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mtaylor
And did he play on "You Can't Always Get What You Want"?

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Palace Revolution 2000
In bands there are the songwriters, and there's the players. Both sides are equally important to the band, and to each other. A great song needs a good band to interpret it, to perform it; and the better the players are, the better the song will become.
Brian was as much a victim of his time as anything. They were very young; they were in an insanely busy and hectic cauldron of attention and movement. With cooler heads the story might have turned out different. But no one knew about drugs yet. Drugs themselves were also ..different. Barbiturates? Come on.
I do believe that what must have hurt Brian the most, is that from all accounts he sounds like he was just an @#$%&. So his meter ran out quickly with the rest of the guys. And a group of 20 year old dudes is not the most forgiving society.
Many of his brilliant contributions only revealed themselves as such within the context of history. The flute on 'Ruby Tuesday" I imagine wold be taken for granted. There was much brilliance and competition in the air to begin with.
I often think of Brian like Jeff Beck. Both are superb musicians, but can not write. Writing is a strange thing. It only blesses a few.

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ash

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mtaylor
Shame they didn't do a run of gigs at that time with the Beggars tracks.

He wasn't in any condition to play gigs or tour. That's why they asked him to leave.
The whole thing is pretty simple -- he was in a rock and roll band that wanted to get out and tour -- that *needed* to tour and make new music because they had just stupidly sold their catalog. (Admittedly not sure just when this happened and when Mick realized this.). But Brian couldn't be counted upon to do this.
Which is a shame and unfortunate for him because if he had been healthy he would have rocked the 1969 tour and probably gotten more attention and stardom than Keith. Remember that Keith hadn't yet created his own myth at this time.
I could envision a future for him in which he toured and recorded with the band but went into the studio with other people and did all sorts of side projects.
But he couldn't get a window to get himself together.

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annajulia

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Palace Revolution 2000
In bands there are the songwriters, and there's the players. Both sides are equally important to the band, and to each other. A great song needs a good band to interpret it, to perform it; and the better the players are, the better the song will become.
Brian was as much a victim of his time as anything. They were very young; they were in an insanely busy and hectic cauldron of attention and movement. With cooler heads the story might have turned out different. But no one knew about drugs yet. Drugs themselves were also ..different. Barbiturates? Come on.
I do believe that what must have hurt Brian the most, is that from all accounts he sounds like he was just an @#$%&. So his meter ran out quickly with the rest of the guys. And a group of 20 year old dudes is not the most forgiving society.
Many of his brilliant contributions only revealed themselves as such within the context of history. The flute on 'Ruby Tuesday" I imagine wold be taken for granted. There was much brilliance and competition in the air to begin with.
I often think of Brian like Jeff Beck. Both are superb musicians, but can not write. Writing is a strange thing. It only blesses a few.

i agree with you on most things, but isn't this pretty much the opposite to what most people that knew him said? i hope i'm not misunderstanding what you wrote, but the only ones to say he's an @#$%& is the Stones (maybe minus Bill and possibly Charlie) and Andrew Oldham tbh, and they're the ones people listen to.

Brent Rej, Damian Korner, Donovan, George Harrison, Paul Mccartney, Pete Townshend, Nico, Dr John, Zouzou, Gered Mankowitz, John Lennon, Kathy Etchingham (Jimi Hendrix's girlfriend at one point), Phil Brown, Jack Nitzsche, Stan Blackbourne (the accountant for the Stones at their mid-1960s peak), Mick Fleetwood, and the list goes on and on, have all said that he was a really nice, polite and all round good guy (although i would like to be clear on that he could have handled the whole baby-situations more gracefully to say the least, even though he wasn't permitted to be seen with them by the Stones management he basically left their mothers and the children to fend for themselves, except for the two that got adopted). so really, by most accounts, he wasn't an @#$%&, but a nice, funny and polite guy, that like anybody else had his own hang-ups.

this is not meant to sound confrontational or anything at all btw

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jlowe
Many of the old blues singers had similar love lives as Brian...chaos is almost too mild a description.
Not sure people got too moralistic about them however?

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wonderboy

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jlowe
Many of the old blues singers had similar love lives as Brian...chaos is almost too mild a description.
Not sure people got too moralistic about them however?

Some of Brian's behavior bothered Keith. Hitting women, for example. Not showing up for gigs. Keith considers himself a moral person, tries to live by a certain code. I think that's how he sees the world, and who really knows from the outside, but he's probably done his best to live up to his own morality.