THERE PROBABLY WOULDN’T have been an Elvis Presley without Colonel Tom Parker. And there probably wouldn’t have been a Beatles without Brian Epstein. And we could say with some certainty that there wouldn’t be a Rolling Stones as we know them without Andrew Loog Oldham.
Managers, producers, image makers, cheerleaders, and hand-holders all play a significant role in the rise of a pop phenomenon from obscurity to international acclaim. In the early days, Andrew Loog Oldham provided all five of those necessary services for the Rolling Stones. Less than a year after the group’s first gig, Oldham was made aware of them by journalist Peter Jones of the Record Mirror. He went to see and hear them at the Station Hotel in Richmond.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: I was a press agent in London doing the publicity for people from the Beatles, to Sam Cooke, to Gene Pitney, and a journalist told me to go and see this group in a pub and that group was the Rolling Stones. So I immediately became a manager and a producer. It was the Station Hotel, Richmond, just outside the center of London with these blues evenings run by Giorgio Gomelsky. They were playing all blues circuits, which I think was the Marquee, Station Hotel, Crawdaddy, Eel Pie Island, and that circuit, and there were six including Stu (Ian Stewart) the first time I saw them.
I asked him how and why he became involved with the group, and, without hesitating, he offered four words and an explanation:
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: I fell in love. We had a lot of things in common: age, ambition, lack of knowledge. In reality, how it progressed, how I became the producer was, number one, I wanted to be a producer; and number two, because of the type of music we all liked, especially them, they felt more protected by a situation in the studio I could give them. In England then, the A&R thing was rather like your Mitch Miller thing was here: twenty-five pounds a week, suits, nine to five.
I asked him if, at that point, the group had done any recordings at all.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: They had tried. They had done a few things on home tape recorders but not really much had come of it. This was really the first time at this stage. Their material was all the blues and R&B things they were weaned on. Because this thing was put together—I mean I was twenty-four hours ahead of the rest of the world!—it was as close a margin as that. It was sped up by the fact that we went to the record company that turned the Beatles down, so we knew that they probably would not make the same mistake twice, regardless of what they were looking at.
MICK JAGGER: Andrew was a publicist for Brian Epstein, although we didn’t know that. He probably said, “I am the Beatles’ publicist”—how about that as a line? Everything to do with the Beatles was sort of gold and glittery, and Andrew seemed to know what he was doing.
KEITH RICHARDS: Andrew pulled together the innate talents within the band. He turned us into a gang, and he broadened our horizons. Our biggest aim at the time was to be the best blues band in London, and that would have done it for us. But Andrew said, “What are you talking about?” He had the experience—even though he was just as young as we were—but he was very precocious; a sharp fucker and a right little gangster. Also he really wanted to be one of the band. At one time he called himself “the sixth Rolling Stone,” so as well as the management side, he thought of himself as part of the gang.
I asked Andrew what that first time in the studio with the Stones was like.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: I just said, “Play me some of your things—the five that you think are the most commercial.” Well, out of the five or six songs that they played me, “Come On” by Chuck Berry was the best-known song, the most “whistleable” ditty, and they actually had a slant and an arrangement for it, whereas the other things they played were more out of total respect to the way they had originally heard them. In other words, there was nothing else original. So, we went to record it on a four-track at the original Olympic Studios in London. We had about forty quid and two hours and at the end of it—about five to six—they were in a real hurry to get through it, as you can hear on the record. And five minutes to six I said, “Right, let’s go.” And the engineer said to me, “What about mixing it?” And I said, “What’s that?” and he politely explained it to me. And, thinking that if I weren’t there I wouldn’t have to pay for it, I said, “Oh, you do that. I’ll come back in the morning.”
Andrew Loog Oldham in the studio
Both Andrew and the boys were quick studies.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: A year and a half later we were experts. But in that year and a half we decided we’d better go to straight, cruddy mono and just deal with “what you hear is what you get.” And that’s how we worked right through “Not Fade Away.” “Come On” had gone to number eighteen in England. It took a while before we got to the reality of what plastic was here (in the States). Plastic in England was plastic plus an “image”!
Ah, there’s the word that might best capture Andrew’s biggest contribution to the group: “image.”
CHARLIE WATTS: He always was sharp. He had great taste and style, which reflected on us, he reflected what London was like at the time. We were in the world of the Beatles because of our age, but we were a totally different band. We were a live band for a start—much better than they were live—and Andrew, compared to Brian Epstein, was younger and he looked much hipper. That doesn’t mean to say he was cleverer than Brian, because no one has matched the popularity that the Beatles still maintain. Brian set all that in motion, but then in another way Andrew set up the Rolling Stones for forty years!
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I met Andrew Oldham, who was always with the Stones. He wasn’t only their manager, but he was also their influence. He was the sort of person they copied a lot to do with his kind of outlaw way of looking at the world.
Lindsay-Hogg, a director who has worked with the Stones extensively over the years, shares this memory:
MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I remember when Andrew was still their manager and after a show we’re in the bar having a drink. And I noticed, over in one corner was Mick and Keith and Andrew, and Andrew was talking about something. And Mick and Keith were leaning into him like baby birds getting seed from their mother. They were very influenced by Andrew and his take on the world. I think that fed into the way they related to the audience, which was slightly antagonistic and at the same time seductive. Andrew was a very important initial role model for them. He knew that. And they were grateful for it. Brian Epstein of the Beatles was much more of a protective person . . . Andrew was saying to them, “Don’t be careful.”
Perhaps one of Andrew’s most brilliant ideas was to position the Stones as a kind of “anti-Beatles.”
KEITH RICHARDS: Andrew also realized how easily you could manipulate Fleet Street. He would call a few of the papers and say, “Watch the Stones get thrown out of the Savoy,” and then he’d say to us, “We’ll just go dressed as usual and try and get lunch.” And of course with no ties you’d get chucked out of the Savoy and there’s the press with their story: THE STONES THROWN OUT OF THE SAVOY. Just silly things like that.
Or how about “silly things” such as manufacturing the headline, WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? Or encouraging fans to mug blind beggars for money to buy Stones records? The Beatles just wanted to hold your hand! Parents could only imagine with horror what mayhem the Stones might want to attempt.
But the strategy worked. It gave the Stones an identity that separated them from all of the other myriad British Invasion bands, especially the Beatles.
Another undeniable Oldham stamp on the Stones was his insistence that they move away from covering songs penned by other artists, and that Mick and Keith begin to write their own. He also oversaw the very mercurial shifts in the ever changing leadership roles within the group.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: Yeah, well it went from variations of Brian; to Mick, Keith, and Brian; to Mick/Keith; back to Mick, Keith, and Brian again. Brian was definitely the leader up to that time.
Shepherded by Oldham, the Stones were ready to take their next step.
THE RISING STONES
MICK JAGGER: I was studying economics in college and I was just singing. After two years I was just too interested in playing, and when I finished my second-year exams I said I wasn’t interested anymore in doing any more work at college on economics. We’d been playing six or nine months and we had a record out, “Come On.” When it got in the charts I just quit. Well, they were very sweet to me. I was given the best of both worlds because when I went to see the registrar of the college he said, “Well, if it doesn’t work you can always come back next year.” So I didn’t see how I had anything to lose.
After “Come On” managed to chart, the Stones played outside of London for the first time. The crowds knew who they were.
MICK JAGGER: In Liverpool, we saw girls with “Rolling Stones” on their handbags, and we realized they knew about us, which was a surprise because we were a London band. Something was happening that we weren’t aware of. We had never played there, and Liverpool had the most bands in the country, so we were very surprised.
BILL WYMAN: The first time we ever had an article in an English music paper was March or April of ’63, in the New Record Mirror. We were in town shopping one day and we bought one and there was our picture with the headline, NEW RHYTHM AND BLUES BAND IN RICHMOND DRIVING PEOPLE CRAZY, or whatever it was. So when I went home on the train that night, I neatly folded the magazine so that the picture was uppermost, and I sat there with it on my lap waiting to be recognized. That’s how naïve I was! And it didn’t happen (laughs). And then when it finally did start happening, I wished to hell it hadn’t because it’s so boring, with people bugging you all the time for this and that.
I guess some people in that situation would have run up and down the platform saying, “Oi!! This is me. Everybody, this is me!” And some people would have just folded it up, put it in their pocket, and looked out the window at the view, and not even thought about it. It’s just in the way it gets to you.
As the band got bigger, so did the venues, and the Stones choice of material changed as well.
MICK JAGGER: When we started, we were just playing rhythm and blues because that’s what we liked. We were playing it well, and nobody else seemed to be doing it. At the time, we were doing up to three-hour sets. Now when we went into the ballrooms we listened to what other bands were playing, and picked up a lot of new numbers. Things that might not have been current like “I Can Tell,” “Poison Ivy,” and “Fortune Teller.” We knew ’em anyway but had never gotten around to actually playing them. I can remember buying Barrett Strong’s “Money,” which was a really big R&B hit in America, but didn’t happen when it came out in England. When we saw that those things were, like, popular, we said, well—let’s do that. So we did and people liked it.
