STONES 65-67, THE

If music fans and musicians carry a composite image in their head of The Rolling Stones' street-fighting dandy look in the '60s, it'll be substantially composed of shots taken by revered British photographer Gered Mankowitz. Fittingly, Mankowitz took his first photographs of The Stones as a teenager. As a hip London 18-year-old, with a growing reputation as photographer, he'd met and photographed Marianne Faithfull in '64 at the time of her first single, "As Tears Go By". Her manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, was so impressed by the results that he invited Mankowitz to photograph one of his other turns, The Rolling Stones. From '65 to '67 Mankowitz was on board as the Stones' unofficial-official visual chronicler, accompanying Mick, Keef, Charlie, Bill and Brian through the hysteria of the 1965 autumn US tour, providing covers for their Decca albums Out Of Our Heads and Between The Buttons, and documenting all angles of their notorious progress, on stage, back stage, in the studio, on location and at home. Previous books from Mankowitz on The Stones have been very expensive limited editions which have now sold out. Here, for the first time in nearly 20 years, the classic shots, as well as images from the thousands of lesser-known photos in his Stones archives, are given the design setting they deserve and are available, at last, to a wider audience. The Stones is both a cultural and historical document, and one of the greatest rock'n'roll stories ever told.