Andrew Loog Oldham and the London of the '60s

By Richard Abowitz (rabowitz@vegas.com)

The rise of rock brought with it a new breed of managers who could be as flamboyant as the artists they championed. Though by far less written about and examined men like Colonel Parker (Elvis), Albert Grossman (Bob Dylan), Brian Epstein (the Beatles) and Andrew Loog Oldham (The Rolling Stones) reinvented the business of entertainment as surely as their clients transformed popular music.

These men turned the industry establishment on its head in order to win their artists unprecedented creative control and riches. They also managed to earn plenty for themselves in the process. But along with the flash and money came all the risks of the rock'n'roll lifestyle, and, of these four managers, only Andrew Loog Oldham has survived to tell the tale.

Oldham was born in London in 1944 to a single mother whose relationship with a wealthy married man helped fund her social pretensions. But in class-obsessed England, that left Oldham, a bastard child of another man's mistress, in an ambiguous position. He responded with an active fantasy life that wound up transforming him. Obsessed by turns with film, music and fashion, the ambitious Oldham began to create himself into his dreams.

"He was performing all the time," recalls one childhood friend in Stoned: A Memoir of London in the Sixties, Oldham's autobiography. "He was never off. He was always on stage." Another recalls, "He was the most concerned­about­clothes person I ever met in my life to this day."

It should be clear from this that Stoned is not exactly a memoir. It's compiled out of reminisces from a variety of interviews and sources, mixed in with extensive quotes from Oldham himself. The result, however, is a far more vivid view of Oldham than a more traditional autobiography would likely reveal.

Two people recall Oldham confessing to assaulting his mother, for example. It is a charge to which Oldham's denial is at best lukewarm. "I do not recall knocking my mother about in any way, shape or form," he writes. But he hedges with, "I may well have whacked her ... and blanked the act out." Other voices in the book also bring a welcome reality check to Oldham's admittedly unreliable memory.

After doing some early publicity for the Beatles, Oldham saw the Rolling Stones perform in 1963 at the urging of a friend. "I'd never seen anything like it," he recalls. "They came on to me. All my preparations ambitions and desires had just met their purpose." Even before he signed a management contract with the Stones, Oldham called Brian Epstein up to resign his job with the Beatles.

Though Oldham paints Brian Jones as the group's early leader, Oldham bonded more with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Stoned moves quickly through Oldham's more famous early interactions with the Rolling Stones, adding little to what has already been written by others. It was Oldham who created the Stones' image as the anti-Beatles. It was also Oldham who locked Jagger and Richards in a room together in order to force them to write songs.

Oldham's most notorious action, though, was kicking the late keyboardist Ian Stewart out of the Rolling Stones: "I told Brian and Mick that it was OK for Ian Stewart to appear on records and do live radio, but their ivory thumper could not be seen in photos or on TV. I compounded the cruelty by adding that he was ugly and spoiled the 'look' of the group."

Stewart became the group's driver, roadie and side man. To this day, Oldham doesn't comprehend the magnitude of this. He even denies having kicked Stewart out. "And that meant including Stu, not excluding him altogether. Far from it: Stu had the van and he played great." Yeah, that's almost as good as being a Rolling Stone.

It should be clear that whatever his accomplishments--and there are many--Andrew Loog Oldham has at best a tarnished legacy. Stoned breaks off in 1964, leaving much of its most controversial aspects unexplored. From a preface, we learn that Oldham was living on his past as a washed-up and drugged-out luxury hotel dweller in 1995 when he decided to make changes.

And from acknowledgments in the back of the book, it seems that the help he sought was Scientology. It's perhaps fitting to think that in the end, a huckster like Andrew Loog Oldham got taken by a far greater charlatan in L. Ron Hubbard.