudeville which survives from Bob Hope to Stanley Holloway to Michael Flatley. Mickie Most was a great songsniffer, one of the best. ‘I'm Into Something Good’ and ‘There's A Kind Of Hush’ are great records.

Marianne Faithfull will understand that she was not such a pleasure. Drugs I was taking amplified some poor choices of key and material in her early work after ‘As Tears Go By’ into a nightmare. I recall dying my hair orange and black from the shock.

‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Come And Stay With Me’ held up. Our version of the Ronettes’ ‘Is This What I get For Loving You, Baby?’ did not. It was all very stiff and Ritalin. She’d had the hits but for what we were about to receive should not have included an album.

The Phil Spector experience was remarkably cold. I was only involved in sequencing and mastering a couple of the albums. There were no great suprises, just a helluva lot of musicians on each track. There were some little secrets that are Phil's to speak of and not mine to tell. The records were great, are great and always will be great.

How does that great lyric go? "One thing isn't very clear, my love/Should the teacher stand so near, my love?" Well, it's time for Phil to get out of the box Tom Wolfe measured him into way back in 1963, throw away the Prozac and Maneschevitz or whatever and get back to work... get engaged in out-flow! We all love his records and miss him making them and we miss the new songs. Call up Bob or Jakob Dylan, and go do a John Lennon with him. We deserve it!

A retired 60-year-old teenage genius is not a required or a pretty sighting. I took my family to the 1998 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to see the Mamas & Papas get inducted and Phil was there at an Allen Klein after-party and not at his very best — informing Michelle Phillips that she did not deserve the induction! I'm sure John Phillips would disagree. Phil had three bodyguards in a room full of people who had nothing but love and affection for the man. My then-16-year-old son Maximillian observed all this and asked, "Papi, you used to idolize this man?" And I had to explain why. I should not have had to do so. Steven Spielberg works — he survived the wunderkind holocaust and he too is very slight, very talented and circumcised. I hope none of this sounds like holier-than-thou-ism — I'm remain a greedy and optimistic fan of the man.

The Rolling Stones was an emotional experience that drove me to the edge of madness; the madness I tell of in the preface of Stoned. I was at a very fragile and wired stage. I did a great job, but finished the project more than a little fried. The actual listening of the Stones masters — as produced by myself, Jimmy Miller, Glyn Johns and the Dimmer Twins themselves — was amazing. It was like being let back in time into the studio and hearing the canvases wet again before they dried, and that — given my condition at the time — was wearing and impossible to confront and handle.

To do the work, however, I just remembered what the vinyl sounded like and adapted it to the present. You also had to allow what people thought that the records had sounded like and remember that their experience was mainly compressed radio — so I let a little of that in, too.

I did the CDs in Hanover, Germany, with a great Dutch engineer who used to do concerts and had done the Stones in the early seventies. I finished the project with Tom Steele at Frankford Wayne in New York. Another great assist came from Big Dom at Bell Sound who had done all my original mastering and still had his notes and recall.

You were in such a rare position of knowing many the artists, producing the actual recordings on some of them. Did you go through a series of mixed emotions when doing these projects?

I try not to miss anything and stay in present time. My friend and magician Fernando Harker once reminded me not to have tears for things that did not have tears for me. That data meant a lot to me and saved a lot of drama. I regard my job as very simple and very present time. I have to fill in a certain space in people's lives — in time and in actual musical space. Making the original recordings with a self-contained entity like the Stones, the job is just as simple, until you get cocky, and that is to provide the space, environment and people in which and with whom they can realize their potential and make universal noise. It remains a privilege to be able to be engaged what Graham Greene termed edutainment — it always was, even when I was not at my best.

Excuse me if I enthuse about the wonder, but, as you know, I only recently got the wonder back. Even whilst I was selling the Stones I could still have my life changed by John Lennon, Brian Wilson or the Shangri-La's and it was wonderful. Sound and vision remain the great communicators and electricity the mother that allowed art to move off of the ceiling and into the home and the concert hall.

You must have really enjoyed preparing the Sam Cooke packages.

Sam Cooke was the great experience of my remastering period. I'm one of the few lucky young white zits to have seen him on the Little Richard/Jet Harris tour promoted by Don Arden in England in 1962. I'd always regarded Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley, and later Bob Dylan, as the real self-producing artists of the era. Sinatra and Bing Crosby had to be the guv'ners — Keith Richards and I got to watch Mr Sinatra record, that was an education in form and producing thyself. It's an art that Julio Iglesias and Lionel Richie mastered in the ’80s — to know thyself and how to dress yourself in sound, song and polish every word so that it belongs. It places you above anything that can be deemed the A&R domain.

You only have to listen to the Sam Cooke studio chatter and Sam's instructions to know this was the reality of Sam Cooke. He wore the band like a glove. He knew what fit his hand and his command of who he was was spot on. Being able to work on remastering Sam Cooke was a joy — the Live At The Copa recording remains an uncanny experience. I spent a lot of time getting the knives and forks balanced in character. The original three-track recordings were perfect — you just had to allow for the new medium of how and where the work would be listened to and on what. I did the work with Steve Rosenthal and Jody Klein at the old RCA studios on 6th Avenue in New York. There were still a lot of the old guys around, original engineers from the day. They were so graceful and wanting to be of help.

Do you still talk to the Stones? I think you saw their 1998 New York City concert. In reading Stoned I was also reminded how important the music TV programs were to the introduction of the Stones to a wider audience. How important were Ready, Steady, Go and Shindig?

I have to save my energy on all of that area for 2Stoned. As regards the Stones en totale, to quote Sir Cliff, "we don't talk anymore"... but the other Mr Richards and I continually wish each other well via third parties and hug on the rare occasions we do meet. I embrace the very idea of him at least once a week.

Do you feel that Stoned gave you ample opportunity to chronicle and reflect on your initial period with The Rolling Stones?

It was the perfect time and forum and I'm very proud of the total result or I would not have had it published. I applaud the time, the opportunity, I applaud my England and I hope it shows. I had a dream a few years ago, prompted, as I recall, by that funny Keith Richards and Elton John spat about songs for dead blonds. In the dream I'm in some awful early-Jewish brocade-driven living room, probably Elton's, overlooking Regent's Park, and Sir Reg is whispering in my ear, " Andrew, you really should come home again..."

And I answer, "But I have, my dear, I have...".

© Harvey Kubernik 2001