Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Page 15
To this day, there are those who can’t quite believe that the USA’s first exposure to hardcore blues on mainstream media was all due to a bunch of foreigners. It’s a hard fact to stomach for many Americans. Of course, there had been champions of black music before, visionaries such as John Hammond and Alan Lomax; Paul Butterfield had started guesting with blues musicians like Smokey Smothers in 1963, recruiting Wolf’s drummer Sam Lay to his band later that year. Butterfield’s was a significant step, but it wasn’t a breakthrough, like Shindig! All the Chess musicians, including Sam Lay and Buddy Guy, who played guitar on Wolf’s immortal song Killing Floor, were well aware that this mass exposure to a white audience was epochal. ‘It was the light at the end of the tunnel,’ says Guy. ‘There was a boundary line which no one thought could be crossed, and the Rolling Stones broke it by getting Wolf on that show.’ Peter Guralnick, the dean of American blues writers, agrees: ‘I’ve listed it as one of the Top Ten TV moments of all time, one of the most significant moments in cultural history – part of a wonderful movement that couldn’t be turned back.’
The resonance of the event was underscored by the presence of the bluesman Son House at the recording. Brian walked over to Son’s manager, Dick Waterman, to ask who the venerable gentleman was. When told, he let out a sigh: ‘Ah, the man who knew Robert Johnson and Charley Patton.’
Kids like Buddy Guy had left the South at a time when its representatives, led by Georgia senator Richard Russell, were successfully filibustering attempts to prevent lynchings and introduce civil rights. It took the murder of John Kennedy and the masterly politicking of Lyndon Johnson to pass basic civil rights legislation, albeit in a watered-down form, in the summer of 1964. Brian Jones sat at Wolf’s feet at a time when many restaurants in the South would have refused him service. For a hip English rock group to champion Chicago blues, uncompromising music aimed at a black audience, was a radical, epoch-changing step, both for baby boomer Americans and the musicians themselves. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids like Ken Kubernik hardly understood the growth of civil rights; but they could understand the importance of a handsome English man who described the mountainous, gravel-voiced bluesman as a ‘hero’ and sat smiling at his feet. If any moment epitomized the life work of Brian Jones, this – in all its sexiness and purity – was it.
Later in the show, the Stones got to mime Little Red Rooster. For most of the time the camera focused on Mick. But still that slide guitar rang out, unmistakably the sound of change.
*
It’s a quiet night, for once, at Buddy Guy’s club on the edge of the old Chicago South Side, the swaggering, smelly area over which Wolf and Muddy once vied for leadership. The smooth face and wondering, uncynical demeanour of the city’s one-time young Turk bely his years. There’s something entrancingly optimistic about his story, of how a kid who grew up playing a diddley bow – a one-string guitar nailed to the side of a shed – grew up to earn the respect of the President of the United States. His life is filled with many moments of wonder, and the night that Howlin’ Wolf was beamed into millions of American households – that light at the end of the tunnel – was one of the most significant. ‘It was something we would never even have thought of,’ says Buddy. ‘The hairs were just standing on my head.’
There are all too few interviews on the record with Howlin’ Wolf to reveal his feelings that evening. Wolf was a fascinating figure, an intimidating presence who studied at night school, hired classical music tutors for his band members, and tapped right into the deepest, most profound heart of the blues. Buddy was a confidant of the big man, and remembers how the event affected him. ‘We talked about it later. He said about how the man next door don’t know who I am – and here’s some British kids from thousands of miles away.’ Wolf was friendly with the Stones, but somewhat guarded. Only with the younger Chess musicians, like Buddy, did he reveal what a profound moment this was in the venerable bluesman’s life. ‘I know he was proud of what happened,’ says Buddy, ‘cause as far as the record companies or the news media or anything, we were all ignored until those kids came in.’
It was a mere three years since Brian Jones had set out to champion his beloved R&B. However embattled he was, this was something real. A movement that couldn’t be turned back.
6
Paranoia Meter
SHOULD I STAY? Should I go? How many of us delay that decision until it’s too late to matter?
It is no surprise that Brian Jones, a man who enjoyed confrontation but hated making decisions, would end up being pushed rather than jumping from the Rolling Stones juggernaut. Yet his senses had told him the right moment to jump, right at the beginning of 1965. Only one thing seemed to stop him: the people who were pushing.
*
It was an impressive Chelsea mews flat, a prototype for how all rock stars’ pads should look: Moroccan carpets, walls crammed with artworks, records stacked at the side, dandyish clothes draped over antique chairs, and a woman cached in a side room. Brian, too, was the prototype of a sixties rock star: languid, softly spoken, almost effete, a charming blond choirboy with something of the night about him.
‘Sorry, did I keep you waiting?’ he asked Chris Welch, clucking around him attentively and yelling ‘Sorry for the mess!’ as he disappeared into the kitchen, emerging minutes later with two cups of Earl Grey, no milk, before sitting down to talk.
They huddled around the fan heater, listened to a bagful of singles Welch had brought along, Brian recognizing most of the artists and producers after a few seconds and debating the merits of Geoff Love or Mike Leander as arrangers, or picking out what style of harmonica Stevie Wonder played.
Welch had become mates with both Mick and Brian over the two years he’d covered them for Melody Maker. They were joint leaders of the Stones, he reckoned. He liked the way Mick would deflect a tricky question with a joke, his ambition veiled behind the humour. Brian was very different, more anarchic, unafraid of voicing controversial opinions, riffing on how Londoners were too neurotic and how he’d like to live in Australia. But most of all he talked about life outside the Stones. ‘I’m soaking in the feel of the business at the moment,’ he told Welch, ‘but I want to produce records. In America. Who would I record? Any sort of pop artist.’
Welch realized the remarks about life outside the Stones were the real point of the interview, which had been planned as a guest review slot – that the idea was being tested on him. He thought it was a good one. In the topsy-turvy English scene, change was exciting. But for Brian, someone else would ring the changes.
Not that the Stones were sundered by some evil masterplan. Andrew Oldham didn’t set out to unseat Brian, as his PR partner Tony Calder points out: ‘It wasn’t hate. It was just that Andrew only had eyes for Mick, and Andrew’s supreme talent was that he could manipulate Mick.’ It was more the lack of a plan, the obsession with making it quickly before everything fell apart, that meant no one took much account of the long-term future. Except Eric Easton and Brian, who discussed what Brian would do when it all blew over. It was Easton who spoke regularly to Chris Welch: like quite a few journalists, Welch trusted him more than the volatile, aggressive Oldham. And in the spring of 1965, Easton set out to push Brian back into the limelight. ‘That interview was set up to take the spotlight away from Mick and Keith,’ says Welch. ‘[Brian] was aiming to set himself up as a solo figure. That’s why he was talking about working as a producer beyond the Stones.’
Easton, the older, old-school half of the Stones’ management team, was Brian’s main confidant within the band. ‘There was this camaraderie, and understanding between them,’ says Linda Lawrence. Easton was the only man Brian could trust to help float the idea of a solo career. But within weeks of the meeting with Welch, Easton was history, as was any prospect of his support for Brian.
Staying with the Stones allowed Brian to craft, to define, some of the most beautiful pop records of the sixties, but it
would come at a terrible cost. The Stones’ complex, nasty internal dynamics have been debated for decades, Keith Richards and Bill Wyman, for instance, giving drastically different interpretations of Brian’s conduct. Brian’s mistakes were indeed legion; yet in hindsight, his inability to jump off the juggernaut as it built momentum was the greatest of them. If Brian had formed his own purist blues outfit in the latter half of 1965, using friends like Paul Jones or Steve Winwood as guest vocalists, introducing exotic instrumentation and Islamic or Indian influences into the mix, he would have been perfectly placed for the second blues boom, kicked off by albums like John Mayall’s Blues Breakers (a Top Ten LP in 1966) and continued by Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, a band that started with purist blues songs then branched out to write their own material.
Paul Jones, the man who turned down a job as singer in Brian’s band, was well aware of Brian’s shortcomings, his overemphasis on being leader of the pack, his fastidiousness. He too shares the sense that if Brian had retained control of his own band and he had joined up with him, Brian ‘may never have become quite so rich, or quite so famous – but he might have still been alive’.
Without managerial support, Brian’s fantasies of launching his own band withered away. Lack of confidence was undoubtedly a factor, and in an act of bitter irony, it seems his decision to stay was partly inspired by more open attempts to dislodge him. Whatever the mix of motivations, with Easton gone he would never jump off a juggernaut that was picking up speed.
*
Zouzou was now Brian’s most consistent girlfriend, staying in the mews flat at 7 Elm Park Lane, just off the Fulham Road (Brian was the first Stone to fix on Chelsea, which soon became an obligatory rock star hangout). When she came over from Paris in the summer to stay with Brian, she found him upbeat, ‘wonderful, making me laugh all the time. He really was joking, laughing, full of energy. He was drinking a bit much, that’s the only thing I could say.’
Brian was almost indecently good at building a rapport, one of those people who bind you to them by insatiably gathering information. ‘He would call me up, was very curious – he wanted to know, was I sleeping on my right side or my left side, my belly or my back, all these crazy things that don’t mean anything; all about my parents, if I was happy.’ When Zouzou stayed over, they built their own silly routine. Brian didn’t have a cleaner, so they created little games to make the housework more interesting. ‘I was the captain of a ship. I would give him orders: you do this, you have to wash this part, like this. So it was very fun.’ Only Brian’s morbid narcissism and mood swings spoiled their on-off domestic harmony. ‘Sometimes he was very depressed because he didn’t like his eyes, the bags under his eyes, and he’s asking me, shall I get a [plastic] surgeon! Sometimes he was laughing about it – but he was moody sometimes. He could be very upset, cry like a baby. Then suddenly he’s starting to laugh and joke. He was up and down very often.’
As 1965 rolled on, Brian’s mental state became steadily more volatile. There are a couple of versions of when he first dropped acid, but there’s no doubt that he was the first Stone to do so. It’s possible he discovered the drug via Robert Fraser, the London gallery owner who’d become a key figure in his circle, but it’s more likely he dropped his first tab on the way to a club on Sunset Boulevard on 16 May, just a few days before the Shindig! show. Even in an altered state, though, threats were omnipresent. ‘He said the whole ground was covered with snakes,’ recalls Bill Wyman. ‘He jumped along the pavement trying to avoid them.’ The snakes would become a leitmotif, says Marianne Faithfull, who was encountering the Stones more often from around this time. ‘[His] paranoiac condition worsened on acid. Everyone would be looning about, and Brian would be over in the corner, crumpled up.’ Yet Brian seemed to embrace these horrors, savour them almost. He’d dropped acid again when the band hit New York a few days later, and became something of an evangelist, pressing others to try it. One of the psychedelic season’s most committed spokesmen, Eric Burdon, remembers being turned on, probably at Brian’s hands, at the New York club Ondine’s on 29 May: ‘I was in the middle of the dancefloor among a bunch of people when someone pushed by me and said, “Here, try this.” It was a sugar cube, and I think it came from Brian Jones. It blew my head open; it was like going straight into [the Beatles’] Day In The Life. I embraced it fully. I thought it was a way of changing humanity.’
Brian was busy that weekend, hanging out with both Burdon and the Animals’ guitarist Hilton Valentine, turning Valentine on to acid too. ‘Brian asked if I had ever tried LSD. I told him no and asked him what it was. He said it was just like hash but stronger and proceeded to hand me a sugar cube. We both popped one in our mouths and went off to the club.’ The guitarists were kindred spirits. ‘Brian was shy,’ says Valentine, ‘like me. I did like him – he was the only one from the Stones that bothered to reach out.’ Burdon and Valentine got on with Brian in a way that, if you believed the accounts of people like Andrew Oldham and Ian Stewart, should have been impossible, given their description of him as pretentious and selfish. Burdon, like Phil May before him, blames the Stones’ competitive streak: ‘There was the band, the Stones, and there was Brian, on the outside. I actually think he handled drugs well – I don’t think he was an acid casualty. I just think Brian had his own reasons for opting out.’ Yet as Valentine points out, the Animals (like the Pretty Things) weren’t that different: ‘It’s just too much to expect five people to be with each other for extended periods of time without something blowing up. Eric and I were taking all kinds of acid and the others didn’t like that, but we thought they drank way too much. Add our manager stealing our money into the mix, and boom.’
Boom. The Animals’ own story was uncomfortably close in some respects to that of the Stones, with bitter feuds, a mysterious death and vanishing fortunes. But the Stones story is bigger, not least owing to the appearance of a manager who wanted to control not one band but the entire British scene, a rapacious outsider whose art was money and whose genius lay in knowing how to hustle a hustler.
Allen Klein was hard-working, aggressive and boasted gangster smarts that entranced naive Brits like Andrew Oldham and John Lennon. Lennon would famously fall out with Klein, and mocked his legendary BO in one of his finest latter-day songs, Steel And Glass (‘you leave your smell like an alley cat’). In contrast, Oldham still seems strangely enchanted by the man whose estate now controls all the music he made with the Stones. ‘There is, and will only ever be, one Allen Klein,’ he says.
Klein’s upbringing was fractured, like Oldham’s, but way less cushy. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1931, Klein was brought up in an orphanage, took evening classes in accountancy and made his way into music publishing via hard graft. By the time Oldham first encountered him, Klein was intent on securing at least a slice of the British invasion. Klein played the much younger Oldham like a pro, appealing to him on both a practical level – he could refashion the band’s finances and truly break them in the US – and tapping into his fantasies: Oldham could become a recording visionary and a record company owner. Oldham took the bait, hook, line and sinker.
Within days of meeting Klein, Oldham appointed him as his business manager, then started persuading Mick and Keith to make him the band’s co-manager. After several secret get-togethers between Klein and the Oldham-Jagger-Richards triumvirate, an agreement was presented to the remaining Stones as a done deal, and Eric Easton was summarily sacked (his lawsuits would drag on for years). ‘I was the lone voice to express reservations,’ Bill Wyman would say in Stone Alone. Brian also missed Easton, the half of the Stones management he could talk to. Jeff Dexter, who worked with both Oldham and Tony Calder, speaks for many when he says, ‘Given what Andrew actually had at that time, it just shows how lacking in self-belief he really was. He’d always had that fantasy of trying to be someone else – and he looked up to the dodgiest American. To allow a cunt like that to come in and take it all . . . it’s unforgivable
.’
In trademark fashion, the news of the change was announced via huge interviews with Oldham and Klein, who considered themselves just as press-worthy as their band. In August 1965, Oldham used his regular Disc and Music Echo column to announce the launch of Immediate Records, aided by ‘my two friends, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard [sic]’. Eric Easton attempted to retaliate with his own half of the story, but was frozen out by the music press. ‘He was sad and despondent,’ says Chris Welch, who interviewed Easton about the split but had his story spiked. ‘News editor Ray Coleman’s ethos was, we only talked to winners, not losers.’ That ethos, Welch believes, was inspired by Oldham. ‘As you can see, the sixties wasn’t all peace and love.’
Klein had offered Oldham the irresistible prospect of his own empire: films, a record label, a bigger stable of artists. Although this was bad news for Brian, Oldham’s grandiose schemes did produce some fringe benefits. Back in March, a striking woman had arrived at a London party attended by Brian and Oldham. The woman, born Christa Päffgen but who would be forever known as Nico, marched up to Oldham and impressed him with her deadpan cool, talk of her role in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and her friendship with Bob Dylan. Then she noticed Brian Jones staring at her. ‘Let’s meet up again, and talk careers,’ he told her.