Thirty-six years ago I was a fifteen year old with a dilemma: it was too early in the decade to be making a decision about pot and it was too soon for me to be making a decision about sex, but summer of 1965 was the moment every kid had to decide-Beatles or Rolling Stones? The Stones' appearance on Shindig had settled the question for me; now I needed to decide which Stones' album to buy first. I certainly wasn't alone in this because the Stones had released three previous albums in the U.S. without any particular success before "Satisfaction" made them inevitable. But I was a boy who took his rock 'n' roll very seriously, setting a pattern of wanting to know the full context of everything I enjoyed that persists to this day.

I didn't buy singles, because to my teen mind, 50¢ a song didn't seem like good value, especially when b-sides were usually throwaways. So although I loved "Tell Me" and "Time Is On My Side," I hadn't felt compelled to buy a Stones' record. Not when Capitol released a new Beatles' album every couple of months with Number Ones like "She Loves You" and "Hard Day's Night" on them. Now it was obvious I was going to have to buy Out of Our Heads, but librarian that I am, I didn't want to buy into the middle of the discography. So this was my dilemma: start at the beginning with England's Newest Hitmakers or cut to the chase and buy the Lp with "Satisfaction" on it? I surely couldn't afford to buy both: mono albums were $2.79 on sale and a dollar more for stereo (of course had I known, I could have saved the dollar on Stones' albums for some time to come). So I bought the first album and discovered the blues and Andrew Loog Oldham at the same time.

Andrew's name appeared on the back of the first album twice, as many times as Mick and Keith's and more than Brian's, and two more times than George Martin's on the notes for Meet the Beatles. This was a time when we sat on our beds and meditated on the backs of album covers while we listened to the first side three times in a row, trying to feel what it was like to be "Them." Well, Andrew told us straight out in the first sentence of his liner notes: "The Rolling Stones are more than just a group-they are a way of life." This was hype of a completely different order of magnitude from Capitol quoting John Lennon: "Our music is just-well, our music."

Who was this guy? At a time when looks were everything--you either hated the Stones' hair or you loved it--I never saw a picture of Andrew Loog Oldham. In fact, I would meet him in person thirteen years later without ever seeing a picture of him. But the notion that one did not have to be a musician and risk a complete break with one's parents was thrilling, an alternative to joining a garage band I clutched at like a Titanic survivor grabbing at a piece of floating wood. That flotsam would sustain my imagination for twenty years into the future.

Because of Andrew Loog Oldham, I could say to my parents, out loud or in my mind, "See, you can go to a 'good' school and still make money from rock 'n' roll. I'll stay in school and then I'll be just like Andrew Loog Oldham. How's that?" Upon reflection, Andrew's real appeal was that he was the Stones' most respected outsider, and up to today, "inside" and "outside" are very real distinctions to Rolling Stones. He had helped to create the World's Most Exclusive Club and in my moments of alienation I would cheer myself up by thinking, "If Andrew Loog Oldham met me he would like me, and he would tell Keith and Mick, 'Ron's alright.'" Then, of course, I would be "alright."

I thought of "Loog" as an ancient Anglo-Saxon ancestral name invoked to bring British cultural continuity to the sharp break the boys' hair seemed to represent. Little did I know that Andrew Loog was a Texan airman who may or may not have sired little Andy out of wedlock. "Oldham" was his mother's maiden name, adding credence to the bastard theory, and an Anglicized Jewish name at that. I can't understand why he made such an impression on me except that I was so desperate to be part of the British Invasion without bringing on any more parental oversight than was already crushing me. Managing and producing a successful rock 'n' roll band was my way out in 1965, when all efforts were meant to be aimed at getting into the "right" college, a future at which I secretly suspected I would be a failure, cf ulitmate Preppy George W.

How could you be on Ed Sullivan all the time and not be rich? And wasn't being "rich" what it was all about? My family didn't exactly stress the Kennedy tradition of public service. Being on Ed Sullivan put you at one with stars like Barbra Streisand and Bobby Darin, so what could be bad? And in my subconscious I think I was musing, "It's even better to be Andrew Loog Oldham than Mick Jagger. That way, you're just as cool and you don't have to take as much shit."

So a line was drawn in the sand. I went to college from 1967-1971 and prayed in my own way not to drop out into an uncertain world of East Village cold water walk-ups, Viet Nam, and a complete break with my family (not to mention death under fire). I stayed the course and graduated with highest honors, defending my thesis before a panel of professors on "A Comparison of the Songs of the Rolling Stones to Jacobean Drama." Three months later I was employed at the trade magazine Record World. I interviewed Pete Townshend who spent three hours telling me that Woodstock was the worst thing to ever happen to rock. Ronny Wood and I shared a limo down to Philadelphia to his Faces gig and after discussing our mutual obsession with the Stones for a while, he confided that he was leaving the Faces to join the Twins.