Andrew Loog Oldham moves to Van
Stones' former producer finds city to his liking

Kerry Gold

Vancouver Sun

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

"I know too much about artists to actually be able to respect them. I mean, a true rock star -- never mind being a pig -- has to be [hard-assed] to start with."

 The maverick responsible for pushing the Rolling Stones from baby-steps beginnings to rock-'n'-roll empire has decided to return to the biz with a new act and a new city. Ours.

Andrew Loog Oldham settled in Vancouver in May to work on the third instalment of his autobiography, to pursue hobby interests such as film and Pilates, and to carry on a long-distance recording relationship with a Scottish group called V-Twin.
 

Andrew Loog Oldham spends time writing and reminiscing.

"They have a lot of elements ranging from Aerosmith to Motown to Sam and Dave and the 33 per cent of the Stones era I didn't get to work in," he says of his new proteges. "I'm having a good time," said Oldham, a few days after our meeting at a downtown cafe, near his new home.

He has a lilting English accent, he is 59, slender and bearded, and he wears small John Lennon-ish glasses and Oriental beads around his wrist. In other words, he looks like a survivor of the 60s.

After all, Oldham was a key player back then. He was at the vortex of the era that launched a thousand clichés and left subsequent generations feeling hopelessly inadequate. He was 18 when he was press secretary to the Beatles under their manager, Brian Epstein, and he'd already worked for legendary designer Mary Quant. It was while working for Epstein that he discovered the Stones and fell hard for their look and their sound. Soon, he had joined their ranks as a publicity-shrewd manager and ultimately as producer of so many early hits, including Satisfaction, The Last Time, Under My Thumb, Get Off Of My Cloud, Lady Jane, Play With Fire, Out of Time, Mother's Little Helper, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Paint It Black.

Oldham was with the Stones for four years (he had joined up in 1963, at the cocky age of 19). In 1967, realizing that his departure was imminent, he quit the band before they could fire him.

Oldham, who jokingly refers to himself as an "iconette" rather than full-fledged icon, rekindled his legendary status as the Stones' first manager in Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s, followed by 2Stoned last year. Tonight at the Anza Club, as part of the monthly Celluloid Social Club series, the once-reclusive Oldham will give a talk and answer questions before showing the unreleased behind-the-scenes documentary Charlie Is My Darling. It follows the Stones on their 1965 tour of Ireland, an event that is covered in 2Stoned.

"When the Rolling Stones and I arrived in America everyone was having hits except us.... And then it cuts back two years and we go back to England at the end of '66 when we weren't really welcome and then drug busts came and the bad boys of rock [thing]... In other words, the Beatles were allowed to take time off and drive around England in Rolls Royces, but the Rolling Stones were not. And that really hasn't changed.

"I don't think the Rolling Stones were ever the 'greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world' in England. That has been America's [perception]."

He also writes about his discovery of a young singer, Marianne Faithfull, and his post-Stones record label he co-founded that went bankrupt in 1970. Oldham's Immediate Records was Britain's first independent label, and during its run, released early recordings of Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Peter Frampton, Small Faces, and Fleetwood Mac.

"Enough things to be silly with the money again," says Oldham, a reference to the large chunk of Stones' wages he blew before that. His extravagant spending meant there wasn't anything left to pay the taxman, and he and the Stones, who faced the same predicament, fled England. The Stones went to France; he went to Connecticut. Then Oldham fell in love with Colombian film star Esther Farfan, and he spent 20 years in Colombia, raising a family. That country's political turbulence and the fact that his son has relocated to Los Angeles brought him to Vancouver, where, he says, he might settle permanently, if our tax laws don't prove too prohibitive.

Oldham gave a talk at NewMusicWest this spring, but that wasn't his first visit to Vancouver. He and his wife were here in February to scout for a home. He's showing signs of settling in already. A serious music fan who's not living in the past when it comes to his listening, he attended Beck's recent show at the Orpheum Theatre.

As the recipient of publishing royalties for early Stones' songs (he is co-writer of As Tears Go By), Oldham doesn't need to work. And although he considers the thought of purchasing an old Stones album almost offensively redundant, he does not fault his former clients for continuing to rock 'n' roll at an average age of 62.

"Hey, you've got to respect the numbers," he says. "I don't mean the money they make, but it did become what it did, the reason it became what it became -- General Motors, for want of a better term. You can't be asleep at the wheel any more. It doesn't work. You gotta respect the animal, the beast.

"And musicians, I know they have this need and this right to play."

If music was the Stones' passion, the Stones were Oldham's, which is probably the reason his drug use accelerated after they parted ways. Although Oldham says he was stoned throughout the 60s, his habit never got in the way of his gifts as a businessman with a shrewd eye for publicity and exploiting a sure thing.

"During the time period, I took drugs as opposed to the drugs taking me, to be productive."

Oldham conquered a 30-year cocaine and alcohol habit in 1995, and a couple of years later underwent a 40-day purification cleansing by the Church of Scientology.

Although he didn't think he'd have a new book on the go for another decade, he's working on a broader update about the rock 'n' roll hangover, and the fact that so many of his contemporaries have sustained it.

"I have just taken a look at a lot of the characters who were with me in the 60s, now," says Oldham, over an espresso (his "last sin"). "The Rolling Stones, they're not even the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world any more. It's something else now. American artists are something else since Sept. 11. The Who is something else since John Entwistle died. And Pete Townshend downloaded. Phil Spector is somewhere else since he stopped [going to] the House of Blues. Mickie Most died last week. There were only three producers at the time in England -- George Martin, him and me."

Music writers love to say that Oldham didn't just experience the 60s, he created the era, and considering he is the man who laid the blueprint for bad-boy rock 'n' roll (remember the Beatles were the only other game in town), they've got a point. But because he lived the rock star life and all its excesses, contrary to romantic notions that followed, he has few good things to say about the era of peace and love.

"Peace and love? We were at war," he says. "Peace and love only came in when the money and the drugs weren't working, that's all. It's a farce. It's a manufacturing merchandising tool.

"I know many rock 'n' roll people said, 'Yeah, all right, peace and love,' and then went inside and wacked each other out."

If it's stories you want, Oldham has a library's worth of them, but you must follow his meandering, stream-of-consciousness style, replete with movie references and a hilariously blunt take on the characters involved. The Doors frontman Jim Morrison, he calls "a pig." (But he admits that he saw The Doors as a looming threat at the time, and that even today kids would far rather emulate Morrison than Jagger). He's received hate mail for his slagging of original Stones guitarist Brian Jones, who, he says, saw him as a threat to his authority over the band. Jones drowned in his swimming pool shortly after splitting with the band, but Oldham has always been unapologetic for his dislike of the tragic Stone.

"He was just a nuisance," he recalls. "'Me, me, me.' He was God. And yeah, I was the enemy. Because up until I came along and Eric Eastman -- the partner I had at the time -- he was the de facto manager of the group and he enjoyed that power too much over them. Like, 'Who gets the ham sandwich?' You're dealing with a lot of Lord of the Flies stuff here...I didn't like him. I don't care. I've had some vicious mail because of what I said about him. But to me, he was a normal person who I didn't like. He wasn't that normal, either."

So who did he like? Oldham admits to a fondness for The Who's late drummer Keith Moon and guitarist Pete Townshend, but reluctantly, as if this question of likes and dislikes is too moot a point for consideration. Finally, he settles on a certain profane word for female genitalia as the perfect word to matter-of-factly sum up the rock star.

"I know too much about artists to actually be able to respect them," he says. "I mean, a true rock star -- never mind being a pig -- has to be [hard-assed] to start with. If they want to be one, it takes a certain breed of survival that you or I might find too much of a daily life to bear. For them, it's nothing. It's part of the survival kit and is either natural or it will kill them, and the survival kit certainly requires that you get up every day and you look in the mirror and go, 'I am it.' Self determined. If you think of anybody who has risen above their given field they entered, they are synonymous with it. Like Jagger was synonymous with this or [dancer Rudolf] Nureyev or Courtney Love or Madonna with this. They are all [hard-asses]. They have to be. That's not to say they are not perfectly reasonable family men or so on and so forth, but in terms of staying where they are every day, it's the survival of the fittest. You just know what you want and you make sure you get it. There's no time for anything else. You are in the business of being who you have manufactured. And time off in that game is for the weak."

His sink-or-swim credo extends to himself. While frank and at times caustic, there isn't any sign of bitterness or remorse around Oldham. He has, he says, led a remarkable life and if he had weaknesses, they were more often the result of vanity than insecurity, he says.

"How do you replace the rush of having done it right on the nights you do it right, get it right, or play it right?

"I remember Eric Clapton saying once in terms of his heroin addiction that if he hadn't had the guitar to go home to -- he didn't admit it this way -- but to nourish, cuddle, be with, he might have nodded off and died on many occasions."

He refuses to take credit for discovering the Stones that day at the Crawdaddy Pub in the London suburb of Richmond, partly because they already existed as a band when he first laid eyes on them, and partly because he had only gone to see them as a favour to a journalist who'd recommended them. He had no particular affinity for the blues that the band was playing at the time.

"I didn't want my Sunday upset, by schlepping on the train down to the suburbs. You've got 300 people in London, middle class students, who've adopted this black people's music as if they're sharecroppers ... my taste, I like commercial art."

And if the Stones refuse to acknowledge his contribution to their career by way of cooperating with his memoirs, he merely shrugs it off as a fact of life.

"I wrote one letter, and I got no response, so I left it," he says, adding that he wasn't surprised.

"Work is work... it almost disqualifies them from having time to build a private life. And how much time right now have you got to hang out with people you started with? You romance the one you're with."

kgold@png.canwest.com

© Copyright 2003 Vancouver Sun