Not Necessarily Stoned, But Readable

Even if you've swapped body fluids with Mick Jagger or needles with Keith Richards, you'll never really understand those guys - forests have fallen in attempts to describe their mystique. Former Rolling Stones Svengali Andrew Loog Oldham, on the other hand, resists such analysis in his breathless memoir Stoned. Why get excited about pop stars when you yourself are so much more fascinating?

Far from trading in rock group tittle-tattle, Stoned finds its strength in its captivating anti-hero, who begins the book awash in chemicals and adrift in New York sometime in 1995, and his pin-sharp portrait of the pre-Beatles English pop scene, when cash-rich kids were hungry for rock messiahs.

It helps that Oldham has obtained interviews with era scene-shakers like Vidal Sassoon, Lionel Bart, and legendary manager Don Arden - they add needed shades to his purple-prosed self-portrait, and far from providing mere hagiography, they provide valuable insight into the scene's culture of the day. Minor musician Tony Meehan, for instance, explains how English record companies rode the early rock boom by giving their homegrown teen idols black American hits to re-record, concluding, "There was no English rock 'n' roll."

But naive talents like Billy Fury were too excited by their deals to care that the industry expected rock to quickly disappear. When 16-year-old Oldham leaves school in 1960, he claims that "British rock 'n' roll had reached an all-time low; performers who'd had magic moments had now become tame and lame, knocking out slushy ballads, from sex 'n' shake to slop 'n' rot, en route to becoming 'all-round entertainers.'"

Enter Oldham, a flame-haired bastard child turned culture vulture, just as interested in the backstage impresarios as the musicians themselves. Impeccably dressed, the teen swears by the holy trinity of lit and film: Room at the Top (John Braine's story of a social climber), Expresso Bongo (a Wolf Mankowitz novel whose narrator is the ruthless manager of a bongo-whacking pretty boy), and The Sweet Smell of Success, the 1957 classic whose center is an acidic power struggle between fast-talking publicist Tony Curtis and columnist Burt Lancaster.

Oldham wants to be all of them, and Stoned sizzles with his nervy ambition. He gets his picture in the London Evening Standard as an advocate of gray shirts, leaving the paper's fashion editor to explain, "He basically wanted some publicity, but because he wasn't working it was hard to know what the publicity would be useful for." Oldham lands at the epicenter of Sorta-Swinging London, working days at Mary Quant's Bazaar boutique, evenings at Ronnie Scott's jazz club, and nights at Soho's Flamingo club. "This life I had dreamt of," he writes, "existed."

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