At the beginning of the 21st century, it's hard to tell. We've got Keith Richards posing for family portraits decked out in eyeliner and hair ribbons, and Mick Jagger prancing about, looking more and more like a dancing cartoon skeleton every day; only Charlie Watts, the rock 'n' roller with a jazzman's heart, has escaped with his dignity completely intact. But it wasn't so long ago that the Stones were somebodies, not just because of what they played and how they played it but because they had a whole way of being that no one had seen before.

That way of being turned the Stones into icons, performers whom rock 'n' roll fans would obsess over and argue about for decades, the kind of band that inspires books like Steve Appleford's glossy and cheerily obsessive "Rip This Joint -- The Stories Behind Every Song." But to get to that part of the story, you have to trace your way back to the man who handed the world a scruffily perfect love object on a plate. Andrew Loog Oldham was the guy who taught the Stones how to be.

"I'd never seen anything like it. They came on to me," Oldham writes in his new and shiftily entertaining autobiography, "Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s," about seeing the Stones for the first time at the Crawdaddy Club in the London suburb of Richmond, in 1963. At the time, Oldham was a 19-year-old hustler with a vision; he just didn't know what it was yet. Watching this rangy bunch of kids onstage -- most of whom were, incidentally, older than he was -- he began to see the blurry outlines of that vision's shape. "All my preparations, ambitions and desires had just met their purpose ... The music was authentic and sexually driven ... It reached out and went inside me -- totally. It satisfied me. I was in love. I heard the anthem of a national sound, I heard the sound of a national anthem."

You could argue that the Stones would have become what they did without Oldham. But you'd be wrong. "Stoned" is a book written by a guy who has never pretended to be anything but a raconteur and a bullshitter supreme, but even if it's not 100 percent true, it's still 100 percent believable. Part of what makes it so credible is Oldham's unerring belief in the fact that he himself is unequivocally interesting, and whether or not you've ever cared much about him (or have even heard of him), by the sixth page he has you convinced that you should.

Oldham doesn't even meet the Stones until the second half of the book. Somehow, though, the first half, in which Oldham shares his recollections of early-'60s London, is much more exciting. London at that time was a corner of the universe that seemed to be changing faster and more brutally than any other. Oldham neither inflates nor downplays his role in that universe: He simply comes off as a guy who wanted as big a piece of it as possible.

Raised by a domineering single mother (his father, Andrew Loog, a Dutch-American U.S. Air Force lieutenant, died before he was born), Oldham was the kind of brash, preternaturally confident kid who set out early to grab his fortune -- merely seeking it would have been too boring. A redhead with finely chiseled features and an even more sharply defined sartorial sense, he got a job with the company run by pioneering clothing designer Mary Quant and her husband, Alexander Plunkett Green, by showing up at their shop and demanding that they hire him; Green and Quant were too shocked to even consider saying no.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"