Not Necessarily Stoned P2

Not Necessarily Stoned, But Readable continued...

After a sojourn in France, where he meets Picasso and peddles stories of runaway heiresses to the papers, Oldham returns and enters the world of PR. The 19-year-old quickly learns that nothing gets attention like outrage, promoting a Sam Cooke/Little Richard tour with the unfortunate blurb, "The kids are gonna go crazy, they're gonna rip the seats from out of the theatre! Come and see it!" He was fired for his fever.

Quant's miniskirts and the French new-wave movies playing at Oldham's favorite cinema were the first glimmers of a youth revolution, fueled by greater leisure time and cash in pocket. When the Beatles storm the Establishment, Oldham slides into the role of their publicist.

"You can hear something without seeing it," he explains as he watches the Fab Four create fan hysteria, "in the same way as you can have an experience that is beyond anything you've had before. You don't have to be clever, you only have to be a member of the public. The noise that night hit me emotionally, like a blow to the chest. The audience that evening expressed something beyond repressed adolescent sexuality. The noise they made was the sound of the future."

A wary Oldham checks out a new combo called the Rollin' Stones after receiving a tip from an NME editor, and at Richmond's Station Hotel, set to pasty-faced R&B, a similar epiphany occurs. "All my preparations, ambitions and desires had just met their purpose. It was a feeling of all the elements falling into the right place and time, catching all the dualities."

The Stones are the same then as now: blank slates. Oldham works fast, adding a crucial "g" ("How can you expect people to take you seriously when you can't even be bothered to spell your name properly?"), sacking the pianist ("People worked nine to five, and they couldn't be expected to remember more than four faces"), and turning Jagger and Richards into songwriters to undermine Brian Jones' leadership.

"The novelty of their first loves - Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters - had provided an edge early on, which, now that they were recording artists, could hold them back," he coldly reasons. "The entire teenage population of the British Isles could not be expected to relate to the needs and wants of middle-aged blacks."

The story of the Stones' rise is one of chance and near disaster. Oldham contemplates throwing Jagger out of the band when the all-important BBC deems his voice "too black" for its audience. Desperately searching for their second single, Oldham meets a drunk Lennon and McCartney, who come to the studio and bash out "I Wanna Be Your Man." And while for their early gigs, Oldham gets the band's girlfriends to rush the stage, by 1964 everyone wondered if they dared let their daughters "go" with a Rolling Stone.

Of course, Oldham gets dizzy on pills and possibility. Worse, he grabs credit for B-sides, looks for pop puppets like Marianne Faithfull to manipulate into the top 10, forms the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra, and discovers pleasure in the art of journalist-threatening. Leaning out of his car window to punch passing motorists, he becomes a mix of Success' Curtis and Lancaster and Performance's Jagger and Fox.

Stoned ends with the Stones' debut LP knocking the Beatles off the top of the English charts. Oldham leaves their name off the jacket. "The real title was embedded in my sleeve notes on the back of the cover: 'The Rolling Stones Are More Than Just a Group, They Are a Way of Life,'" he explains. "If you stood with 18,000 Americans in Madison Square Garden in January of 1998 - all trying to recover a moment to which they are not entitled in the first place, a moment the Stones lent them - then you'll know that my message is still true."

For that alone, Stoned is worth reading. It isn't often that a man at the right place at the right time can take his readers there as well. Stoned deserves to become a classic of its kind.

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