Andrew Loog Oldham had receded to the background. Of course, in 1969 when Immediate when belly-up, I dedicated my entire college radio show to Andrew's oeuvre, portentously reminding my audience how much money I thought he had made and lost before the age of twenty-five. How cool is that? Drugs and sex never came into it. It was purely about rock 'n' roll, although if drugs and sex came with the territory I wouldn't say "no."

In 1975, when I myself was twenty-five, I had my definitive "We Always Get What We Really Want" experience: I had been a "rock writer" and publicist for four years, and when somebody asked me what I really wanted to do, I said without hesitation, "I want to be David Bowie's product manager at RCA." Two months later I was in the job, and three years on, I had a call from the then president of RCA, Bob Summer. "Ron," Bob said, "I'd like you to come to my office and meet the manager of a group we've just signed, Andrew Loog Oldham."

And so for the first time, I encountered the nervous energy, watery eyes, and ginger hair of my ideal. Given my business relationship to him, it behooved him to like me. So, as long as I didn't ask questions about the Rolling Stones directly, we were off to a flying start. Andrew was at a very interesting juncture in his personal and professional life in 1978. You will think I am making it up that Giorgio Gomelsky who was then living in New York, as was Andrew, told him about a group from Texas who had come to the Big Smoke seeking fame and were available for a management/production deal. Evidently the Werewolves played Max's Kansas City in its second iteration frequently but I was there all the time for the Heartbreakers and the David Johansen Group and I had never heard of them.

Nevertheless, because of their connection with Andrew, the Werewolves became a cause of mine, as much as The Idiot and David Bowie-Stage. They were nice enough, although two of them died prematurely due to bad genes and worse habits. I never thought the lead singer shared Andrew's vision of him as a star and he persisted in developing the qualities of niceness that I'm sure sustain him to this day, now that he is long out of show business. Andrew's imagination as he projected a glamorous career onto his charges was a sight to behold, but the band enjoyed it more than they bought into it.

Andrew's immediate reputation had preceded him: he was known to fall out in a drunken stupor while wasting expensive studio time. Physical exercise was confined to building up his ability to inhale. He consistently made people either his bemused admirers or they wished he'd never been born. I was instantly charmed. He was everything I ever imagined and more. It was too bad he was working with play dough rather than marble.

By the time I met Andrew I was pretty much over the Rolling Stones. This meant that in between trying to get into their exclusive small theater shows and invited to screenings of Ladies and Gentlemen the Rolling Rolling Stones, I only listened to their music via their disciples like the Dolls and the Sex Pistols. By no means were they over--Some Girls was right up there--but I knew they weren't going to invite me manage them, so fuck 'em. They were no longer relevant to me, the center of my world.

Andrew Loog Oldham, despite the temporary burden of the Werewolves, certainly was. I had never met someone so intelligent, so outré, who turned fan-ish impulsiveness into a facsimile of business so readily or so inconsistently. I already knew I would never learn a thing from being with Mick Jagger, and I could only take Ronny Wood, Keef-doll as he was, in small doses, so Andrew was the ultimate keeper of the rock 'n' roll velvet rope. It didn't matter if he was "successful" in the eyes of the world; he was so fucking exclusive. Getting up in the middle of the night to accommodate his lifestyle was a small price to pay to hear what he thought of "Start Me Up." And occasionally he gave me a line.

I never saw him take a drink. Not once in eight years. He prided himself on what he called his "serial addictions": coke, percodan, and tobacco mainly in those days. He was always experimenting with some technique to stop doing something. My favorite was the acupuncture staple he had in his ear that was supposed to keep him from smoking when he fondled it. For a few months I never saw his hand off his ear. He would disappear for awhile and then show up again, usually in the middle of the night. "I've been to Switzerland," he'd tell me. "I had the same doctor Somerset Maugham used; he injects the blood cells of lamb fetuses into your veins. How do you think I look around the eyes?" Could the nubile Angela Lansbury be more winsome?

Then The Lady Vanished, for real. I couldn't understand it. In 1997, after almost ten years, I got The Call. Andrew was staying at a pied a terre owned by ABKCO and invited me up.

Andrew was right as rain, sober as a judge. I would have to bring my own fun from thence onward. Never mind that he excused himself to sit in front of a table with fourteen different pill cups on it, like a man in an experimental cancer ward. These were "nutrition," he explained to me, and it had saved his life. During our long hiatus he had been drinking, unto near-death, but now he was drug-free. "Except for tobacco," he noted. "My therapist tells me that if I stopped smoking it might be just too much a shock to my system." Consider that I had known Andrew Loog Oldham at this point for almost twenty years, off and on, and I had never seen him drink an alcoholic beverage, yet he was telling me his reason for ignoring me for almost ten of those years, was because he did not like to think of me seeing him in his cups. This is a complicated man.

Meanwhile, a rock writer and would-be rock star, Simon Dudfield, had tracked Andrew to Bogotá, bless his heart, and by a deception worthy of karmic payback had managed to con a British publisher that he had the rights to deliver Andrew's authorized biography without Andrew's permission.

Andrew and I had been going around about this autobiography for years. Unlike Mick, who seems to think that the moment his memoirs are published, his career as Kid Rock is over, Andrew was ready to tell his story. The question was only: at what price, since he had over the course of many years sold Allen Klein nearly all of him that was worth selling and the facts, ma'am, were about all that was left. He had notoriously sold the rights to his insider account to A. E. Hochner for a big advance, only to realize that A. E. was someone he would left in the limo alone with Brian Jones. Andrew had the devil of a time giving back part of the money. The result, Blown Away, stands as the worst single book ever written about the Rolling Stones.

Simon had worked dutifully on Stoned, reading every secondary source that described the British nurses' uniforms from WWII and interviewing many people who Joe Meek tried to fuck, but the result was a shambles. Simon's own limitations as a writer notwithstanding, even I didn't want to read Andrew's best bits in the third person. The book completely lacked the immediacy that even a casual meeting with the man himself makes unforgettable. What a shame.

I told Andrew as much, out of love and respect. Andrew ultimately decided to re-write the book as an oral history with his own voice in the first person. What had become a pop history book was now a vivid recreation of a time almost forgotten. Perhaps you've seen the result. There are excerpts from it hereabouts, I understand. Stoned was published in the U.K. to universal acclaim. I was delighted the book ended  in 1964 just before the Stones came to America for the first time. Why had this been so important to me ever since I had met Andrew twenty years earlier?

Because Andrew's story stands alone, and as time goes by his distance from the Stones' as individuals becomes less important, and his significance to them as a dreamer becomes more obvious. Andrew Loog Oldham matters because he is a Fan who put his Enthusiasm into Action. Phil might have been the first tycoon of teen, but he was never love struck like Andrew. Andrew's vulnerability was a big part of what made him great: he was a fan's fan, long before he reluctantly took a long ride on the tube south to Richmond.

Just as he was present backstage when the Beatles' first performed on TV in 1963, he could not fail to meet the Stones or someone else just as important to him and ultimately to us. He realizes of course, as he always has, there will never be anyone else quite like them. That's a bigger problem for Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Bill than it will ever be for Andrew. It killed Brian, but that's another story. Andrew's very clear on this problem: "It's not so much that I will never manage another Mick Jagger, as that I will never be 19 again in 1963," he'll tell you.

The point is, what Andrew loves becomes seductively vivid to him and then to the people to whom he communicates. If you read Stoned, you'll learn what it's like to be a stroppy middle-class teenager much like you or me, but actually get to manage the Rolling Stones. You'll be in the room when Brian Jones succeeds in convincing Eric Easton he's the group's leader, and loses Andrew entirely to Mick. You'll understand why if there hadn't been a Keith, Andrew, Mick and Brian might well have been boutique owners, hairdressers, or bank managers.

Although the same might be said about Andrew: while all five (six) original Rolling Stones might have pursued music in any event, they would never have found themselves together in such a salable package as Andrew helped them to create. If you opened that package, you might not have found Andrew himself but you would have certainly found a little of him in each of the Rolling Stones and a very great deal of him indeed in what the Stones were as a creative collective entity and commercial success. Stoned provides ample and amusing evidence that occasionally accident and intention are in perfect accord.

- Ron Ross, January 2001