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BRIAN JONES: How did the founder of The Rolling Stones manage to ruin himself so convincingly? At last, on the 30th anniversary of his death, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Pete Townshend and many other friends and lovers speak out about the man who's been dubbed "the perfect pop star".The Bittersweet Symphony.
Rolling Stones founder, Rolling Stones reject; ruthless controller, helpless passenger; blues obsessive, dabbler in the exotic; countercultural networker, paranoid recluse; adored Prince Charming, vicious heartbreaker; '60s legend, real life murder victim? Thirty years after his death, the twisted saga of Brian Jones.
By Rob Chapman.
Chances are, regardless of the era or location you grew up in, there's a couple of types you've known at one time or another. Firstly, there's our resident Lothario - let's call him Vinnie - a little mad, bad and dangerous to know. The local tearaway. Vinnie's name often crops up in the same hushed breath as "back seat of a car", "knickers round her ankles", and "had to go away for a while until the heat died down".
Then there's this other guy. Let's call him Cedric. Bespectacled. Quiet. Nervy rather than nerdy. Disconcertingly distant, as if he's forever entertaining some private joke in your presence. Invited you round to his house one day and you wondered why he was so intent on playing you his dad's record collection, until it dawned on you that these obscure discs in their thick cardboard sleeves by black artists you'd never heard of weren't his dad's at all. They were his and he seemed to know every note, every nuance.
Brian Jones was both of these characters. And a few others besides. A complex and bewildering bunch of multiple personalities, a man who panhandled the Cheltenham Delta and then upped and left for London, where he conceived and founded the biggest rock'n'roll group of all time. A short guy with broad shoulders and a little Welsh-bull chest that tapered down to a skinny waist, a bum like two boiled eggs in a handkerchief, drainpipe legs and matching Achilles heels. How many contradictions can one frame take?
As a child he indulged in that most harmless of activities, bus-spotting. He also had a proclivity for staging car crashes with his Dinky toys and igniting them with lighter fuel. He carried those contradictions through adult life. A softly spoken, drinking, smoking, womanising Narcissus with a psychosomatic condition (asthma). A strutting, intense egotist with a gentle, shy smile that played across his face whenever the TV camera lingered long enough. A musical purist blessed, or cursed, with pop star looks. Eulogised by many. "Brian Jones, with his puffed-up Pisces, all-knowing suffering fish eyes. Brian always ahead of style. Perfect Brian," as Lou Reed put it in Fallen Knights And Fallen Ladies, his elegiac 1972 essay on rock deaths. Demonised by just as many. "He was always nice to me," says Charlie Watts, "but he was not very liked, Brian. Stew [Ian Stewart, off-stage Stones pianist] just couldn't stand him. Bill [Wyman] never got on with Brian. Not Bill's fault. Brian's fault entirely." And misunderstood and misrepresented, it seems, as often as he was maligned.
The whole 'Is it a boy or is it a girl?' thing starts with Brian Jones. He was the first heterosexual pop star to wear costume jewellery, off-stage and on. At the first of several drug-bust trials in 1967 he wore a navy blue Mod suit with bell-bottom trousers and flared jacket, large floppy blue-and-white spotted tie and Cuban-heeled shoes. As you do. "He was the definitive, quintessential pop star," says Nick Kent. "He looked as good as any of the women in the '60s like Verushka or Francoise Hardy or Nico. And he did it himself. He didn't get a bunch of designers. It wasn't 'Brian Jones dressed by…' It was self-presentation. That was his art."
And it all went so terribly wrong. In 1962 he had a head full of the blues and a heart full of hope. By 1967 he had a wardrobe full of Chelsea velvet and Marrakesh silk. But by the summer of 1969 the blues was merely a distant, fading bottleneck note, the dandy clothes were crumpled in unwashed, hashburned heaps, and Brian Jones floated face down in a swimming pool.
Brian was a bright kid. Nine O Levels. Two A Levels. Obvious university material. But, with a perverse intransigence that would become a hallmark of his short life, he took a series of menial jobs instead - everything from coalman to clerk - which exasperated his parents beyond endurance. It annoyed them even more when he was sacked from most of these dead-end occupations for petty pilfering. But the thieving didn't upset them half as much as when Brian kissed the girls and made them cry. And got one of them pregnant; she was 14. And then another; she was married. Then they packed him off to Europe, 'until the heat died down'.
"When I was 15 a bunch of us used to sneak into Sunday afternoon pictures at the Cheltenham Regal, when it was supposed to be adults only," says Pat Andrews, Brian's girlfriend from 1961 to 1963 and then mother-to-be of his third child Mark (whose other Christian name, Julian, he shares with all Brian's sons, in honour of one of his heroes, tenor saxophonist Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley). "One of the guys in our little group said he had a friend who'd been away for six weeks and had just come back from Germany and Scandinavia. He said he'd lost track with his friends and had no girlfriend and seemed a bit low." Pat agreed to meet Brian on a blind date in the Aztec coffee bar. "I don't know why they called it the Aztec," she laughs. "It had fishermen's nets and candles. But it did have a jukebox. I'd arranged to meet him in this alcove. I didn't want my friends seeing him in case he was frumpy and looked like Abbot And Costello. He had beautiful golden shiny hair which you could see in the darkness, but he was wearing this tweed suit which put me off. But when we talked he was so different from all the other Cheltenham boys. He wasn't after a quick grope. You could actually have a conversation with him."
In the re-telling of the Brian Jones story his birthplace is constantly caricatured as a Regency rest home for retired majors and assorted nobility. Charlie Watts still subscribes to this view: "He was a pretentious little sod. He was from Cheltenham. Does that sum it up? An English boy from Cheltenham." "He started off by being a clarinet player in a trad band," affirms Mick Jagger. "In a provincial West Country town. Very provincial." That's not how Pat Andrews remembers it. "There were plenty of dancehalls. Five cinemas including the Gaumont where the Stones played. During the war there'd been two airforce bases nearby. My older brothers used to get lots of American magazines and records from them. There was always a big jazz following in Cheltenham. In the '40s it was all bebop: Thelonious Monk and people like that would come and play. At the town hall it was all Kenny Ball and Johnny Dankworth. Then they opened up a place called the Barbecue, and it was always full of beatniks from the Art College."
Brian was already proficient on saxophone, clarinet, guitar and piano when Pat met him. He had played trad jazz with people twice his age in local bars, in the quaintly monikered Cheltone Six, and had now progressed to an R&B combo called The Ramrods. "He was very modest at that time," says Pat. "He said he played a couple of musical instruments, tinkered around - he made it sound more like a hobby - but he didn't push it. He didn't start playing properly 'til he met Alexis."
When Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated came to town Jones immediately bonded with its talismanic leader. Seeking out the right people was a hallmark of his intuitive enthusiasm right from the start. It was Brian who would later pester Giorgio Gomelsky to let his new outfit play at the famed Station Hotel, Richmond. "We all went back to the coffee bar after the gig and Brian plonked himself down in front of Alexis," remembers Pat Andrews. "This kind of thing must have happened to Alexis hundreds of times, but Brian started telling him how much he loved the blues and what he played. He went home and got his guitar and went back and played for Alexis. Alexis was so taken by him that he gave him his address in London and said come up and stay."
Paul Jones, a fellow blues obsessive, was at that time playing parties around Oxford with the splendidly named Thunder Odin's Big Secret. "I'd just bought a 78 from the late '50s by Thunder & Lightning called Santa Fe Blues. Lightning was Lightnin' Hopkins," he laughs. "I met Brian at an Alexis Korner gig in the Ealing Jazz Club in 1962. We jammed together at a few parties in Oxford. I asked Brian if he would come and play guitar in my band but he said, 'I don't really want to be in a band unless I'm the leader.' Brian wasn't so good at that stage that I couldn't afford to be without him so I got another guitarist. A few months later Brian said he was moving to London and forming a band and would I like to be in it? I said no. I told him, I don't think we will ever be able to make enough money from playing this kind of music to make a living from it, and in my case I've just got a job with a dance band. I'm just going to do blues as a hobby! Brian was more enthusiastic about the immediate future than I was - and a bit more perceptive, too."
After a few reconnaissance visits to the capital Brian moved up permanently early in 1962. Pat, with six-month-old Mark in tow, followed him soon afterwards. Dingy flats and dead-end jobs came and went as Brian pursued his mission. Alexis Korner was busy building a Trojan horse for R&B within the trad jazz enclave; just about anybody who would ever be anybody on that scene would sit in his band, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Charlie Watts was drummer with Blues Incorporated at the time. "Alexis introduced me to Brian and we went off back to his flat," he remembers. "Bloody 'orrible thing, with one of the girls he was living with and was pregnant by him. He used to have short hair like Gerry Mulligan, blond, pushed forward, and he used to wear thick-fur crew-necked sweaters. He played bottleneck guitar and loved soprano saxophone - his big heroes were Sidney Bechet and Elmore James. He used to play harp quite well, too, which not many people did then." Brian, with Alexis Korner's blessing, eventually convinced Charlie Watts to join his fledgling outfit. "Brian saw in Charlie what he had in abundance and demanded from any musician: commitment and idealism," Bill Wyman later noted.
It was Brian who placed a Musicians Wanted ad in Jazz News. It was Brian who auditioned future members, named the band after a Muddy Waters song, and assertively defended his callow crew when the purists gathered round to sneer. Not that Brian wasn't a fundamentalist himself. His R&B was Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, John Lee Hooker. He had to be convinced, by Keith Richards, that Chuck Berry wasn't just pop. In fact, potential Stones guitarist Geoff Bradford walked out over this very issue.
"I first saw Brian at the Ealing Club playing with Paul Jones as interval guest with Alexis Korner," says early Stones member and Pretty Things founder Dick Taylor. "I was there with Mick and Keith and we were most impressed. He was playing an acoustic with a pick-up on it and his slide playing was extraordinary. It didn't take long to get talking with him and it wasn't long before he in turn heard Jagger sing and poached him for his band. Mick took Keith along which prompted Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight to walk and myself get drafted in."
When the Stones toured with Bo Diddley the following year, such was Brian's reverence that the band dropped their Bo Diddley covers. Like The Beatles, the Stones occasionally had to pretend they played trad just to get a gig. Indeed, at their first big showcase, the Third Richmond Jazz Festival in August 1963, they played bottom of the bill to the likes of Terry Lightfoot and Acker Bilk. But within a year the Stones' brand of raw R&B had blown trad out of the water, and much else besides. "A schoolfriend's father was the promoter of gigs at the Sophia Gardens in Cardiff," remembers Nick Kent of his Damascene conversion as a 12-year-old in February 1964. "He got me backstage to meet them. Johnny Leyton was topping the bill. Jet Harris was on there. Their day was done. They weren't going to last another year. It was the changing of the guard culturally; the Stones just took that place. We had front-row seats and girls in the third row were threatening us with their stilettos. Backstage Brian was clearly the leader. The others were sulking around but Brian was smiling and talking to all the girls."
The Rolling Stones' self-appointed leader had the musical acumen to back up his promotional skills. He 'worked out' blues harp, 'worked out' slide, 'worked out' the Bo Diddley beat, and later the dulcimer and sitar like they were mere maths equations.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-09-27 12:43 by bv.