Chris Salewicz - 27: Brian Jones

This ebook edition published in 2012 by

Quercus
55 Baker Street
Seventh Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright 2012 Quercus Editions Ltd

The moral right of Chris Salewicz to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78087 542 2

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Chris Salewicz has been writing about music and pop culture for over 30 years. He was at the NME in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has written for The Sunday Times, The Face and Q magazine. His critically acclaimed books include Bob Marley: The Untold Story, Mick and Keith: Parallel Lines and Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer.

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 wed had a couple of successful records, zoom, he was Venus and Jupiter rolled into one. Huge inferiority complex that you hadnt noticed he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment.

Brian, in many ways, was a right cunt, is another of Keiths 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 Keiths 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 minences 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 hed 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 hes one of them guys that disintegrated in front of you.

Part of Brians disintegration was a consequence of the remorseless bullying he received from the other Stones. Pretty Things singer Phil May recalled

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 .

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.

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 thats why Brian appears in the front of the grouping in the Out of Our Heads cover. Theres no doubt about it: even from Brians 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 Joness smirking, studied air of dissolute elegance impressed Gered, who clearly saw the groups 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. Thats what I mean by charisma; he had a presence to him; hed got an image together; hed 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 musics 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 groups 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.