To any of the countless prolific dreamers of my generation – those of us who were adolescents in the sixties – Brian Jones meant something, and from the moment we made contact with his perfect blond impudence it was weird love at first sight. When I first saw him live with the Rolling Stones it was early 1964, I was twelve, they were only weeks away from being the biggest thing to hit England since the bubonic plague – and, oh, I will never forget it. They looked simply out of this world, like a new delinquent aristocracy, and they played music of a stunning arrogance and unbridled potency. And they had Brian Jones, who really appeared like their leader that night, with his china-cat smile of contagious evil assurance. He looked to me like a young man who had everything – charm, beauty, grace, success, infamy – every wondrous virtue this world could hope to offer, and for a long time afterwards his vision epitomized everything I in turn could hope to aspire to.
The next time I saw the Rolling Stones live five years hence, Brian Jones was there but not in the flesh. He was just a huge cardboard cut-out representation at the side of a stage. He was five days dead and the Rolling Stones, cool and disengaged as ever, were playing at his wake. The strange thing again was how little genuine sorrow there was emanating from the 250,000 plus crowd gathered at Hyde Park. A sense of loss, perhaps, but not sorrow. In a Rolling Stone obituary already circulating that afternoon Greil Marcus stated how when he’d heard that Jones was dead he’d felt no sense of shock, only that this was the most natural thing to hear happening to this tormented narcissus. It was true: the way Brian Jones lived his life he had nowhere to fall but into the grave.
He was born on 28 February 1942 in Cheltenham, and it was genteel, conservative Cheltenham as much as drugs, stardom or notoriety that was to prove his undoing. Certainly Keith Richards has strong views on this:
‘Brian was from Cheltenham, a very genteel town full of old ladies. It’s a Regency thing, you know, Beau Brummel and all that. Just a seedy place full of aspirations to be an aristocratic town. It rubs off on anyone who comes from there . . . He [Brian] had to conquer London first, that was his big thing. He felt happy when we’d made it in London, when we were the hip band in London. For me and Mick, it didn’t mean a thing, because it was just our town.’
His mother was a rather prim, religiously finicky woman. His father, a small Welshman from whom his son gained some of his singular looks, was quiet and deferential, inwardly seething with terrible anger. He had an older sister, whom a psychiatric report, one of many in his last years alive, would identify as a source of intense childhood jealousy on Brian Jones’s side. ‘He never truly felt loved,’ concluded the report.
He was obviously a prolific dreamer, and a prolific hustler too. From a very early age Brian Jones must have learnt just how contagiously precociously charming he could be and how by using this easy charm he could go a long way to getting whatever he wanted. Apparently excellent scholastically, he none the less bucked that system by staging a mini-revolt at school and getting turfed out as a result. If there was ever a turning-point in his life, it was probably here, but it’s hard to tell. After all, he was always a pretty audacious guy: already a girl was pregnant, the family shamed and he didn’t really seem to care. He let that easy charm grease his path away from the spectre of provincial ruination time and time again. Meanwhile he was being audaciously awful as a saxophone player in a Duane Eddy-styled combo, the Ramrods, but as a guitarist and harmonica player he started showing weird promise. He became a rhythm’n’blues obsessive – and as his best instrumental contributions to Rolling Stones records will later readily attest, this was the music that he had the most feel for. He aped old blues stylists like Jimmy Reed and Elmore James and planned on changing his name to Elmo Lewis, moving to London and becoming a big wheel. In 1961, in a tiny Cheltenham club, Alexis Korner, performing with Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, was accosted by an extremely intense young man who also was extremely inebriated: ‘It was Brian, of course. He was accompanied by a mate of his, I seem to recall, who said nothing. Not that anyone else could, because Brian was this pent-up ball of obsessive energy, talking away thirteen-to-the-dozen in an incredibly intense manner.’
That’s how people talk when they reminisce about Brian Jones. ‘I vividly recall the first time I met Brian but I can’t for the life of me remember where I first met Mick,’ Korner once told me, and he was being honest not bitchy because already Brian Jones had reinvented himself, he was larger than life and on fire for acclaim. And of course he was always hustling, stealing and petty pilfering. More often than not, he appears to have been caught, yet each time he slipped through with only a caution. This happened also in London just after he’d moved down: sacked from a record shop for having his hand in the till.
But by then he’d encountered Mick – then Mike – Jagger and Keith Richards after an impromptu performance sitting in with Alexis Korner and Cyril Davis. His ability to duplicate ‘Dust My Blues’ live with all the slide guitar embellishments had the pair royally gob-smacked, and they were even more impressed, if a little shocked probably, by Jones’s casual disclosure that he had two illegitimate children by different girls and the second one was living with him now there in London, but he was just living off her money, man, you know what I mean. Actually Jagger and Richards were much less worldly and didn’t know what exactly he meant but they nodded because they got the gist right enough and because they definitely wanted in. From that moment on the Rolling Stones were born and the sixties started really swinging.
To the vital Rolling Stones equation Jones brought with him a brawny Glaswegian straight-looking geezer-type, Ian Stewart, a hard worker who played strong piano and whom Brian Jones would soon enough back-stab and betray. Together this four-piece (with Jagger moonlighting at the LSE) rehearsed, and, with Keith and Brian living in now mythic squalor over in Chelsea’s Edith Grove, a sound was formed: Keith Richards’s primordial gut riffing – the very churn of sedition itself – over which Brian Jones’s guitar carelessly agitated, investing the blend with a seething malicious energy that was his and his alone. This and the sheer maniacally assertive force of his personality made him the leader of the Rolling Stones at this time and it was a position he was to connive his way into steadfastly maintaining until the other members could be bothered to dispute it. He did himself no favours here because, as the others, Jagger, Richards, stone-faced Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman – the bassist they engaged simply because they needed his amp-power – were soon to discover, behind the easy charm and china-cat precocity lay a shallow, maladjusted temperament. As a leader he was just hopeless, playing one off against another ceaselessly. When he went behind the others’ backs to demand an extra £5 per gig for himself the jig was well and truly up, but it was over anyway the minute sixties megaspiv Andrew Oldham, nineteen, laid eyes on the Stones.
That Oldham and Jones never got on is a little ironic because the hype that Oldham successfully sold the world – the Rolling Stones-are-not-just-another-group-they’re-a-way-of-life – was totally dependent on the infuriating dimension that Brian Jones gave the whole endeavour: because the fans instinctively guessed that the ‘way of life’ they intimated at was the one Brian Jones more than any other appeared to be leading on a day-to-day basis. Anyway, although they initially conspired together (Ian Stewart’s expulsion was their first piece of smarmy manoeuvring), they hated each other, and Oldham wanted Jones out before ‘Satisfaction’ even, probably pretty much from day one. For, reckless and beautiful Jones may have been, but Oldham’s showbiz instincts told him that there was no staying power in a Brian Jones. He was too much of a pain in the arse, one big problem. If he could have written songs, if he could have focused and articulated his torment instead of letting it turn him into a self-indulgent brattish malcontent, then things might have been different. But when Oldham successfully elicited Rolling Stones original material from the hard-working and more disciplined Jagger and Richards, Brian Jones’s careerist and artistic pipe-dreams of controlling the Stones framework evaporated before him.
In things that really mattered, Jones was always his own worst enemy anyway. His natural talents he squandered, as simple as that. After the beginning of 1965 he rarely if ever played guitar on a Rolling Stones record again, forcing Keith Richards ceaselessly to double-track in the studio because Jones was too out of it, or because he was ill and just didn’t feel like turning up. On the ceaseless treadmill of a gruelling world tour schedule through 1965 and 1966 Brian Jones was always the weak link. It didn’t matter so much that he couldn’t – or wouldn’t (he’d defiantly vamp the riff to ‘Popeye the Sailorman’ during ‘Satisfaction’, for example) – play his prescribed parts because at Rolling Stones concerts in the sixties all definition was lost under a sulphurous wall of frantic strumming and screaming anyway. But when he physically couldn’t make it onstage – he was always being hospitalized for nervous breakdowns, for taking too many drugs or because he’d broken his hand beating up a girlfriend – the other four hated and resented him. Not without reason, one feels.
Also, he was always hanging out with the rivals. He was a bit of a groupie really in that way, though they all treated him as an equal. The Beatles regarded him with genuine affection (they even recorded with him), Warhol thought he was just fabulous, and Dylan was fascinated by him. ‘How’s yer paranoia meter runnin’,’ he’d ask Jones, a twisted mass of helpless charm but always delightfully turned out. And though he’d agonize about his increasing isolation from the other Stones, who’d inevitably be working while he was out partying with his peers, he was secure, whether he knew it or not, in his capacity for being the kind of star who just has to ‘be there’ in order to generate the very mystique that culminates in a force like the Rolling Stones transforming itself from an irritant to a national outrage. In his finest photos (and until 1968 there was no such thing as a bad photo of Brian Jones) he looks like a little prince, just exquisite. Quite simply, he was the quintessential beautiful damned face of the sweet, sick sixties. And he was also the sixties’ baddest dandy. This was understood everywhere, it seems. All the big wheels stepped back when Brian Jones walked into a club, stoned of course, particularly when Anita Pallenberg was in tow. She was ‘the only one he ever really loved’, say his friends, and certainly she got inside him, tormented him like no other woman he ever got to know, because Anita Pallenberg, a North Italian actress,-model and full-time swinger, was as reckless, abandoned and amoral as him but much tougher. He couldn’t stand to be without her for a minute, but when he was with her he couldn’t stand not to hit her. They looked like twins – eerily beautiful together – and were an item for one sexy ruinous year between the fall of ’66 and the spring of ’67. It was a hell of a fling. And it could only get worse when Pallenberg left Jones in Tangier to take off with Keith Richards.
He’d been ‘behaving disgustingly’, according to the latter. ‘I just said, “Baby, we’re getting out of here.” ’ Another source now opines:
‘Anita was no fool. She first thought that the real power of the Rolling Stones lay with Brian, but after a while she found him to be weak . . . She found him pathetic in many ways. Her timing was perfect: she intuitively knew that the real power base in the Stones – the one strong man – was Keith and she latched on to him. Keith couldn’t believe his luck.’
With that it was game, set and match to Jagger-Richards in the psychic war over who meant the most in the Rolling Stones, the war that Brian Jones had obsessively instigated against them in the first place. He had every excuse now to get even more fucked up and did so with a terrible abandon. He’d always taken too many drugs but now his consumption rocketed alarmingly, as he chased after numbing stupefaction with a vengeance. ‘I’ll never make it to thirty,’ he’d once confided to Richards, just before their flimsy comradeship was destroyed once and for all by Pallenberg’s ‘betrayal’, and now it was just a matter of time before he fulfilled his own prophecy. When Alexis Korner spotted him at some London ‘happening’ in the late summer of ’67, three months after the break-up with Anita, he was ‘already starting to look hideous . . . Like a debauched vision of Louis XIV on acid, gone to seed. It was then that I suddenly realized there could be such a thing as an acid casualty.’ Not that it was just acid. Tony Sanchez, a minder and dealer for the Stones who divided his time and loyalties between Richards and Jones, once described to me the typical start to a day for Brian Jones in 1967 through 1968:
‘He’d wake up in the morning, take leapers [speed], cocaine, some morphine, a few tabs of acid and maybe some mandrax. Then he’d try to get dressed and end up with, like, a lizard-skin boot on one foot and a pink shoe on the other. Then he’d find he couldn’t stand up.’
Keith Richards now maintains that Jones’s chief drug problem was barbiturates: ‘He had an obsession about piercing the capsules so that they’d get into his bloodstream quicker. He knew all these junkie tricks!’ Barbs and alcohol combine to cause an often fatal wooziness. Jones was once spotted in this habitually warped condition attempting to shepherd a similarly blotto Judy Garland out of a club – talk about the blind leading the blind! He’d been an alcoholic anyway since late ’64. Back then Charlie Watts, to his credit, had cared enough to try and help him, but it was all to no avail. Brian Jones never seemed to grasp simple common sense. When he entered a clinic to come to terms with ‘stress’ and ‘nervous fatigue’, he took with him all the drugs that had helped put him there in the first place.
This was the essence of his pitiful nature: he’d plough through the dolly birds with a rapacious, again often malicious, zeal and then agonize fretfully about the loveless life he led, the fact that none of his countless conquests really ‘loved him’. Suky Pokier, the girl he picked up with briefly after Pallenberg absconded from his life, another doomed blonde sixties beauty, once confided that Brian’s problem was that ‘he basically thought of himself as an utterly useless member of society’, and it’s this one line that ultimately says more about him than all the reams of psychiatric reports and surveys he underwent in 1968, only to have their contents leaked before he had even been afforded a decent burial. For though he harboured all the flaming arrogant vanity of a peacock he possessed the sense of self-worth of a hopeless psychic cripple. Self-love and self-loathing were always in conflict, the latter getting stronger as each blurry barbiturate minute of his life ticked away.
The Stones, meanwhile, were off being industrious. They were survivors after all, and Brian Jones was not. After the psychedelic folly of 1967’s Satanic Majesties Request they were back playing their lascivious pagan music again, only it was even darker now, more malevolent and assured. Their big comeback, the 1968 Beggar’s Banquet, redefined them perfectly. They became ‘the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world’ instead of ‘more than a group, a way of life’. The way of life Brian Jones had represented was being abandoned. He was out of step, out of time, but most of all he was just out of it.
During the Beggars Banquet sessions, if he turned up at all, Brian Jones would roll up in a feeble, intoxicated state, incapable of being even remotely productive. Pallenberg and Richards were always together now, as thick as thieves, and that must have stung deeply. His paranoia meter – ‘He was so paranoid by that time he was too scared to go into a shop to buy cigarettes even, because he thought anyone behind the counter had to be a plain-clothes cop’ (Sanchez again) – also received a terrible caning from Jagger. ‘What can I play?’ Jones timidly asked the singer during one session. ‘I don’t know, Brian,’ Jagger had replied icily, ‘what can you play?’
‘Actually,’ says Alexis Korner, ‘I thought Mick and Keith were very patient with Brian, particularly him being in the state he was in. They didn’t broadcast his problems to anyone else, they didn’t put him down publicly. They were concerned in their way. And they waited a long time to see if he could recover before starting to consider replacing him.’
By 1969, facing a crippling tax bill, the Stones wanted and needed to tour again. This was the principal reason now for Brian’s exclusion because even in the last months of his life, when he seemed more settled, less desperate and drugged, he was incapable of physically sustaining a tour. After narrowly missing imprisonment for two drugs offences, the second of which all the facts seem to point to being a set-up, in ’68 he’d eased up, moved out of London to take up active residence in A. A. Milne’s old house. It was a gorgeous place apparently, and acquaintances remember Brian in the last weeks and months of his life pottering around the grounds like Milne’s Pooh Bear, quite hopeless but helplessly charming all the same. The most poignant image is Korner’s observation of Brian spending hours crouched excitedly rummaging through wardrobes and trunks full of golden trinkets which he’d try on, finest silks and velvets that he’d stroke, all the sprawling booty of his past peacock finery. When Jagger, Richards and Charlie Watts came down to tell him that they already had young Mick Taylor, a new guitar hero, waiting in the wings, Jones accepted the news graciously. Only when they departed did he break down, crying softly. A month later, five days after his departure had been made public to the world, he died – death by misadventure, the coroner stated. Late one evening, his mood buoyed by the mixture of amphetamines, barbs and alcohol he still found himself hopelessly dependent upon, he went swimming in his pool and drowned. There are still several nagging questions hanging over the circumstances of his death – a disquieting feeling that all has still not quite been revealed. For a time conspiracy theories were running riot all over the place but they’ve never amounted to much under scrutiny. Alexis Korner again:
It’s true that a lot of people hated Brian and some of them may have wanted him killed. But I genuinely believe it didn’t happen that way. Everyone was just waiting for him to do it to himself anyway.’
Dying when he did – frankly that was the best thing that could have happened to Brian Jones. For friends and fans alike, as sick as it sounds, it was a blessing because he was getting fat, losing his looks fast, and the image of a fat ugly Brian Jones was simply intolerable. For his girlfriends, in a way, it was good too, for now they could dream about his perfect doomed sexiness without having to confront its often vicious reality. For the Stones, of course, it was perfect because the dimension no replacement could ever hope to cover was suddenly filled up by his ghost. I mean, everyone knew the Stones were bad but now they were so bad one of them was holding up a tombstone.
For him, too, it was the right time. He was certainly intelligent enough to understand that he could never hope to match the impact he’d had as a Rolling Stone, that without their active context he was a has-been. And he died a martyr of sorts – the first major rock death of the sixties superstar era, a whole year before Hendrix and Joplin. At his funeral a letter written from Jones to his parents during the chaos of his drug busts was read out and its helpless plea, ‘Don’t judge me too hardly’, became his epitaph and was duly respected for a while.
But his absence hasn’t made many hearts any the fonder of his memory. ‘Quite honestly, you won’t find many people who genuinely liked Brian,’ stated Keith Richards in 1988 before launching into a blistering put-down of his former partner-in-crime. Well, yes, of course Brian Jones must have been a constant pain to work with, but now, twenty years after his death, it’s the infamous conduct and outrageous narcissism that he’s regarded for, the stuff that takes up the lion’s share of all those weighty Stones biographies. People duly point to his musical legacy, to little flashpoints of inspiration like the slide guitar on ‘Little Red Rooster’ (his own favourite) and the percussive modal malignancy of his sitar playing on ‘Paint It Black’, but really they don’t amount to much. What he gave to the Stones was the full force of authentically damned youth. What he lived informed Jagger and Richards’s best songs, and when he died they were robbed of a whole third dimension of meaning, really, becoming first the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, then ‘it’s only rock’n’roll’, then . . . Well, let’s face it, it’s been downhill ever since and leave it like that.
‘He was all right, y’know, when he wasn’t too out of it or in one of his states,’ a friend once told me. ‘Brian’s real problem . . . He couldn’t feel love, he wasn’t capable of feeling real love ever, not even for Anita really. That’s why he was such a mess.’
That’s it. Poor baby Brian Jones, so twisted, lost and loveless: the spirit that Jim Morrison and Patti Smith have eulogized in public verse, the image that stares out provocatively, disdainfully from all those timeless sixties photographs. He will never grow old.
Who loves you, baby?