27: Brian Jones

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Since his death from a mysterious drowning at the age of twenty-seven in July 1969, time has not been kind to the reputation of Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones.

At the time Brian died there was no widespread public awareness that his position in the Stones had become contentious, or of exactly why he had left the group a month previously. Information about the split is largely based on the unfavourable testimony offered up by celebrity witnesses, most notably other members of the Rolling Stones. Some of these expert voices may be considered to have had an axe to grind; motivated perhaps by complex reasons of his own, Keith Richards, for example, has never pulled any punches in his assessments of Brian Jones. ‘I never saw a guy so affected by fame,' said Richards in
Life
, his autobiography, ‘the minute we'd had a couple of successful records, zoom, he was Venus and Jupiter rolled into one. Huge inferiority complex that you hadn't noticed … he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment.'

‘Brian, in many ways, was a right cunt,' is another of Keith's assessments of his former friend. ‘He was a bastard. Mean, generous, anything. You want to say one thing, give it the opposite too. But more so than most people, you know. Up to a point, you could put up with it. When you were put under the pressures of the road, either you took it seriously or you took it as a joke. Which meant that eventually – it was a very slow process, and it shifted and changed, and it is so impossible to describe – but in the last year or so, when Brian was almost totally incapacitated all of the time, he became a joke to the band. It was the only way we could deal with it without getting mad at him. So then it became that very cruel, piss-taking thing behind his back all the time …'

What is strange about Keith's ceaseless dismissals of Brian is that they were once close. What, you wonder, is Keith trying to justify? Such egregious assessments, moreover, were amplified by contemporary
éminences grises
like John Lennon. The former Beatle famously said of Brian to Jan Wenner that, ‘He ended up the kind of guy that you dread he'd come on the phone, because you knew it was trouble.' Those much-quoted words, however, only set the tone for a more measured appraisal which Lennon finally gave to Wenner: ‘He was really in a lot of pain. But in the early days he was alright, because he was young and good-looking. But he's one of them guys that disintegrated in front of you.'

Part of Brian's ‘disintegration' was a consequence of the remorseless bullying he received from the other Stones. Pretty Things' singer Phil May recalled
[1]
that once, when the Rolling Stones had a gig in Portsmouth, Brian was driven down to the south coast port in his old Rover, the fastidiously punctual musician wanting to be at the venue early. When his car broke down, Brian waited for the rest of the group's limousine to drive past, and attempted to flag it down. But the other Stones drove past him laughing, and played the gig without him. On another occasion while on tour, Brian was suffering from a sore throat. They stopped at a chemist's for Brian to purchase an antidote, but then, at Keith's urging, drove off and left him, surrounded by screaming girls.
[2]

Such anecdotes contribute to the myth of Brian Jones as a kind of pathetic loser with perpetually bruised feelings. Yet in actual fact, Brian Jones was a consummate artist ceaselessly channeling his abundant creativity into driving the engine of what became the Rolling Stones.

When the first music, images and performances of the Rolling Stones emerged, it was Brian Jones who incontestably and effortlessly captured the attention of female and male admirers alike. With his glimmering, thick golden hair, girlishly handsome face with its knowing, hard but seductive eyes (it seems almost unsurprising that he was a father at the age of sixteen, and would have four more children), and his consummate and dramatically different sense of style, he appeared like a Greek god. For almost all of his time with the group, when you thought of the Rolling Stones, you first considered Brian Jones – not really Mick Jagger, and certainly not pimply Keith Richards. Much more than by Mick Jagger, the initial visual identity of the Rolling Stones was personified by Brian Jones, its prime exponent of foppish narcissism. ‘Brian Jones was the most stylised, and stylish, British rock star there has ever been,' said Paul Gorman, author of
The Look
.
[3]

Ray Davies, not yet leader of the Kinks when he first encountered Brian, recalled him as being ‘probably the most conceited-looking person I have ever met. But he was also one of the most compelling musicians ever on stage.'
[4]
‘He was the nasty one … the whole nasty image of the Stones really started with Brian, not Mick. Because Brian was a bitch!' said Alexis Korner, an important mentor of the Cheltenham boy.
[5]

By 1965, the Stones were working with a young photographer, eighteen-year-old Gered Mankowitz, shortly to take the cover picture for their
Out of Our Heads
album. Mankowitz was fully aware of who was the star of the group: ‘In those days Brian had the most formed image, the most evolved image, the most groomed image. He was the one who physically was the most confident.

‘Mick and Keith were still kids in a way. They were still finding a space, a place. And that's why Brian appears in the front of the grouping in the
Out of Our Heads
cover. There's no doubt about it: even from Brian's haircut you can see he really was the most evolved and the most charismatic.' So much so, in fact, that in a poll in
Record Mirror
in September 1965, the same month that
Out of Our Heads
was released, Brian Jones was voted ‘The Most Handsome Man in Pop'.

Brian Jones's smirking, studied air of dissolute elegance impressed Gered, who clearly saw the group's founder as the architect of its image; Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were far less sophisticated. ‘There was a studenty thing about them, an art school thing. Brian had an element of show business about him. He was more advanced in that way. That's what I mean by charisma; he had a presence to him; he'd got an image together; he'd made a conscious effort to look the way he did, whereas everybody else was just evolving, Mick and Keith particularly, and shaking off the ordinariness of early '60s British teenagerhood.'

Not only was Brian Jones by far the most charismatic performer in the early days of the Rolling Stones, he was also the most musically talented. As Clash guitarist Mick Jones commented, ‘Brian Jones would just need to look at a newly discovered instrument to know how to play it.' It was Brian who introduced the sitar into the pop charts, on the masterly ‘Paint it Black'. He was forever pushing further texture and daring inventiveness into the Stones' sound: the dulcimer on ‘Lady Jane', the flute on ‘Ruby Tuesday', the marimba on ‘Under My Thumb'. Into Eastern music even before George Harrison, Brian Jones was one of British pop music's great innovators; through his recording in Morocco of
The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka
, he was the first significant British musician to discover what became known as world music.

Convinced of his status as founder of the Rolling Stones, however, Brian early on made what can be seen as a huge tactical blunder: it emerged during the group's 1963 tour with the Everly Brothers that he had negotiated himself wages of five pounds a week more than the rest of the group when signing a management contract. This was a key moment. ‘That was the beginning of the end for Brian,' said Keith.

Yet the most legendary functioning rock 'n' roll outfit today would not have existed without his having started them.

*

On the evening of 7 April 1962, Mick Jagger had borrowed his father's car for the ninety-minute drive from Dartford in south-east London to Ealing on the fringes of the capital's western suburbia. With him was Keith Richards and their mutual friend Dick Taylor. All were members of the Blue Boys, a group that had played no further afield than their respective living rooms.

They were heading for the G Club, which had been started in a basement by Alexis Korner, doyen of British blues. The billed headliners at Ealing on that Saturday night were Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated.

But when Mick, Keith and Dick arrived at the venue, the music that sailed up to them as they stepped down into the tiny, smoky club was a tenor sax solo by Dick Heckstall-Smith. The gang from Dartford were unimpressed, feeling this to be more in the vein of trad jazz than blues. Until Alexis Korner stepped forward and announced, ‘This is Elmo Lewis. He's come from Cheltenham to play for you.' And then the group kicked into ‘Dust My Broom', the Elmore James classic, on which a flaxen-haired, handsome young man took up his Hofner Committee electric guitar to devastating effect. ‘They were stunned,' Dick Taylor recalled the response of Mike Jagger and Keith Richards. ‘Just when it seemed there was no one else who understood, here was a kid our own age, playing bar slide blues. Mick was knocked out.'

Keith also was awestruck by what greeted them onstage. ‘It's fuckin' Elmore James,' he gasped. ‘I said, what? What the fuck? Playing bar slide guitar.'

‘At the beginning,' Alexis Korner noted later, ‘Mick and Keith hero-worshipped Brian. He seemed about twenty years older than them.' On vocals on that performance of ‘Dust My Broom' was another prospective blues singer called P.P. Pond. P.P. Pond was actually Paul Jones, the singer with a blues group called Thunder Odin's Big Secret. Brian Jones had sat in with them on a few occasions, and that Saturday at the G Club Alexis Korner had given them the break of playing as interval group. Although the voice of P.P. Pond and the exciting slide guitar of Elmo Lewis gelled so well, this was the last time they would play together. Paul Jones would become the singer with Manfred Mann, another blues-based London group who would have considerable success. That evening, however, it was the guitarist with whom the Dartford boys were absolutely taken, an individual who managed simultaneously to appear slight and stocky. After Brian had come off stage, Mick, Keith and Dick spent some time talking to him. They were enormously impressed by Brian, who already had two children of his own, while they were still living at home with their parents.

*

Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones had been born on 28 February 1942 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Both his parents were university-educated; his mother Louise was a piano teacher, while his father Lewis was an aeronautical engineer.

Brian was the eldest of their children. Barbara was four years younger than him, but another sister, Pamela, who was two years younger than Brian, had died when she was two. Around this time Brian developed asthma, which would return afterwards during taxing situations. Later, his parents would shelter Barbara from her reprobate brother. There were suggestions that Pamela's death had caused Louise Hopkin-Jones to project all her love onto her new daughter, withholding affection from her son. Perpetually shocked by his teenage behaviour, Brian's parents put up an emotional brick wall against him, which only seemed to harden the resolve of their sensitive but tough son.

Brian easily passed the eleven-plus – he had an IQ of 135 – and won a place at the local Pate's Grammar School, which had a dress code of straw boaters in the summer and mortar-boards in winter. But this former church choirboy rebelled against the establishment's atmosphere of stifling convention. For organizing a revolt against prefects, Brian was suspended for a week from Pate's.
[6]
He spent his days away from school swimming at Cheltenham Lido. Brian was a very strong swimmer, and when he returned to school he had attained high status amongst his peers. Despite his behaviour, his headmaster, Dr Arthur Bell, retained fond memories of the boy.
[7]
‘Brian was a very clever boy, but introverted, withdrawn, with a pasty face and with his father on his back all the time. He wasn't a bad lad.' Dr Bell noted that his father would frequently arrive unannounced at the school, complaining about the behaviour of his son. ‘Once he demanded that I get his boy to get his hair cut, which of course had nothing to do with me.'

Brian's parents were ambitious for their boy, wanting him to become a classical musician. By the age of twelve, he was an exceptional guitarist, as well as being adept on the piano and clarinet. After fourteen-year-old Brian sold his clarinet and took up the saxophone, however, he revealed his interest in jazz, especially the work of innovative sax player Charlie ‘Bird' Parker, with whose music his parents had no truck whatsoever.
[8]
He also took up playing the washboard in a local skiffle group.

In 1971 his father Lewis was interviewed for
A Story of Our Time
, a programme on BBC Radio 4. ‘There came this peculiar change in his early teens,' he said. ‘At the time, I suppose he began to become a man, where he began to get some resentment of authority. It's something we hear an awful lot about now – less about then. But it was becoming apparent in him.

‘He seemed to have firstly a mild rebellion against authority, which unfortunately became stronger as he grew older. It was a rebellion against parental authority and it was certainly a rebellion against school authority. He often used to ask, why should he do something he was told, just because the person who was telling him was older?'

There was a further problem thrown up by these shifts in Brian's behaviour. Near his school was Cheltenham Girls' Grammar School, a repository of fine young ladies. Brian, aware of his extreme good looks, would boast to his classmates that he had ‘gone all the way' with at least one of them. Disbelievers were soon disabused when a scandal hit prim Cheltenham: a fourteen-year-old girl, Valerie Corbett, had become pregnant – and the father was 16-year-old Brian Jones. Contrary to Brian's entreaties, the girl refused to have an abortion, giving birth to a son, Simon (originally Barry David), who was adopted.
[9]