Product Description

'Playing God was just my sideline, actually. Getting records cut was my principal business.' In 1963, in a south London hotel, Andrew Loog Oldham discovered an unknown blues band called the Rolling Stones and became their manager and producer. 2Stoned is the remarkable story of how his radical strategies transformed them into the Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band That Ever Drew Breath. An utter original, a svengali figure and a hustler of genius, Andrew Loog Oldham had, by the age of twenty-one, made the Stones, made a million and revolutionised the music business. Reveted and reviled in equal measure, he had a flair for outrage, manipulation, and success. Working with the Stones, he had the vision to insist that they write their own songs. Working the media, he engineered a permanent storm of publicity around the band and ensured that their notoriety preceded them wherever they went. With one eye on making records in the studio and the other on fanning the flames of hysteria that greeted their appearances, Andrew Loog Oldham masterminded the ceaseless recording and touring that produced a string of seminal tracks and propelled them, within three years, to global fame. In his first book, Stoned, Andrew Loog Oldham recorded his early years and the meeting with the Stones that changed all their fares; by 1967 the Stones would have achieved worldwide celebrity, been arrested in a drugs raid and split with the manager that made them. 2Stoned is the story of this adventure in the words of the man who led it and those of a number of his contemporaries. Nik Cohn, Marianne Faithfull, David Bailey, and Pete Townshend are among those who contribute to this compelling portrait of the golden period when Andrew Loog Oldham and the Rolling Stones were invincible.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #474431 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

About the Author
Andrew Loog Oldham lives in Bogota, Colombia.

Customer Reviews

History from the hip
As a child of the late fifties, I'm old enough to remember the Rolling Stones' music first time around, but I was too young then to have any inlking of the social revolution that was underway, soundtracked by the Beatles/Stones et al as they swept away the old guard of safe pop music your mom liked. This is a superb first-hand account from a man who was not only right in the heart of the action, but causing a fair chunk of it himself. Oldham writes with the panache you would expect of an arch pop publicist, and the book is also well served by some equally telling contributions from other sharp observers of the time - some well known, some not. But they all have an interesting tale to tell.

It's difficult not to warm to the author, regardless of the scrapes and states he got himself (and others) into, because he relates his take on events with a disarming honesty throughout, shot through with a wry sense of the absurd. What the reader gets as a result is a well written eye-witness account of a musical revolution in progress. Whether you're young or old, it sets the music in the context of its time, spiced with some glorious anecdotes. And best of all, it makes you want to listen to all that fabulous music (and not just the Stones' stuff) all over again. For anyone with any feeling for the times, the music, or both, this book is indispensible.

best book about the 60's
This could be better than having been there (like it says about the DVD of the 1970 isle of wight festival - certainly safer and more comfortable, anyway) Andrew Loog Oldham has taken self-destructive testing further that any man still alive, and he's written two of the best books ever on the post-war generation which spawned pop & rock. I can't wait for the third in this tri-biography, which also includes contributions from other protagonists like Allen Klein, Keith Richard and Pete Townshend.

Searingly honest, brilliantly & originally written. I was a nice boy; a Beatles baby, but these books illuminate the times like no others, and are the testament of the man who started The Stones rolling - and let's face it, it's a successful formula which continues to this day.