Fact #186930

Eric Clapton : A year after The Stones had been playing this residency, this guy Andrew Loog Oldham came in with a whiz-kid attitude, thought there was some money to be made here, and signed them up.

Andrew Loog Oldham: In early 1963 I was doing public relations on a freelance basis for The Beatles and some other Brian Epstein acts. Contrary to popular opinion, I wasn't looking for anything else to do. I was a very happy man. One day, I went to see Peter Jones of Record Mirror, trying to sell him something, probably an Epstein act, but he wasn't interested. He kept talking about this other group, they were still called The Rollin' Stones then, playing around London, England, UK, Europe. Record Mirror had decided to allow its R'n'B expert, Norman Jopling, to write an article on them.

Norman Jopling (journalist) : I was just amazed, because Record Mirror's policy was only to write about people who had records out, but there was such a buzz about them, Peter told me to go ahead. To be honest, I was reluctant. British R'n'B was a contradiction in terms. Our bands were all like Alexis Korner or Cyril Davies's band, coming out of the trad movement, with no resemblance to real R'n'B.

Andrew Loog Oldham: On Peter's recommendation, I went down to see them that Wednesday (April 23, 1963) at the Station Hotel in Richmond, which was run as The Crawdaddy Club by Giorgio Gomelsky. As I walked down an alley at the side of the hotel to get to the entrance at the back, This couple in the alley were having a very loud lovers' tiff. I just said,'Excuse me' and went past. It wasn't until Jagger came on stage that I realised it had been him outside, and the girl was Chrissie Shrimpton.

Norman Jopling : They came on looking like students, but what amazed me, because I was a huge Bo Diddley fan, was that they could replicate his raw sound. I'd never seen a British band that came anywhere near that.

Andrew Loog Oldham : Right off, I liked the appearance of the front line - Brian, Mick and Keith That I did understand. Bill and Charlie, they were different, but cool. Bill was sort of just standing there next to the amp that had got him into the group. Charlie even then, looked as if he'd just zoned in from Ronnie Scott's. Then there was lan (Stewart). It's a subjective opinion but ... he was ugly. He didn't look right. but what was really running through my head was that I didn't know a really successful group with six people in it. Peter Jay And The Jaywalkers? Cliff Bennett And The Rebel Rousers? The public can't count up to six. Even so, there was this one-ness between them and the audience. And the sheer power of the band. That strength, that passion, was the thing I remember.

On that first night, I didn't go and talk to them. The next day I went to Eric Easton, a music business agent from whom I was renting an office at the time, and told him what I thought and made arrangements to see them again the following Sunday. I wanted to manage them, but GLC regulations at the time meant that you could not function as a manager without an agent. You could manage, but you couldn't book gigs without the licence. I needed Eric because he had the licence.

Julie Grant (pop singer) : He [Eric Easton] was a different kind of a manager. He had never handled anything like The Rolling Stones. He had me as a pop singer. He had a lady who played piano who was very successful. I can't remember her name. Bert Weedon, a guitarist. He was an organist out of Blackpool, used to play The Tower, close to where I was born. But he was very hands-on. He had a wonderful staff. They were lovely. Then Andrew came along and he thought he was a stable character, which he was. He wasn't a whacky-doodle guy like Andrew.
Source : http://www.classicbands.com/JulieGrantInterview.html

Eric Easton (agent/manager): I went along hoping the evening wasn't being wasted. Outside the hotel was a queue of teenagers, all dressed in the clothes of the day. We tagged on the end, feeling conspicuous inside, it was the most exciting atmosphere I'd ever experienced in a club or ballroom The Stones were producing this fantastic sound which was obviously exactly right for the kids in the audience.

Andew Loog Oldham: From Eric's point of view, they had a number of things against them. For a start, as far as someone like Eric was concerned, Mick Jagger simply couldn't sing. They had also failed a BBC audition, which was very important because it could stop them getting exposure on the radio. That was the night we introduced ourselves to them. The following day I rang and asked Brian to come and see us and discuss whether we would like to get in bed together. Brian was the leader then and he was the one we had to negotiate with. One stumbling block was Giorgio Gomelsky. He saw the potential and wanted to be their manager. He had given them a great gig, done a little promo film about them, set up some recording sessions and, in the world they lived in at that stage, these were all very important moves up.

Giorgio Gomelsky (Promoter): If I had drawn up a contract, I suppose I might have become a very rich man, but I never believed in those stupid bits of paper.

Keith Richards (guitarist, Rolling Stones) : Andrew was very young, even younger than we were. He had nobody on his books, but he was an incredible bullshitter, fantastic hustler, and he had also worked on the early Beatles publicity. He'd got together those very moody pictures of The Beatles that sold them in the first place, so he did have people interested in what he was doing. He came along with this other cat he was in partnership with, Eric Easton, who was much older, used to be an organ player in that dying era of vaudeville after the war, in the Fifties, when the music hall ground to a halt as a means of popular entertainment. He wasn't making a lot of Bread, but people in real showbiz sort of respected him. He had contacts - one chick singer who'd had a couple of top-twenty records; he wasn't completely out of it - and he knew a lot about the rest of England, which we knew nothing about; he knew every hall.

Andrew Loog Oldham: I can't say I had a master plan. Luck had a lot to do with it. As it happened, Gomelsky was out of the country for his father's funeral. During the discussions about management, they didn't mention Gomelsky, Really, I think they were stringing him along.

lan Stewart (Rollin' Stones pianist): The Stones liked Andrew. Like us, he was young, irreverent, full of enthusiasm and eager to make a fortune.

Andrew Loog Oldham: We formed a new company, Impact Sound, for the deal, which was to be a three-year management contract with Eric and me getting 25 per cent between us· Brian Jones signed it on behalf of them all on May 1 1963. Three days later, he signed a three-year recording contract, which gave them six per cent between them.The only side-deal was that Brian Jones, as leader, got an extra five pounds a week. He did that with Eric.

Giorgio Gomelsky: I thought we had a verbal understanding and felt tremendously let down when they left me. But I never like to work with monsters, no matter how talented. They had this satanic power. Jagger was organised and ambitious, but selfish. Keith was very spoilt. Jones should have had treatment. His responses were never those of a normal person.

Ian Stewart: In the office, Easton, who didn't know anything about pop music, said to Brian, I don't think Jagger is any good. And so Brian said, OK, we'll just get rid of him. I felt sure Brian would have done it. I said to him, Don't be so bloody daft.

Andrew Loog Oldham: I told them lan had to be removed from the stage during a gig at Eel Pie Island. He could still play piano for them, but not on stage.

Keith Richards : That was when Brian started to realize things had gone beyond his control. Before this, everybody knew that Brian considered it to be his band. Now Andrew Oldham saw Mick as a big sex symbol and wanted to kick Stu out, but we wouldn't have it. Eventually, because Brian had known him longer than we, and the band was Brian's idea in the first place, Brian had to tell Stu how we'd signed with these people, how they were very image conscious and how he didn't fit in. If I'd been Stu, I'd have said, "Fuck it. Fuck you." But he stayed on to be our roadie, which I think is incredible, so big-hearted. Because by now, we were star-struck, every one of us. The Beatles had been to see us play and we'd been to see them at the Albert Hall, and we'd seen all the screaming chicks, the birds down in front, and couldn't wait to hear them scream for us.

Cynthia Stewart (widow of lan): Whatever Stu or anybody else said, he did care about being relegated. The bottom line for Andrew was that Stu's face didn't fit. Andrew loved the pretty, thin, long-haired boys. Stu felt bitter about The Savage way he was kicked aside.

Keith Richards : They said they had a Decca contract for us. But we had cut a few tracks at I.B.C. Studios, where Stu's friend Glyn Johns was working as an engineer, and had signed a recording contract with I.B.C. They had no outlet and they couldn't get any record company interested in them.

Glyn Johns (engineer, IBC) : We recorded a number of tracks but before I was able to do anything with them, Andrew Loog Oldham came on the scene and decided that he wanted to be the Stones producer.

Andrew Loog Oldham : After everything was signed, they said, we forgot something. We are signed to IBC Studio. This was the session Gomelsky had set up, engineered by Glyn Jones.

Keith Richards : Our I.B.C. contract, though it was nothing, was still a binding contract, so Brian pulled another one of his fantastic get-out schemes.

Andrew Loog Oldham : The deal gave IBC a specific time period in which to do something with these tapes. So we rehearsed Brian to go to them and say he felt the band was going nowhere and he had this big opportunity to join some other outfit, and so could they let him go if he managed to pay back the £106 in studio costs?

Keith Richards : Before this cat at I.B.C. could hear that we were signing with Decca, Brian went to see him with a hundred quid [pounds] that Andrew and Eric had given him and said, "Look, we're not interested, we're breaking up as a band, we're not going to play anymore; but in case we get something together in the future, we don't want to be tied down by this contract, so can we buy ourselves out of it for a hundred pounds?" After hearing this story, which he obviously believed, this old Scrooge took the hundred quid. The next day, he heard that we had a contract with Decca, that we were gonna be making our first single, that we were London's answer to The Beatles, folks.

Andrew Loog Oldham : And they went for it. Thank God.

Glyn Johns : He paid £120 to buy back the tapes from the studio, and then went away and re-created exactly what I had already done. Out of that came their first hit. I was incensed, but nine months later, Andrew called me back in as his engineer and did eventually manage to convince me that he knew what he was doing.

Andrew Loog Oldham : Once I had them for management, I explained to Eric that I didn't want a standard record company deal for them. My strategy was based on what I had learned, not from Phil Spector as Is usually written, but from another producer, Bob Crewe. He had signed The Four Seasons direct to VeeJay Records, and they got fucked - made hits but never got paid. So they got out and went to Philips and did a tape lease deal. This meant they made the records and delivered them. Philips just marketed them.

Norman Jopling : My feature appeared in Record Mirror dated 11 May, but it was on the streets three days earlier and immediately three of the four major British record labels, Philips, Decca and EMI, were on the phone to me. They all wanted to know where they could contact The Rolling Stones. I put them on to Andrew.

Eric Easton : Because there was a lot of interest from other companies, I could go after a really good royalty rate on record sales. And we got it.

Andrew Loog Oldham: I wanted them to be where they'd be the Number 1 priority. EMI already had The Beatles, so I was really only interested in Philips or Decca. But I knew that Joe Meek had already done a tape lease deal with Decca, which meant they were open to exactly the deal I wanted. So I targeted them, partly 'cos their A + R man, Dick Rowe, was vulnerable.

Dick Rowe: When I saw them live, I was fascinated by the audience reaction, and the dancing. As I'd turned The Beatles down earlier, I didn't want to make the same mistake again.

Andrew Loog Oldham: Sure, I exploited that. I had called up Chuck Berry's music publisher and told him how we were planning to record all these Chuck Berry songs. He was sufficiently impressed to call up Dick Rowe two days before I did and tell him he'd just heard the best thing since sliced Bread - The Rolling Stones. "The deal we signed was for two years, giving Decca first option on any Stones product we produced. I was still only 19, so my mother had to sign for me. I felt like everything I'd done up to then had been a rehearsal. I thought I was looking at the rest of my life. It didn't quite turn out that way…

Additional:
Paul Easton (son of Eric Easton) The additional five pounds a week Brian Jones received was not something that was in any way a 'side deal' concocted between him and Eric Easton. This was done with full knowledge of the band and was to compensate Brian for additional responsibilities he had. The Rolling Stones were, after all, Brian's group. The reason Brian signed the agreements was that he was the leader of the group at the time.

Eric Easton never saw Mick Jagger as a liability. At the time of seeing the Stones at Richmond, Eric was already a successful manager and agent and was well aware of what made this particular group a hot property. Any concern about Mick Jagger's ability to sing was voiced by a top producer at the BBC.

He did not believe in salacious gossip or 'kiss and tell' books, rather believing that a manager had a responsibility to ensure his clients were better known than their representatives. Documents prove the point that The Rolling Stones were well taken care of financially up until the time that Mr. Oldham and Mr. Klein formed their alliance.