Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

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  So in September 1965, the one-time leader of the Stones could feel the balance of power, the limelight, inexorably slipping away from him. Fatefully, just days after his encounter with Whitehead, Brian would make the ultimate double-or-quits bet and team up with Anita Pallenberg. They would become the sixties’ hottest, most dangerous couple, celebrated for damaging each other.

  The twenty-one-year-old actress, born in German-occupied Rome, was fluent in four languages and had already made connections with the Living Theatre and Andy Warhol’s Factory. Apparently undeterred by her rejection in Paris, she walked up to Brian in the wake of the Stones’ show in Munich on Tuesday, 14 September. In later years she would describe how she arrived after Brian had been picked on by the cabal, that he was desperate for solace. But he was also desperate for kicks. Even early on it was obvious that together the pair seemed to unleash some thrilling, uncontrollable energy. ‘Anita was a stunning creature,’ says Pete Townshend, ‘I mean, literally stunning. It was quite hard to maintain one’s gaze. One time in Paris I remember they were so sexually stimulated they could hardly leave the room before starting to shag. I thought Brian was living on a higher plane of decadence than anyone I would ever meet.’

  As a couple, they simply intimidated people, and revelled in it. ‘They frightened me,’ says Gered Mankowitz. ‘Anita exuded an extreme sexuality that I was frightened of. She was extremely exciting but she was dangerous. I was also very nervous around them, because there was a thing going around of spiking people’s drinks, and Brian was supposed to do that.’

  Together with Marianne Faithfull, who had first appeared on the scene in 1964 although only officially unveiled, as Mick’s new consort, in October 1966, Anita Pallenberg redefined the Stones’ reputation. Cynics reckon she latched on to Brian in the mistaken belief he was the leader of the Stones, then ditched him having realized her mistake. Not so, says Stash, the man who witnessed their first meeting in Paris: ‘Anita and Brian were very different people – Anita got a lot out of Brian, and she admired him for what he was capable of. And she grew him, the way women do grow one.’

  As Peter Whitehead noted, Brian was already demanding – of love, attention and new experiences. In this respect, he and Anita were very alike. ‘She was very much bent on things happening, and pushing, taking things to the edge,’ says Stash. ‘A very brilliant individual in her own right. A talented person. A wild person.’

  With Anita on the scene, the centre of gravity of the Stones shifted again: Mick and Keith still had a lockdown on the songwriting, but Brian regained his primacy in terms of the group’s image. As he dressed more extravagantly – multicoloured stripes, ruffles, velvet – Keith, with his cheeky face and chunky leather coats, looked at first like a jobbing apprentice, before later becoming transformed in Brian’s image.

  Anita completed Brian, and theirs was a potent alliance. They didn’t seem to care, and they seemed totally to lack any sense of decorum or empathy for others. Marianne Faithfull – whose command of detail isn’t necessarily comprehensive, but whose understanding of the emotional landscape is always accurate – was thrilled, and shocked, by their amoral behaviour. They seemed impossibly old and decadent, but also behaved like wilful children. Marianne remembers one night when Linda Lawrence, along with her father Alec, arrived at their flat, holding baby Julian, in an attempt to chase money Brian had promised them.

  ‘We’re in a bad way, we need some help! Please!’

  Up at the windows, Brian and Anita simply cackled, enjoying the spectacle, and refused to come to the door. Linda was ‘devastated. My dad was angry, but I was simply hurt and depressed. It would always remain one of my worst memories, for ever.’

  In her wildness, in that touch of evil, Anita was the perfect partner for Brian. Just before meeting her, Brian had taken delivery of a black Rolls-Royce, registration DD666 – which, legend would have it, signified ‘Devil’s Disciple’ followed by the number of the beast. It wasn’t planned that way, says Stash. ‘It just happened. I don’t believe Brian was even aware [of the number], till it arrived.’

  Brian’s fantasies of leaving the Stones ebbed away. He would never raise the subject again. Anita gave him the confidence to compete with Mick and Keith; doubtless he also sensed that if he left the Stones, he might lose the glamour that attracted her to him.

  The fourth US tour towards the end of the year ratcheted up the tension a few more notches. Again it would be Brian pushing everything to the edge. A few days into the tour he was hanging out with Bob Dylan, whom he seemed to prefer to be with rather than the members of his own band. On 9 November, he took part in what is often described as one of the great lost musical moments of the sixties. In fact, the headiness of the experience derived almost entirely from the shock of witnessing the Big Apple suddenly enveloped by darkness.

  Brian had spent the afternoon in the Village with DJ Scott Ross, and the pair were being driven uptown in their limo when all of a sudden the lights went out all over the city.

  ‘It’s the end of the world!’ Brian exclaimed, only half joking.

  The chauffeur drove tentatively, block after block, every junction a near nightmare without traffic lights, for what seemed an endless amount of time, up to the Lincoln Center. Yet when they arrived at the hotel, their troubles had only just begun. ‘The hotel was surrounded by young girls,’ says Ross, ‘and the garage doors wouldn’t open. When they realized it was a limo, they recognized Brian in there, and we had to run for it. I had my hair pulled, so it was bleeding – they’d take your hair, your clothes, anything. So it was a long way up to our rooms.’

  The pair had only just got to Brian’s room, still in the pitch black, when there was a knock on the door. It was Bob Dylan, who reputedly greeted Brian with the line ‘How’s your paranoia meter now, Brian?’, which is precisely the sort of brilliant one-liner Dylan was spooling out at the time. Scott Ross doesn’t remember that exact line, but agrees ‘that was exactly how it was – flip comments, sarcasm, cynicism, always that kind of commentary’.

  Dylan joined Brian and Ross in Brian’s room, his entourage trailing behind him, ‘Robbie Robertson, and a lot of others; then we lit candles, sat on the floor in a large circle, and passed joints around’. Someone produced guitars, and Brian, Dylan and Robertson played late into the night. No one noticed, or knew, what Mick and Keith were up to on the same evening.

  In mid-November, the band took a couple of days’ break in Miami. Anita flew over to meet Brian – an event recorded in the world’s press, which was starting to follow their romance. All the Stones were grateful for a break: already they’d become habitués of the American lifestyle, with its eager staff and twenty-four-hour action. Their hotel was on a beach with a dedicated area where guests could potter around in little motorboats – ‘like dodgems, really’, says Gered Mankowitz. Anita remained in her room while Brian was one of the first out, eager to try any cool little gadget. ‘He comes down, jumps on [this] boat and just heads straight out to sea. Completely disregards everything. Runs out of petrol and is towed back in. He was beaming, absolutely beaming, as this boat was being towed back. I can see him now.’

  It was one of those minor selfish, childish acts that requires lots of tedious grown-up tidying in its wake; the boat operator was offended and upset, and the hotel management announced that the entire tour party was banned from using the boats. It was a trivial but significant example of the way Brian often expected people to clear up after him, like a toddler. In such a manner did the childishness around the Stones escalate. In 1964 it was often Keith, Stu or Mick who indulged in petty behaviour, like leaving Brian behind on the way to a gig. Now Brian felt more empowered, he revelled in being difficult. Some people, notably Andrew Oldham and Gered Mankowitz, certainly reckoned that Anita’s arrival on the scene seemed to give him even more licence to act in a wilful fashion. Those people who, unlike Phil May, hadn’t seen Brian being picked on
grew almost to despise him. ‘It was simple attention-seeking behaviour,’ says Mankowitz, who believes a barrier was crossed during that tour. ‘It began to get to the point where it was difficult for him to surprise people with his behaviour.’ Mankowitz cites one particular incident when the band’s mini-motorcade was stuck in traffic in Chicago and Brian simply walked off and didn’t reappear. ‘No one knew what happened or where he went.’

  Ian Stewart, Andrew Oldham and, intermittently, Mick and Keith shared Mankowitz’s mounting contempt for Brian’s behaviour as the tour progressed to a close on the West Coast in early December. Yet one insider, right at the heart of their creative process, had a very different take.

  Brought up in a little town in Michigan, Jack Nitzsche was one of a small group of ambitious outsiders who made their mark on the Hollywood scene from the late fifties. By the early sixties he was on salary at Specialty, reporting to Sonny Bono, working with Little Richard and Larry Williams, writing out sheet music and overseeing compilations. Nitzsche’s stock rose in tandem with Phil Spector’s, and when Oldham became infatuated with the latter, adopting the same shades and haircut, he hired Nitzsche as an assistant, to hang out, arrange and produce on sessions. Although ‘hired’ is perhaps the wrong term: all Nitzsche ever got in the way of remuneration was a mention in the credits, and later a gold watch, in recognition of his contribution to million-selling hits like Satisfaction. He never complained; but when Oldham boasted of his new Roller with tinted windows, as Mick had bought his Aston Martin, Keith a Bentley Continental and Brian another Roller, Nitzsche’s friends thought he was insane.

  Brian was the Stone whom Nitzsche respected the most – although, as he mentioned frequently to his friends, Brian was just as much of an enigma as Mick and Keith. Nitzsche always felt himself excluded, never quite sure what any of them thought of him. Even so, bit by bit he began to understand how they operated. It wasn’t pretty.

  It was on the West Coast that the rivalry between Mick and Brian gained an extra, nastier edge – because Brian, as local kids like writers Ken and Harvey Kubernik testified, ‘made a bigger impact locally’. Ken Kubernik reinforces an impression shared by Toni Basil and most of the young Hollywood in-crowd: ‘Everybody glommed on to Brian. He was the centrepiece of the Stones.’ Jack Nitzsche was one of the few people who could track Mick and Brian’s relationship in both Britain and in the US, and he reckoned that on the West Coast, with the obvious public adulation of Brian and the way that bands like the Byrds would base their style, their haircuts, on him, the atmosphere seemed noticeably different.

  To make things worse, it was Brian who seemed to have his own little social group. Often it would be Nitzsche and Basil, or he’d wander off to stay with Wallace Berman or other members of the West Coast’s hip crowd. ‘Brian was really excited by the underground art scene,’ says Basil, ‘and this was a period when art and pop music were mixing. You had Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who made the first film where they used popular music. People gathered together, artists from different disciplines, all excited to be out together.’

  For nearly fifty years there’s been revisionism from the likes of Andrew Oldham and Keith Richards that Brian was out of it for sessions during this period, slumped useless over a guitar, drooling under the influence of a cornucopia of pills. Yet those around him in LA don’t remember him being conspicuously out of it – although it’s possible he saved his binges for when he was hanging around Oldham and the other Stones, in a bid to blot out the hostility. For much of the time in LA it appears he was on top form.

  By the new year he was avoiding the usual teenage-oriented clubs on the Strip to avoid getting hassled, choosing instead less predictable destinations such as a tourist-oriented joint which hosted a hypnotist, Pat Collins. Collins was well into her act, impressing all the starry-eyed visitors, when she appealed for volunteers to be put deep into a trance. A queue formed. Brian turned to his companions, giggling, then joined the line. Collins marched slickly through her routine, hypnotizing her volunteers in twos and threes before getting them to perform the usual ludicrous humiliations, like imagining they were eating the most delicious pie they’d ever tasted. Then she came to the long-haired guitarist, spoke softly to him, lulled him into a trance. His chin dropped; his eyes slowly closed. Then he swivelled around to the audience, lifted his face and extended the middle fingers of both hands, as the crowd erupted into laughter.

  Denny Bruce, later the drummer with the Mothers of Invention as well as a noted blues producer, shared a house with Jack Nitzsche, attended many of the RCA sessions for the Stones albums Out Of Our Heads and Aftermath, and often chatted with his friend about those sessions and how Mick in particular responded to Brian’s popularity on the West Coast. ‘Jack said he had the feeling when they got to the States that Mick had this jealousy, that a lot of the girls liked Brian rather than Mick. Which wasn’t so much the case in England. Brian just had a look, a way of moving around, that really excited the audience.’

  Mick’s feud – or, more accurately, rivalry – with Brian was exacerbated by drugs. By the end of 1965 they were becoming de rigueur; but for Mick, who liked to observe, to control, they were at best pointless, at worst frightening. It was infuriating for Mick that what seemed to him to make Brian unreliable actually made Brian hip. And the fact that he was indisputably hip became inescapable as 1966 dawned. This was the key difference between Brian and the other Stones, for better or for worse. As Jeff Dexter, one of the key scenesters of Swinging London puts it, ‘Brian inhaled, the others didn’t. They were tourists. Does that make sense?’

  Brian Jones’s ascendance into an emerging new hierarchy had already been publicly demonstrated, on 5 December, the final date of the Stones tour, which also inspired the first public Acid Test, run by Ken Kesey and his Pranksters – the first time a San Francisco R&B band, the Warlocks, performed under their new name the Grateful Dead. In the following weeks, stories filtered out that Brian had turned up for this crucial event, briefly appearing on stage with Jerry Garcia, as if to give the emerging California counter-culture his blessing. It wasn’t true. ‘We did go to the Stones venue and pass out pamphlets,’ says Prankster Ken Boss, ‘but Brian showing up was just a myth.’ The myth would circulate for years, though, cementing Brian’s reputation as the Stone who was unafraid to venture into new psychic territory. As the music scene changed in 1966, Brian – very much like George Harrison in the Beatles – would become a new figurehead. But peace and love, as Jack Nitzsche observed, were in short supply in the Stones camp.

  Out Of Our Heads, released in July 1965 in the States, was recorded in Chicago and LA, a scrappy affair based on a string of covers with a scattering of Nanker Phelge numbers. Split mainly between December 1965 and March 1966, the recordings that became Aftermath were a huge leap forward, and resulted from block bookings at RCA. ‘That was kind of unheard of,’ says Denny Bruce. ‘The sessions would start late and go into the early morning, something no one else did.’

  Today, we still think of Andrew Oldham as responsible for that classic run of early, hip, focused Stones recordings. Oldham did indeed have a particular genius – and for most of those classic sides its main achievement was the recruitment of Jack Nitzsche. For it was Nitzsche, says Bruce, who performed most of the duties George Martin took on with the Beatles. ‘Often with the songs they would usually have no more than a riff or something. And thanks to Jack being a good arranger, he was the one who would sit at the piano and help structure the song. With a guitar band you get jamming and something’s gonna come out of it. And it was Jack who would start holding them to a song structure.’

  Where Oldham, the nominal producer, had come to hate Brian – ‘the cunt who gives me trouble’ – Jack, the man on the studio floor, had an entirely different attitude. ‘He always loved Brian,’ says Bruce. ‘He used to say, “He’s the real Rolling Stone. The one who’s not just happy being in a blues band. The adventurer.”’ It was dur
ing the sustained sessions that gave birth to Aftermath that Nitzsche started to realize how badly Brian was treated. Like Phil May, Chris Hutchins and Dave Thompson before him, he was shocked by the brutality within the Stones.

  ‘I didn’t get to every session,’ says Bruce, ‘but Jack would tell me what was going on when he got back. And there was one session where Jack, the next day, said, “You know, Mick and Keith really can be nasty, man. Last night, Brian just wasn’t allowed to contribute to a song they were working on. He had a harp part he thought he would work out. And they went, ‘All right, go out in the studio.’ They made him do it five or six times, where he had blood on both sides of his mouth from wailing so hard on the harp. But they hadn’t even rolled the tape.”’

  Keith and Andrew Oldham’s recollections of Aftermath would focus on Brian being zonked out, on Oldham disconnecting him, and on Brian being a victim of his own excess, being paranoid, says Keith, ‘that someone was going to roll him out, which wasn’t true’. Nitzsche’s descriptions, shared after those long California nights, tell a different story, of Brian wanting to contribute but being cut out. ‘According to Jack, [Brian] just sat there, dejected, slumped, no longer contributing,’ says Bruce. ‘So the signs were there, even then.’

  Brian was, most people agree, a highly sensitive individual; this was his gift and his curse. ‘Early on, when Andrew Oldham made fun of his family car, this Humber Snipe, he couldn’t bear it, it made him feel really stupid,’ Linda Lawrence recalls. ‘But that sensitivity is what made him a great musician. You have to have that open sensitivity to be able to play like that.’ By abandoning the prospect of leaving the band he’d formed, this sensitive man was exposing himself, as Nitzsche and other observers noted, to some vicious treatment. Yet, as happened so often in Brian Jones’s messy life, from out of the struggle he brought forth music of quite extraordinary sweetness.