Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  Brian was close behind Oldham in terms of stress levels. Up to this point he’d achieved some stability via his relationship with Linda Lawrence, to whom he wrote postcards throughout that first US tour. When Linda realized she was pregnant, right at the end of 1963, Brian had at first been solicitous. ‘I thought we were so much in love, everything could be worked out,’ she says. ‘Brian talked about getting a house, my dad took me around looking at places, there was this feeling it might be OK.’ But in the whirlwind of tour and recording dates, the idea kept getting postponed. Between the band’s first visit to the USA in June 1964 and their third in April 1965 he would become more maddeningly unavailable, more maddeningly inconsistent – all the more so because from the summer of 1964 he became involved with another young woman, Dawn Molloy.

  As Brian’s stress levels increased, so did his drug consumption. His drinking had become heavier around the beginning of 1964; later that year his friend Dave Thomson remembered Brian drinking a bottle of whisky in an hour or two. Brian had most likely tried smoking pot earlier that year, too, but once the band hit the States they discovered a cornucopia of the stuff thanks to the musicians in Chicago, New York and on the West Coast. For Brian, just as it was a point of honour to have discovered the rarest Robert Johnson track before his bandmates, so it was with new varieties of dope. It affected his behaviour noticeably, and quickly. ‘It became the thing among us,’ says James Phelge. ‘If Brian’s taking drink or drugs then it’s, Oh great, there must be some better drink or drugs. If Brian had some drugs and got smashed for twenty-four hours, then it was, Let’s see if we can get smashed for forty-eight hours.’

  There was another reason, beyond his competitiveness, for Brian’s increasing drugs intake. He’d always been one to evade problems or difficult decisions – unlike Mick, who was far more decisive. From July 1964, as another string of British dates followed the first jaunt to the States, he had more and more reason to blot out reality. Phelge believes it all stemmed from ‘that stupid five quid’ and that it rankled more and more. Phelge remembers, ‘It would be, We’re going to eat over here, and Brian can eat over there, or they’d drive off without him. Then as Brian became more and more of an outcast, that was when he started smoking more and more dope, and drinking more and more.’

  Some thought Brian deserved what came to him – Ian Stewart, in particular, came to heartily detest him (‘Brian was Welsh, and Welsh people are very devious’). But when Stu died, tragically young, he was still close to the Stones, still bound up with all their multifaceted internal bickering. Plenty of others, as we shall see, saw a long, enduring process in which Oldham, Mick and often Keith set out to wear Brian down. In later years Bill Wyman would express his guilt that he hadn’t stood up for the band’s founder. His then-girlfriend, Astrid Lundstrom, agreed with this take: ‘Mick and Keith got away with murder . . . because Bill and Charlie enabled Mick and Keith to go on being incredibly selfish.’

  But in the studio, Brian still held many trump cards, and would continue to do so. As Gered Mankowitz, who joined the organization that autumn, points out, ‘These guys are musicians, and musically, there is another language going on. If somebody strikes the right chord, as the expression goes, then for the duration of that shared experience, you can really tune in with someone – really like them. And that could still be true, even in the very last days.’

  Increasingly insecure and occasionally paranoid, Brian was still conscious he was holding aces, and took to flaunting his differences from the band members – Andrew Oldham in particular. In the summer of 1964 he resumed his wandering – his whereabouts in Windsor were too well known – and began seeing Dawn Molloy, who lived nearby.

  Naturally, for Linda Lawrence this was an unsettling, confusing time. She and Brian had driven to Cheltenham at the beginning of the year so that she could meet Lewis and Louisa. Brian’s parents were polite but undemonstrative. The pair had arranged the trip in order to break the news of Linda’s pregnancy, but in the frosty, repressed atmosphere of Hatherley Road they abandoned the scheme. Stressed by the meeting with his mum and dad, Brian succumbed to an asthma attack; he’d never address the subject of the impending birth with them. Worse still, when Linda’s parents finally contacted the Joneses directly, Lewis sent them a callously cold letter which implied the Lawrences were attempting to engage in some sort of financial squeeze. Brian, as usual, sought to flee the aggravation, told Linda he’d been warned by Oldham to keep news of her pregnancy quiet and needed to sort himself out. Linda decided, ‘If I could be patient . . . maybe he would come back to me’ and continued to see Brian, even as she knew he was drifting away.

  His new pad was a floor in a lofty Georgian house in Chester Street, a beautiful part of Belgravia. It was a dangerously provocative location, given that he shared the house with Phil May, Viv Prince, Brian Pendleton and his old bassist Dick Taylor of the Pretty Things – a band Oldham detested, seeing their hardcore R&B as a direct challenge to the Stones, according to Phil May. Unsurprisingly, the move emphasized his growing separation from the Stones – which in turn inspired a contradictory torrent of emotions.

  In the early days, Phil May heard stories of Brian’s treatment by Oldham and the Stones, but if he raised the subject with Brian, ‘he would pooh-pooh it . . . He didn’t even want me to mention it.’ Brian found it easy to chat to May about all the subjects that interested him – French films, art openings – but essentially it all came back to music. The more friendly Brian became with the Pretty Things, though, the more guilty he felt about being disloyal to his own band. One night he vented his frustrations by melting a stack of Pretty Things records on the stove, hanging them on the wall and writing ‘Fuck Off Pretty Things’ in shaving foam on the mirrors. The Pretty Things had their own crazed inter-band relations – ‘I remember one time I had Brian [Pendleton] up against the wall there,’ says May, ‘trying to strangle him’ – but some of the Stones’ internecine rivalries went well beyond that.

  The situation could lead to cruelty, too. The choice of the Stones’ follow-up to It’s All Over Now was tough. That song had fallen into their lap, and marked new territory: it wasn’t just the sound, its cynicism and put-down of uppity women would prove a template for the band’s whole shtick. After initial objections, Oldham bought into the idea of releasing Little Red Rooster, the beautifully minimal Howlin’ Wolf song written by Willie Dixon, which was a showcase for Brian’s still-pioneering electric slide guitar. Brian was overjoyed by the prospect, mentioning several times to Viv Prince and Phil May that the band was headed for Regent Sound studio to record the song the next day. ‘That’s weird,’ thought May, who’d just been chatting to Ian Stewart, ‘I heard they were in the studio today.’

  Stu picked up Brian in his van at the appointed time, and May and Prince went along for the ride. As they walked up the stairs to Regent Sound, and into the tiny studio, there was no sign of the rest of the band. ‘But there was a note on the chair,’ says May, ‘saying, “Only play on these bits”. They had done the whole thing, and left him to overdub. It was such a mean thing to do.’

  For the first time Brian was ‘frantic’, according to May; ‘it was unbelievable’. In later years, Stu, for all his anger with Brian, would say he was ashamed of the trickery, for which he blamed Mick. For outsiders like May, this was the first sign that the brutality Oldham and his favoured band member directed at rival bands and managers could also be turned on Oldham’s least favourite band member. Yet Mick remained careful around Brian, rarely confronting him openly. Oldham, too, gave little away: ‘he was hard to make out,’ says Dawn Molloy, ‘strange’. Hence Brian would be left guessing, never quite sure what was going on. Keith was different. With him the abuse was physical, to an extent that shocked outsiders. ‘Keith would take the piss all the time,’ says Dawn, ‘but it was plain nasty. If something was going on, he’d pick a fight. They might be throwing things around – and he’d hammer it, throw things at Brian s
o it really hurt. He was nasty. It was very unhealthy.’

  Ultimately, though, the struggles over who controlled the music were more damaging than the fights. ‘Loogie, for me, was a bastard,’ says May. ‘Very good for them but a real bastard. Brutal. Jagger and Oldham were the absolute masters of that ruthless approach.’

  *

  That September recording session for Little Red Rooster was squeezed between more British tour dates, followed by another European jaunt with just a couple of days’ breathing space after Paris for the band to ready themselves for some unfinished business: their second onslaught on America. The Stones still travelled as a tiny crew, but for this trip they were joined by a new recruit, road manager Mike Dorsey.

  On 25 October, the band debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show; it was a raucous performance as they ripped through Around And Around and Time Is On My Side, the camera constantly cutting to the hysterical audience. Sullivan seemed to relish the chaos – the screams continued as he attempted to introduce the other acts – but a few days later the story surfaced that the outraged host had proclaimed, ‘I promise you, they will never be back on my show.’ The threat, soon withdrawn, generated vital publicity on the East Coast.

  Just days later came an equally significant rite of passage on the West Coast: the TAMI show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. It was a hip programme, and the Stones were up against the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, then at his peak. Brown was a pro, steeped in the gospel culture where a preacher could induce hysteria and fits in his congregation, honed by nine years of cut-throat competition on the chitlin circuit. The Stones, just one year into their pro career, fought back using Oldham’s key tactics: bullshit and adrenalin. Oldham held them back, keeping the crowd waiting – a delay that testified both to their terror at following Brown, and their snotty belief that they could do what they want, that the crowd could and would wait.

  Toni Basil, part of the circle of the show’s music director Jack Nitzsche and soon to be a renowned choreographer, was fast becoming a key member of the Sunset Strip cool crew – and also happened to be a doe-eyed, luminously attractive brunette. As the Stones delayed, pleading an equipment breakdown, she wondered how they could possibly follow one of the greatest performances she’d ever witnessed. But then the Stones walked on stage and hit the first chord, ‘And I tell you, Mick jumped in the air and Brian did the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen – because I come from a vaudevillian family: Brian simply turned his back to the audience. Which was such a comment on where this group was coming from, breaking all the boundaries of how we ever thought music was performed.’ Basil’s reaction to Brian pretty much epitomized how the West Coast took to him. ‘He was so extraordinary-looking,’ she says, ‘this blond hair, bright red sideburns, those green eyes, and he dressed so flamboyantly. And, wow, he was really a knockout.’

  It wasn’t just teenagers, like Kubernik’s circle, or music scenesters like Nitzsche or Basil who loved Brian. LA’s photographers and artists gravitated to him, too. Guy Webster, who shot High Tide and Green Grass, was typical in that ‘I just got on with Brian the best’. Guy’s father was Paul Francis Webster, the lyricist who’d written (for example) I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good. ‘I was hip to the blues from an early age cos of my dad,’ says Webster. ‘I loved that they played it with this English twist. And Brian was the guy who championed all of that.’ The band was likeable, but Brian was the one who ‘reached out, who was easiest to get along with’.

  The entire band launched themselves on to the LA scene, hanging out at RCA – the studio that Nitzsche told them put the dumps in London to shame – at the clubs on the Strip, like the Action, or the city’s hip clothing outlets. But Brian was the one who’d go out solo, or accompanied by locals like Basil, Nitzsche and Wallace Berman, one of the city’s hippest artists.

  Berman, one of those iconic twentieth-century figures who made it on to the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album alongside Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi, epitomized a distinct element of California cool. He was a cutting-edge collagist who’d already been sought out by London’s best-connected gallery owner, Robert Fraser, who flew out to visit him early in 1964. Berman had hung with the Beats in the fifties, designed sleeves for Charlie Parker, and was friends with the actors Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell. Andy Warhol used to drop in when in LA, and filmed Berman alongside Hopper and Taylor Mead in Tarzan and Jane Regained. Yet Berman was unpretentious, an unerring judge of art, and kept a tiny house in a gorgeous location in Topanga Canyon.

  After Berman was introduced to Brian by Toni Basil, his home, almost a one-room shack, became a regular refuge for the lonely Stone. Brian and his newest friend would sit talking, sipping wine, toking on joints, playing Berman’s exhaustive collection of jazz vinyl, or Glenn Gould’s latest interpretation of Bach, beyond the wee small hours and into the morning. Often, when Berman’s son Tosh got up for school or his wife, Shirley, was on her way to work, Brian would still be up talking. ‘He went to my father’s world to get away from Stones world,’ says Tosh, who as an impressionable ten-year-old remembers Brian as a powerful presence. Mick, when Tosh met him, ruffled the youngster’s hair; Brian, in contrast, treated him more like an equal, asking him questions. It was the same with Berman senior: endless exchanges of information, Brian asking him about his collages, the people on the art scene, who to check out, or sharing his take on Charlie Parker recordings. It was the same, too, when Brian ventured out to clubs with Toni Basil or Jack Nitzsche: he was the one searching out the unfamiliar, eager to learn.

  Brian’s nocturnal ramblings took him well out of the other Stones’ orbit; he became more and more elusive, only occasionally allowing them into his world. When they did enter it, it was more disorientating and decadent than they were used to. Andrew Oldham remembers one long, sensuous night from that tour when he and Brian briefly bonded, in New York. Brian initiated Oldham into his world via a multiway carnality that echoes the sex games screenwriter Donald Cammell set up in Performance, Mick Jagger’s film-acting debut. It was twenty-four hours that seemed to go on for ever, Oldham recalled later, involving three women and a supply of amyl nitrates: ‘five became one, a sexual androgyny mystified, in one popper-driven phallic rush’.

  During that same New York trip, Brian shocked the writer Al Aronowitz by mentioning his prowess with girls, and showing the respected scribe a dog leash he claimed he used in his erotic explorations. This wasn’t empty boasting: Brian showed other people a leash, or chain, that he used in his sex games, including his old Cheltenham acquaintance Barry Miles, who of course remembers Brian being acquainted with the work of the Marquis de Sade. ‘He was most definitely a sadist, one side of him,’ says Miles. The side of Brian that wasn’t sadistic was undoubtedly narcissistic – a condition hardly rare among rock stars, though Brian was an extreme example.

  It was ironic that Brian bonded briefly with his manager in a whirlwind of sex and drugs for it was behaviour like this that would sever both of them from the band, as it exacerbated their tendency to manic depression. And sybaritic streaks don’t mix with physical fragility. After his manic highs in New York and LA, Brian collapsed with exhaustion on his arrival in Chicago on 11 November; he was hospitalized and missed four shows. Stu, in particular, blamed the collapse on Brian’s drug use and self-indulgence, and his contempt for the man increased. This was the second time the band played several dates without Brian – but this wasn’t like the earlier time he’d let them down, for their success in the US was on a knife-edge. This time their resentment festered, and then spread. By the end of the tour, Brian was telling friendly journalists, ‘I’m not on my last legs through ill health and I’m not leaving the band.’

  At the end of November, Little Red Rooster, the record that embodied so much of Brian’s vision, became a shock UK number 1. A few weeks later, recording at RCA in Los Angeles, Brian lit a fire under Mick and Keith’s first proper Stones single. As Gered Mankowitz poin
ted out, in the studio, Brian still had the power.

  It was the release of The Last Time on 26 February 1965 that formalized Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ assumption of power in the band Brian had created – a brilliant single, with gloriously arrogant lyrics set to an elegantly simple chord sequence and an insistent, unforgettable guitar riff. The single showcased Mick and Keith as snotty young geniuses. Which they were, although not as complete as the single suggested. The song itself owes much to a Staple Singers track Keith had heard back in Chicago, and the Staple Singers’ version was based on an old gospel tune that they’d extensively reworked with a new harmonized chorus: ‘This may be the last time, I don’t know’. Mick and Keith’s take on it lifted that line whole. The verse itself was a simple E, D, A chord sequence, rather like the Beatles’ Rain, or hundreds of other songs. It was the spiralling, insistent guitar melody that made sense of the verse – and this line was Brian’s. For all his irritating habits, he still had the gift of musical insight, making Keith and Mick’s song sound better, twisting the knife in his own wound.

  Brian’s ability to reach inside a song and make sense of it would be commented on by many observers, people who worked closely with the Stones, like Jack Nitzsche and studio engineers Eddie Kramer and George Chkiantz (Mick and Keith have rarely, if ever, voiced such compliments). This makes his failure to write any songs with the Stones all the more puzzling. Gered Mankowitz expresses the view of many insiders when he says, ‘He simply wasn’t able to write material for the band’. Andrew Oldham suggests a simple reason: ‘You can’t write popular music looking down at it – and that’s what Brian did.’ Yet that’s a nonsensical statement, given that Brian was probably the most eclectic of the Stones. ‘He loved pop music as well as R&B,’ says the Who’s Pete Townshend, who became friendly with Brian from 1964. ‘That’s what appealed to me – I hated snobbery.’ In reality, Brian lacked what other emerging songwriters, like George Harrison, possessed: a supportive environment. Eric Burdon, who didn’t start writing his own songs until 1967, remembers how crucial that was: ‘I needed some sort of enthusiasm from somewhere, cos I wasn’t getting it from my band, and it turned out to be George Harrison who helped. I played this rough version of Sky Pilot, we talked, and that was the pat on the back I needed, to be more experimental. I needed that boost to my confidence.’ James Phelge remembers Brian’s first attempts at songs being met with retorts like ‘that sounds like a bloody Welsh hymn!’ In the early Stones material, Brian contributed countless key riffs and backing vocals; the course of his relationship with Oldham can be seen in the way these backing vocals are pulled down in the mix, after I Wanna Be Your Man, and then disappear completely.