The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography

He left Wellingborough College at sixteen with three GCE O-Levels – in English, divinity, and, he claims, rifle shooting – and at once set about making his way in the world as Laurence Harvey had shown him. His first coup was to go to Chelsea, walk into Mary Quant’s clothes boutique and ask for a job in any capacity whatever. Mary Quant and her husband, Alexander Plunkett-Green, were amused by the blond-haired youth and his barefaced effrontery. They agreed to take him on as an odd-job boy, teamaker and messenger.

He worked for Mary Quant throughout the period when her plungingly simple black and white dresses, short skirts, sailor necks and oversized bows altered the look of haute couture, and of London, forever. In February 1962, the first issue of a colour supplement by the hitherto stuffy Sunday Times featured a Quant dress worn by a new young model, Jean Shrimpton, and photographed, not by the customary middle-aged society acolyte but by a young man, David Bailey, who came from London’s East End and – still more outrageously – made no attempt to conceal it. This first ‘in crowd’, as defined by the Sunday Times, did not, of course, include anyone named Andrew Loog Oldham; still, he was happy. ‘I was where I wanted to be – around stars.’

At this stage, the only way of achieving stardom himself, as his mental scenario had dictated, was to become a pop singer. The fact that he could neither sing nor play an instrument seemed hardly relevant. Over a period of months, London agents and managers would be intermittently persecuted by the same blond, bespectacled, unmusical youth, posing under such aliases as ‘Chancery Laine’ and ‘Sandy Beach’.

By working for Mary Quant all day, and by night as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club, he saved enough to migrate to the French Riviera. There, for several months, he worked in sea-front bars and as an itinerant window dresser. There, too, in company with two freelance journalists, he concocted his first great money-making scheme. The plan was to kidnap a wealthy heiress. Andrew would keep her, drugged, in a flat in Monte Carlo while the journalists sold the story to the London Daily Express. It would give the story a piquant twist, they said, if Andrew were subsequently to marry the heiress. This he was quite willing to do. Unfortunately, the scheme foundered after the, not unwilling, girl had been taken to the Monte Carlo flat. Her father had friends in the British government, and got an official D-notice issued, prohibiting any newspaper from running the story. Andrew Loog Oldham thus failed to become nationally famous either as a kidnapper or as a cad.

Back in London, a job with the Leslie Frewin publishing house provided an entrée into the decidedly glamorous world of public relations. He left Frewin to join a PR company whose clients included the pop singer Mark Wynter. Handsome, blow-waved and insipid in the prevailing American style, Wynter was following what seemed an inexorable course from Top Twenty hit to low-budget ‘exploitation’ feature film. One of Oldham’s jobs was to accompany him on location to Twickenham studios and share a bedroom with him at a nearby small hotel. ‘Every morning, Mark used to get up very early and creep off to the bathroom to wash and shave and fix his hair. Then he’d come and get back into bed. A bit later, he’d sit up and say “Well, Andrew – time to set off for the studios.” He was convinced I thought he always woke up looking like that. I thought that was great – that really was looking after your image.’

Two major pop impresarios, Larry Parnes and Don Arden, between them controlled all the singers and groups for whom Oldham hoped to work as publicist. Parnes ran a menagerie of exotically named singers from offices in Cromwell Road, opposite the headquarters of the Boy Scout movement (at which, in spare moments, he liked to gaze through binoculars). Don Arden, an authentically frightening figure, rivalled Larry Parnes in promoting pop package tours, cobbled from the hitmakers of the moment. Andew Loog Oldham joined Arden for a while but was fired after inviting journalists to view cinema seats which, during a particularly well-appreciated package show, had been slashed with razors and drenched with female urine.

He was by this time a well-known figure around ABC-TV’s studios in Aston Road, Birmingham, where Thank Your Lucky Stars was recorded. In February 1963, he stood and watched the Beatles give their first nationwide performance of Please Please Me. He later approached Brian Epstein, and offered himself as publicist for Epstein’s company, NEMS Enterprises. Brian Epstein, it happened, was preparing to launch two other Liverpool acts, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He agreed to hire Andrew Loog Oldham to promote the two groups on a monthly retainer of £25.

The arrangement was somewhat hampered by Tony Barrow, a London-based Liverpudlian already writing press releases about the Beatles and sleeve notes for their first album Brian Eptstein ordained that Barrow should concentrate on written handouts while Oldham – by now running his own PR company – dreamed up stunts to get paragraphs into the papers. The Beatles themselves, watched over with obsessive jealousy by Epstein, remained always tantalizingly out of reach. His NEMS work was for the advancement of Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer, each awaiting Top Twenty success in cardboard shoes and cheap little shortie overcoats.

Oldham’s journeys north, though chilly and unglamorous, brought one further big advance. In Manchester, he met Tony Calder, a young agent handling local groups like the Hollies and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. Manchester groups were by now starting to benefit from London’s obsession with the Mersey Sound. Tony Calder also took on Oldham as publicist for his firm, Kennedy Street Enterprises. ‘It felt just like tiddlywinks. I’d already got Liverpool sewn up, with Epstein and NEMS. Now I’d got Manchester as well.’

A chance PR assignment for the American record producer Phil Spector, early in 1962, altered Oldham’s conception of how he might seize his still unspecified destiny. Up to then, in pop music, celebrity had come only to performers – the singers first, then the star guitarists and, latterly, the groups. No fame, or even credit, was given to the A & R men who arranged and supervised even the biggest hit recordings. Phil Spector was the first A & R man to be as well known as the artists he recorded – to produce each three-minute disc in his individual and unmistakable style of complex multitrack effects and cavernous echo: the Spector Wall of Sound.

Phil Spector became the epitome of all Andrew Loog Oldham wished to be. His persona was that of a semi-gangster, riding round in dark-windowed limousines, protected by ugly bodyguards with bulges under their arms. While Spector was in London, Andrew Loog Oldham rode round with him, devoutly questioning him about the secret of his success. Instead of the hoped-for technical hints, Phil Spector imparted a piece of advice which Oldham at the time found rather disappointing. If Oldham ever found a group to record, Spector said, he should on no account let them use the record company’s studio but should instead pay for an independent studio session and afterwards sell or lease back the tapes to the record company. That way, you had control and you had much more money.

In April 1963, the Beatles were number one in every chart with From Me to You. Gerry and the Pacemakers were Number Two with How Do You Do It? Oldham lost his retainer from NEMS Enterprises, and began looking around for something else to make up that monthly £25. Calling in at the Record Mirror office – a habitual haunt of his for picking up tips – he found Peter Jones enthusing over an unknown blues group whose fortunes Norman Jopling was about to change with a eulogistic article. As Oldham listened, the pop singer and the publicist faded; a brand-new incarnation of himself took shape on his mental Cinerama screen.

He drove to Richmond the very next Sunday. In the narrow passageway beside the Station Hotel, he met a boy and girl coming out into the warm spring dusk. Neither Mick Jagger nor his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton noticed Andrew Loog Oldham, for the simple reason that they were having a furious argument.

The Crawdaddy that night was anything but the wild spectacle Norman Jopling had described. Giorgio Gomelsky had been called away to Switzerland by the death of his father. Without Giorgio to enliven it, the club was in a torpid mood. The Stones had even resumed their old purist habit of playing seated on a ring of bar stools. ‘There was no production,’ Oldham says. ‘It was just a blues roots thing … “Here I am and this is what I’m playing.” Even so, I knew what I was looking at. It was Sex. And I was maybe forty-eight hours ahead of the pack.’

Suffering an uncharacteristic fit of shyness, Oldham did not approach the Stones that first night. For all his hubris, he knew he was in no position on his own to try to manage a pop group. As a PR man he could exist on the wing, using other people’s office desks and telephones. As a would-be manager, he could not function unless connected to the crucial network of tour promoters, song pluggers and record company talent scouts. He realized there was no alternative – his discovery would have to be shared.

His natural first choice was the PR client who happened to be Britain’s most famous pop manager. Oldham went to Brian Epstein and said he would be leaving NEMS Enterprises as he’d found this great group out at Richmond and wanted to have a shot at managing them. He offered a deal whereby, in exchange for some office space and minimal funding by NEMS, Epstein could have 50 per cent of the Rolling Stones. But Epstein felt that, with the Beatles and his other Liverpool acts, he already had enough and more to think about. He thus passed up the chance to manage what would become the two greatest supergroups of all time.

Oldham’s next approach was to Eric Easton, an agent handling such middle-of-the-road acts as guitarist Bert Weedon, singer Julie Grant and the pub pianist Mrs Mills. A former electronic organist, bespectacled and quiet, he seemed the least likely of all patrons for a shaggy r & b band. None the less, he agreed to go with Oldham and see them the following Sunday night, even though it would mean missing his favourite television programme, Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

For a second time, Oldham watched the Stones play their ‘blue-roots thing’ behind their diffident, loose-lipped vocalist in his sloppy student pullover. At the end, Eric Easton, who also hired out electronic organs to Butlins holiday camps, gave Oldham a look that was only the faintest ‘maybe’. Oldham approached the group’s drummer, a sad-faced, smartly dressed boy, and asked who their leader was. Charlie Watts pointed to Brian Jones. Oldham remembers with what determination Brian headed him off from talking to either Mick or Keith. ‘Brian was a really weird shape with that big head, broad body and short legs, like a little Welsh pony. But he had incredible magnetism. He could make you focus on just his face.’

There were subsequent meetings at Eric Easton’s London office, at which the cautious agent said he might be able to do something for the Stones though he was making no promises. His one creative suggestion, to Oldham privately, was that Mick Jagger’s voice might not be strong enough to stand the pressure of performing night after night. When Brian, as ‘leader’, was brought into the discussion, he seemed quite amenable to dropping Mick if necessary. But Oldham, for reasons he himself still did not quite understand, insisted that the vocalist was irreplaceable.

While Easton pondered overall strategy, Oldham applied himself to getting on friendly terms with the six Stones in a way that might have warned his older colleague of things to come. It was, indeed, the most brilliant self-selling job the nineteen-year-old had yet pulled off, expertly mixing audacity with intuition. He came on to Brian, Mick, Keith, Stew, Bill and Charlie as a London big shot who could give them anything they wanted and get anywhere they cared to go. At the same time, he was one of them, a rebel, an outsider who shared their quasi-Marxist ideals and evangelistic zeal for bringing pure blues and r & b to a wider audience. Without being able to play or sing a note, Andrew in effect joined the band.

When Giorgio Gomelsky returned from Switzerland early in May, he found that the Stones had signed an exclusive management agreement with Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton. Brian Jones broke the news to Giorgio, mysteriously claiming that Oldham was a schoolfriend of his. Brian, in fact, had signed the agreement on behalf of all the Stones and had, additionally, done a private deal with Easton to receive £5 a week over and above what the others were paid in salary.

In 1962, the most unenvied figure in British pop music was Dick Rowe of Decca Records, The Man Who Turned The Beatles Down. It made no difference to remind himself – as Rowe constantly did – that his decision at the time had seemed entirely logical. Two auditions, in Liverpool, then London, had failed to detect any noticeable merit in a quartet of juvenile eccentrics singing Besame Mucho, Your Feet’s Too Big and other items perversely unsuited to current teenage fashion. So, in January 1962, Dick Rowe passed on the Beatles, instead signing up a group with the altogether more desirable and commercial name of Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.

Ten months later, the calamity of Dick Rowe’s decision confronted him each day of his working life. The Beatles had become the biggest thing in teenage entertainment since Elvis Presley. Dick Rowe had let them slip through his fingers and into the waiting clutches of Decca’s deadly rival, EMI.

For twenty years, these two companies had controlled British popular music, producing 95 per cent of all discs on their myriad labels as well as manufacturing the wireless sets, record players – and even needles – required to bring their product to life. Of the two, Decca seemed more wholeheartedly devoted to entertainment. The blue Decca label, the white Decca factory at Wimbledon, were synonymous with the age of the wind-up gramophone. Decca introduced the first long-playing record into Britain when EMI was still mainly an electrical company, manufacturing TV sets, radiograms and weapons systems for the then War Office.

Decca was the creation – and, substantially, the property – of Sir Edward Lewis, a white-haired, gangling man who, even on days that paid high dividends, was seldom observed to smile. For Sir Edward, recorded music was a commodity little different from soap or safety pins, and only really in tune if it harmonized with a good showing on the Stock Exchange, Sir Edward Lewis’s favourite place in the world. ‘I only ever knew of one person who could make him laugh,’ Dick Rowe remembered later. ‘That was Tommy Cooper. If Sir Edward ever left the office early, you could be sure Tommy Cooper was on television that night,’

Decca’s pre-eminence as a record company ended in 1954 with the arrival of Sir Joseph Lockwood, a successful flour miller, to the EMI chairmanship. Lockwood instantly halted EMI’s decline, ending the manufacture of radiograms and investing in a new record-pressing plant just in time for the first pop music boom. Sir Edward, for his part, took Lockwood’s success as a personal insult, and would speak of him only in the most slighting manner. He took some comfort from the fact that Lockwood, unlike himself, owned no substantial part of his company’s stock and was, therefore, ‘just an employee’.

Now, thanks to Dick Rowe, Lockwood had carried off the greatest prize of all. Not only the Beatles but all other northern groups and their new money-spinning sound seemed to have been engorged by EMI. No one wanted Decca after the preposterous mistake of its hapless A & R chief. ‘Things got so bad,’ a former Decca employee says, ‘that if a boy with a guitar had just walked along Albert Embankment past our office, the whole A & R staff would have rushed out to sign him up.’

Rowe’s only consolation was that no group, however big, could possibly appeal to British teenagers for longer than six months. He might have lost the Beatles, but he had a sporting chance of finding the next Beatles. It was to this objective that Rowe’s entire A & R department was now frenziedly devoted. Like every other record company, Decca had sent teams of talent scouts up to Liverpool to scour the Merseyside clubs and ballrooms. The fact that the Beatles’ home town was a seaport acted powerfully on the A & R men’s overheated minds. The search for new Beatles was widened to other seaports, Cardiff, Bristol and Southampton.

Dick Rowe himself was still drawn back, with remorseful fascination, to Liverpool. He was there again in the first week of May 1963, hoping to find the next Beatles in a talent contest he had been asked to help judge at the city’s Philharmonic Hall. To add to his discomfort, a Beatle, George Harrison, sat with him on the judging panel. Rowe remarked to George with a brave show of lightheartedness that he was still kicking himself. Though John Lennon had been heard to say he hoped the Decca man kicked himself to death, George seemed to cherish no animosity. ‘In fact,’ Rowe said, ‘he told me I’d been right to turn the Beatles down because they’d done such a terrible audition.’

Halfway through the talent contest, the next Beatles still had not materialized. George Harrison remarked to Dick Rowe that there was a group down in London he should consider signing; a group called the Rolling Stones who played each Sunday night at the Station Hotel, Richmond … When George turned round, he found he was talking to himself. Rowe’s chair was empty.

He remembered that, as he drove through Richmond after his headlong journey down from Liverpool, the sun was low in the sky, red and warm like a portent of redemption. ‘The sun was so bright that when I got into the club, I could hardly see anything at all. Just crowds of boys – I couldn’t see any girls. Crowds of boys, rising and falling on the balls of their feet.’ Unannounced – unnoticed in the Crawdaddy’s Sunday night crush – Dick Rowe stood and watched the five figures who were about to rescue his reputation.

Elated as he was, he forced himself to follow A & R protocol. ‘I’d never speak directly to a group that interested me. It was always to their agent or manager. I couldn’t find anything out in the club about who managed the Stones. Next morning, I was in my office at eight o’clock ringing round all the main agencies. No one I spoke to seemed to have heard of the Rolling Stones. Eventually someone said, “Try Eric Easton.” I knew Eric, of course. Once I’d spoken to him, the whole deal went through in a matter of days.’

Before the Stones could sign with Decca, one small difficulty had to be overcome. The tape of five songs they had recorded with Glyn Johns at IBC studios was still held by IBC, and could thus be termed a prior recording commitment. Eric Easton’s advice was that the Stones themselves should approach IBC, saying they had now split up and wanted to buy the tape back as a souvenir. An unsuspecting IBC agreed to return the tape for what it had cost in studio time: £109.

Within less than a week, Easton and Dick Rowe were concluding what Decca’s A & R chief presumed would be a straightforward two-year recording contract. If anything, Rowe considered, it showed largesse on Decca’s part. When Brian Epstein signed the Beatles with EMI, he had been forced, after many previous rejections, to accept a miserly rate of one old penny royalty per double-sided record, rising in yearly increments of one farthing. Rowe, therefore, felt it almost a point of honour to offer the Rolling Stones, however unknown and untried, the standard record royalty rate, five per cent of the retail price of each copy sold.

Thus far, Dick Rowe’s dealings had been with his pleasant and obliging contemporary, Eric Easton. The familiar process, of doing deals quietly over the heads of inexperienced boys, was now rudely shattered by Easton’s nineteen-year-old associate. Before Andrew Loog Oldham even walked into Decca he had imagined the film cameras starting to roll on yet another version of himself. ‘I’d decided I was going to be a nasty little upstart tycoon shit.’ At his first meeting with Decca’s managing director, Bill Townsley, Oldham sat down, uninvited, and coolly put his feet up on Townsley’s desk.

Dick Rowe gazed just as expressively at the fair-haired youth who had peremptorily cut across his genial suggestions to Eric Easton about possible dates for the Stones to cut their first record at Decca’s West Hampstead studios, and which of Decca’s staff producers might supervise them. Oldham replied that the Stones would not be using Decca studios and, while Rowe was still goggling, added that they did not need a producer. They already had one, named Andrew Loog Oldham.

Oldham had never forgotten the advice imparted to him in the depths of Phil Spector’s limousine. That advice was, simply, that all material taped in the studios of a record company remained the company’s copyright. By recording the Stones independently, then leasing the record ‘masters’ back to Decca for manufacture and distribution, Oldham would retain the copyright and, simultaneously, rob Decca of control over what was recorded. Such a deal had not been proposed in the whole history of British recorded music. It was a measure of Decca’s desperation to launch the ‘new Beatles’ that Oldham’s conditions were accepted.

The sunglasses through which Andrew Loog Oldham blandly surveyed his disgruntled new associates were a further ploy borrowed from Phil Spector. Through his mind’s movie camera, he saw himself already as an English Spector – an entrepreneur as famous and glamorous as any performer in his care. So Oldham, despite never before having set foot in a record studio, announced to Dick Rowe and Decca that the Rolling Stones’ first single would be under his exclusive direction.

It was a simple matter, anyway, to hire a studio at Olympic Sound, just off Baker Street, at a fee of five pounds per hour. There, on May 10, 1963, Oldham met the six Stones under the slightly bemused eye of the single engineer, Roger Savage, whose services were included in the price.

Oldham had instructed the Stones to choose what they considered the five best numbers in their repertoire. He himself would then decide which would be the A-side and which the B-side of the single. That decision proved more troublesome than he had expected. The Stones’ best stage numbers were Roll Over Beethoven, Dust My Blues, Roadrunner – rhythm and blues standards, now so widely in use among other groups they could have little impact on the commercial record charts.

The final choice for the A-side was Come On, the Chuck Berry song they had already taped at IBC studios. As a number, its chief virtue was its obscurity. Few of Berry’s British fans had heard the original version with its uncharacteristically ill-humoured lyric and odd rumba beat. The B-side – which did not have to be so commercial – was another song already taped at IBC, Willie Dixon’s I Want to Be Loved.

For three hours or so, the Stones worked to polish a version of Come On, which, even at its best, would still betray for all time their sense of uneasy self-compromise. Chuck Berry’s perverse rumba was stripped down to bare guitars and bass, played at the tempo of rapid feet pattering in and out of a wah-wah harmonica riff. Mick Jagger’s vocal similarly purged the lyric of its exasperation at ramshackle cars and crossed telephone lines. Where Chuck Berry sang of ‘some stupid jerk’, Jagger felt it more judicious to say ‘some stupid guy’. Even with a key change, allowing much of the song to be repeated, the finished track lasted barely a minute and three-quarters.

As producer, Andrew Loog Oldham confined himself to watching the studio clock, fretting that another hour had passed and another five pounds had been spent. The final take was finished at just before 6 p.m. Unwilling to spend five pounds more, Oldham said that one would do and began to walk out of the studio. ‘What about mixing?’ the engineer asked in bewilderment. Britain’s putative Phil Spector had not realized that, after a song was taped, its separate vocal and instrumental tracks were then ‘mixed’ for internal balance. ‘You mix it,’ Oldham said airily. ‘I’ll drop in and pick it up in the morning.’