Andrew Loog Oldham, former manager of the Rolling Stones, is one of the most committed self-publicists the rock'n'roll business has ever seen, but even he couldn't describe himself better than Nik Cohn did in his book Awopbopaloobop Alopbambom. "Oldham, without doubt, was the most flash personality that British pop has ever had, the most anarchic and obsessive and imaginative hustler of all," Cohn wrote. "He loathed slowness and drabness, age and caution and incompetence, mediocrity of all kinds, and he could not stand to work his way up steadily like anyone else. Instead, he barnstormed, he came on quite outrageous. I think his talent and impact have been very, very underestimated."
Oldham quotes this admiring passage in his new autobiography, Stoned. How could he have resisted? The book arrives as Oldham is attempting a mini-renaissance, after alcohol and fast living dragged him close to the brink in the mid-90s. It is a speedy, quick-witted read - and part of its intrigue lies in trying to decide whether Oldham was really as significant as he thinks he was.
He only takes the story as far as 1964, by which time he had led the Rolling Stones up the British charts and was beginning to eye up the vast potential of the US. Although those expecting epic yarns of rock'n'roll debauchery will have to wait for the projected sequel (which will also cover Oldham's years running his pioneering indie label, Immediate), the story he tells is fascinating. Andrew Oldham is at its centre, but equally it is a portrait of British society in transition: a drab, grey nation suddenly whisked up in the swirling cloud of the 60s.
"England was never shitty," argues Oldham, who now lives in Colombia. "It was what you made of it, and my book acknowledges and gives thanks to that."
Oldham was brought up by his Australian-Jewish mother Celia in London, and learned a curiously English mixture of arrogance, rebelliousness, gender confusion and good manners at Wellingborough public school. "In the late 50s, my school would put on Gilbert & Sullivan romps such as HMS Pinafore, in which young men dressed as young girls and looked very pretty," he remembers. "This could be very confusing to a 13-year-old boy." These notions of role-playing would later emerge in the camp androgyny exploited by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The idea of the Stones as Oldham's identity-by-proxy was central to the way he handled their career, from the way they dressed onstage to their sound in the studio, where Oldham directed the recording sessions like a mad maestro hearing apocalyptic sounds in his head.
It sounds comical now, but what triggered Oldham's lust for the pop business was the stage musical, and later the movie, of Expresso Bongo. He was mesmerised by the show's fictional pop manager, Johnnie Jackson. "This was the first ever British dramatisation of the 50s rock'n'roll scene and the revolution in the streets it was fomenting," Oldham writes in Stoned. "It signalled a coming of age for the new music, the new style, the new hustle."
And Oldham intuitively grasped what he needed to steal to create his distinctive personal style. "I felt like a thoughtful French New Wave movie," he writes, "so I rolled the credits and appeared on location in Hampstead Village's thriving beatnik scene."
Later, he gravitated to Chelsea, where he turned up at Mary Quant's Kings Road boutique, Bazaar, and talked himself into a job. "At first fashion was the fashion, then fashion became music," he explains. His moment of epiphany came in 1963 when he saw his first Rolling Stones gig at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond. Since clothes loom even larger in Oldham's narcissistic recollections than the pop stars he circulated among, he had made sure he was dressed for the part: "broadcloth, blue, tab-collared shirt, jet-black wool tie, three-piece suit complete with cuffs on jacket and trousers, flair-waisted jacket à la Bunny Roger with inverted vent, spit and polished side-laced black booties".
As the pop potentate he must have been insufferable, not least when he was swanning around town in his blue Chevrolet Impala, driven by his rent-a-thug Reg "the Butcher" King. Former Decca promotion man Tony Hall catches Oldham in a nutshell with his observation that he "looked like a white English equivalent to a Blue Note record sleeve".
Oldham's arch, self-mythologising tone would grate on the reader a lot sooner than it does, were it not for the inclusion of such comments from a broad cross-section of eye-witnesses. Vidal Sassoon, Pete Townshend, Gene Pitney, Lionel Bart, Mary Quant, Marianne Faithfull and future Led Zeppelin bass player John Paul Jones all lob in their half-a-crown's worth, along with a swarm of friends, publicists and journalists.
The book's overriding impression is of the unbearable excitement of British pop's first brilliant dawn, when you could meet everybody who mattered in the Green Room on a Friday evening at the TV pop show Ready Steady Go! The knowledge that it was a fleeting moment, with many of the protagonists doomed to an early exit, merely intensifies the buzz.
If Oldham were entering the music industry afresh today, how would he do it? "With a hit song, a follow-up and a law degree," he spiels. "But if I was starting out with a lead singer who put me at one with the world and a guitarist who was at one with the world, I'd still jump into a swimming pool with no water. Stoned is not a cautionary tale - it's a celebration and carries the hope that any self-respecting impassioned young 19-year-old of today would do the same."
Stoned is published by Secker & Warburg, price £16.99. The Immediate Singles Collection will be released by Sequel Records next month.
'They liked my ignorance'
Gered Mankowitz is as integral to the 60s as dolly birds and Purple Hearts. As a 16-year-old in 1963 he had his own studio in the heart of the most swinging of London scenes - Mason's Yard, SW1, over the road from the Scotch of St James nightclub and next to the Indica art gallery, where John met Yoko. By the age of 17 he was shooting Marianne Faithfull for her mercurial manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. A year later Oldham commissioned Mankowitz to photograph what became the album cover for the Rolling Stones' Out of Our Heads, and to take their American visa photographs while he was at it. For the next three years Mankowitz's images of the band were to be burned onto the public's retina: Brian Jones as a Prince Regent gone to seed, Mick Jagger as the naughty boy bourgeois-in-waiting, Charlie Watts as an unruffled smoothie, Bill Wyman as a dirty old man and Keith Richards as an innocent waiting to be corrupted.
"I was terrible at school," says Mankowitz of his precocious success, "but I showed an interest in photography. My dad, Wolf Mankowitz, was famous in the 50s and 60s as a writer and a personality, so as a family we had been photographed quite a lot, in particular by a wonderful man called Tom Blau who owned the photo agency Camera Press. He liked my work and offered me an apprenticeship, so I was out of school at 15 and into a sweatshop, where I learned everything. Eventually Tom sent me to the zoo to shoot Guy the Gorilla. In 1964 I shot the singers Chad and Jeremy, who were appearing on a television show with Marianne Faithfull; Marianne was having a hit with As Tears Go By so everyone was talking about her. We all went out to dinner that night. I thought she was wonderful, started photographing her, and then Oldham asked me if I could photograph the Stones. That's pretty much it."
Soon after Mankowitz first shot the band, Oldham asked him to join them on their US tour in 1965. "It was a dream come true for me, and it was a novelty for them to work with a photographer who was younger than they were - Bailey, who had worked with them previously, was well into his 20s and heading into middle age, even then. They liked my ignorance, and felt that I had caught whatever it was that they wanted to be seen at that time. Also, because of being used to famous people at home I wasn't intimidated - as a boy I had been shouted at by Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester to turn my music down. I was playing Stay by Morris Williams and the Zodiacs and they didn't go for it."
In the American photographs, the band have an innocence not yet eclipsed by an excess of indulgence and success. "They just had a naughty aspect back then. Mick wiggled his bum and Brian Jones wore check trousers and people were shocked. And they didn't perform; unlike the Beatles they had nothing to do with the all-round entertainer tradition. But by not performing, we created a performance - that sullen, unsmiling, irregularly dressed gang was a new look. It was a great image made from what was within the band themselves."
All of the Stones looked eccentric; Brian Jones looked downright weird. "He was a very odd chap, and certainly the standout one in the early days. He had this extraordinary hair on a big head, small neck, wide shoulders, no hips, Rupert the Bear trousers, rollneck sweaters - a look that was quite unique." In Mankowitz's photographs, Jones seems alienated from the rest of the band. "He was capable of fantastic charm, then his dark side would emerge. He was the first to experiment with acid, and it was beginning to have an effect. In Miami he said to me, 'I've got two tabs of acid - have one with me.' I said thank you but no, and he said, 'OK, I'll take both of them and you write down everything I say.' 'No thanks, Brian.' "
In Chicago Jones jumped out of the limo in a traffic jam and disappeared for four days; in Texas he sulked in the car while the others ate burgers in a diner, waiting until they returned to the car to go to the restaurant himself. "Oldham sent the record plugger in to get him, and he grabbed Brian with hamburger in mouth and threw him into the car," remembers Mankowitz.
Mankowitz's most celebrated shoot was taken on an icy morning on London's Primrose Hill in November 1966, and became the album cover for Between the Buttons. "We had been working all night, and the look of the band was fantastic - baggy and craggy. I had this idea of distorting the image by making a home-made filter out of black card, glass and vaseline to make the boys dissolve into the landscape. Brian was lurking in his collar; I was frustrated because it felt like we were on the verge of something really special, and he was messing it up. Andrew said to me, 'Don't worry about Brian.' And he was absolutely right - the way that Brian appeared not to give a shit is exactly what the band was about."
Between the Buttons marked a high point of Mankowitz's relationship with the band; it soon went downhill. Unwilling to move with the Stones into a new area of experimentation, he was usurped by Michael Cooper, and by mid-'67 the innocence was gone. Brian Jones was lost, Jagger and Richards had been charged with drug offences, and the band fell out with Oldham. Mankowitz went with him. He's still doing portraiture today, having shot everyone from Jimi Hendrix and the Small Faces to the Verve and Oasis for Mojo magazine, but it's the Rolling Stones whose image he really captured and, to an extent, created. "It was the peak of their initial success and it was a great adventure," he says now. "We were amazed when it went on for another year. Nobody thought it would go on for 35 years."
Gered Mankowitz's exhibition, The 60s + One, is at Focus Gallery, London WC1 (020-7242 7191), till June 17.