Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  7

  Paint It Black

  TIME TO REFLECT, to hang out and to plan had been cruelly curtailed over the last few years, but as 1966 dawned, Brian returned from a short holiday with Anita to his Chelsea mews flat for his first proper stay there since he’d moved in the previous March.

  Those were chilly weeks in London. Brian felt the cold keenly and kept his fan heater on full time in his flat, now a veritable Aladdin’s cave of records, books and musical gear. But the creative atmosphere in London was warming up fast. This would become Brian’s major distraction from the bitterness within the band, as he realized that he could set the agenda once more. And just as he’d persuaded his more conservative bandmates to hop on the blues train, so he’d drag them along in his wake through 1966.

  Brian was the first Stone to move to Chelsea, a couple of years before Mick, early enough to define the area’s new vibe, with its blossoming hip new clothes shops like Hung On You and Granny Takes a Trip. Brian as a character had always been afflicted by self-doubt – that terrible failure, as James Phelge pointed out, ever to be satisfied – but he was braver than his fellow Stones. With Anita Pallenberg by his side he got braver still. It was Brian who was linked to the movie crowd, to Warhol’s Factory, to Bob Dylan, as the British Beatboom passed into history. Nigel Waymouth, the artist and designer who’d define the look of English psychedelia, had known Brian since the Marquee era, and noticed how he was starting to dominate the band’s look: ‘There was this peacock side to him. He was the pretty boy, he was young and wanted to show off. I don’t know what his finances were like, but he always dressed beautifully – and was probably the most flamboyant of all of them.’

  Michael Rainey, who had opened Hung On You just a couple of months before Waymouth’s Granny Takes a Trip, was one of the first to spot that subtle change in the balance of power: ‘I think that Keith was looking at Brian, with Anita on his arm, and realized he had a lot of self-confidence. That he was taking a lot of acid and whatever other drugs, with Anita, whereas Mick never really took anything. Marianne always said Mick was afraid of drugs. Mick wasn’t the rebel.’

  The fact that he still retained, or had even built up, some of that magical aura of hip inspired and irritated Mick Jagger and Andrew Oldham in equal measure. Just as irritating was the fact that it was Brian who probably got on best with their biggest rivals, like Dylan and the Beatles. Keith was shy; Mick was cautious; Brian would often drop in on Paul McCartney for a natter, ‘mainly about music’, says Tony Bramwell, who hung out with the pair. ‘You’d chat about where you’d been – although none of us would ever know where we were, anywhere, apart from where you’d had a certain meal or played a certain hall. Mostly it was, Where did you get that jacket, those shoes?’ It was Brian whom the Beatles invited down for the sessions that ended up as their emerging masterpiece Revolver – it’s Brian you can hear clinking the glasses in Yellow Submarine. ‘The Beatles objected to most people coming in [to sessions], but Brian they liked around,’ says Bramwell. He also recalls that when the Byrds first came over to the UK and the local scenesters were trying to find someone to make them feel at home, they chose Brian. ‘I took them round to his little mews flat. He was the perfect host, chatting, whacking out a few joints, just a nice, sincere guy.’

  By the spring of 1966, the London scene was splitting in two, between the old rockers who talked about birds and beer, and the emerging heads whose conversation took in conceptual art, cosmology, ley lines and altered states. Brian, usually with Anita, was at the centre of the latter group, spending more and more time with Bob Fraser – often with his photographer friend Michael Cooper – whose gallery and flat on Mount Street became a playground for both aristos and rock stars. Some of Bob’s detractors reckoned he was just ‘a star fucker’ who’d hang out with anyone famous, but Bob’s friend and biographer Harriet Vyner vehemently disagrees: ‘I know many people suggest that Robert just wanted to hang out with Brian Jones and the rest of the Stones because they were famous. In fact, in those early days Robert was at least as glamorous as they were. Although part of the (still mysterious) establishment, Robert was an authority on cool and esoteric subjects.’ In those early days, says Vyner, Fraser was probably closest to Brian, as ‘the most culturally adventurous of the Stones at that time, especially with Anita by his side. But if Brian Jones had been an unknown but sexy blues geek, [Robert] would have been just as enthusiastic about him – Robert was drawn to wayward energy and talent rather than celebrity.’

  The bravery with which Brian launched himself into a new scene, the thirst for knowledge, the fascination with arcane culture – all these qualities that had made him the founder Stone now made him a powerful force as the band moved into new, exotic territory. But some of his traits – his terrible insecurity, his unhappiness with his lot – were just as crippling in this new environment. In early February, he invited Record Mirror to his Elm Park Lane flat for an interview which was revealing – perhaps too revealing. He told the magazine, ‘I’m not personally insecure – just unsure. If someone told me I could write and egged me on, I suppose I could do it. It’s like jumping in at the deep end and not knowing which way you are coming up.’ His statements were, of course, an indictment of the Stones’ dysfunctional relationships. One deterrent in terms of Brian’s writing was the hostility people like James Phelge and Jack Nitzsche had witnessed. But his insecurity and compulsion to nitpick were part of the problem, too.

  Once again it was out in California, with a different set of companions, that Brian’s self-doubt seemed to subside. After a whirlwind globetrotting session – from New York for The Ed Sullivan Show to debut the new single 19th Nervous Breakdown, out to LA, then off to a riotously successful debut tour of Australia and New Zealand early in March 1966 – Brian was back in Los Angeles, where he could hang out with Jack Nitzsche, Wallace Berman and other friends.

  The couple of days’ rest and recreation followed by sessions with engineer Dave Hassinger at RCA would turn out to be one of Brian’s last lengthy stays in the city. Nitzsche, who’d known Brian for a couple of years now, would always be Brian’s main supporter within the little recording crew, though his influence would wane as Andrew Oldham became distracted from the Stones, focusing on his own Immediate label. Yet right to the end, Nitzsche found Brian hard to fathom.

  Nitzsche had by now spent years in Hollywood and had surely developed a good knowledge of the entertainment business’s more exotic erotic activities. But then there would be evenings when he’d talk with Brian until early in the morning, including a time when the group had discovered some high-quality pot which came, explains Nitzsche’s housemate Denny Bruce, ‘from a certain region in Mexico. It had this beautiful herbal taste. Then after a while, you realized you were really stoned.’

  Brian looked immaculate that night in a maroon velvet suit and white silk shirt, until the point when he ventured into the kitchen, made a mustard and mayonnaise sandwich, and proceeded to munch on the bizarre assemblage, his eyes closed. Bruce started giggling helplessly as mustardy drool leaked out of the corners of the stoned Stone’s mouth.

  Once the sandwich had been dispatched, Brian wandered over to the couch and sat himself down alongside Nitzsche. Bruce looked on. Minutes stretched seemingly into hours as Brian remained locked in conversation with the West Coast arranger, whispering intently into his ear. Suddenly Nitzsche got up and walked over to Bruce.

  ‘He just put his tongue in my ear!’

  ‘So . . . what was he saying?’ Bruce asked his housemate.

  ‘I don’t know, man, some kind of bullshit . . . but I think he really likes me!’

  Nitzsche would discuss that night with his friend several times over the next couple of years but never could decide whether Brian was indulging his urge for experimentation or simply enjoyed unsettling him. Spookily, Nitzsche had the experience replicated with Mick, who spent another night whispering provocatively into his ear.
The questions multiplied in Nitzsche’s mind. Was Mick bisexual? Was Brian bisexual? Was this some power trip to put him off his guard? Were the come-ons simply a kind of initiation into the Stones’ inner circle? Were Mick and Brian competing to seduce him, just like they did with women, to enhance their alpha male status? The answer to all of those questions was probably yes – but Nitzsche was never quite sure.

  For all his fellow Stones’ criticisms that Brian was transfixed by stardom, during his last few trips to LA Brian became more and more obsessed with evading the crowds and hanging out with the same tiny circle of people, like Nitzsche and Wallace Berman. In 1966, Berman noticed, Brian tended to avoid the Sunset Strip. ‘People say he liked being famous,’ says Berman’s son, Tosh, ‘but my dad noticed it really bugged him. He was definitely not comfortable in that environment. It became a huge burden.’

  One night on the Strip, at the Trip or some other nightclub, Brian and Berman were deep in conversation about jazz or the Kabbala – two subjects on which Berman was particularly erudite – when Rodney Bingenheimer, the self-styled King of the Strip, known for his unabashed, unironic worship of celebrity, walked up and interrupted the pair. Subjected to Bingenheimer’s trademark non-stop Hollywood hipster slang, Brian begged to be left alone, without success. Finally, he booted the influential DJ in the backside, and he and Berman ran out of the club, cackling.

  Yet whenever there was a chance of picking up new information or new ideas, Brian was fearless, ‘like a scout searching out new sources or new influences’, says Berman. Keith would sometimes tag along on such expeditions, Tosh remembers, but would remain quiet; Brian was the one making connections. One typical example was Richard and Mimi Fariña, whom he met several times towards the end of 1965 – their explorations of stripped-down Appalachian music inspired Brian’s purchase of a dulcimer. Then there was his relationship with the Byrds, who’d regarded him as an icon since the Stones first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Founder member Gene Clark later revealed that the band’s first major self-penned hit, Eight Miles High, was cooked up with Brian in Pittsburgh, when the pair bumped into each other in late November 1965. ‘I wrote the melody and lyrics in a hotel, with Brian,’ he explained. ‘I thought he should have got a credit – but he didn’t care.’ All these experiences would permeate Brian’s definitive contribution to the album that would become Aftermath.

  Aftermath was the most fully formed, adventurous and sustained Stones album since the band’s debut, defined by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ songwriting – which for the first time was shaking off the Spector obsession of their manager – and Brian’s transformative musical interventions, which lifted many of the songs from run-of-the-mill to inspirational.

  Were Mick and Keith grateful? No.

  For all the focus on the Jagger-Richards songwriting team, it was never a conventional partnership; it was really just a brand, for whatever the Stones put together. Often, the songs would be Keith’s: he’d come up with an entire structure, including, as he points out, ‘some of the lyrics. Like the idea, maybe something about I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.’ Later, as Mick’s guitar technique improved, he too would complete songs almost unaided. But whatever the origins, credit would go to the Jagger-Richards brand. All of which was eminently reasonable, except when the inspiration for a song came from outside the partnership – as in the instance when, according to Jack Nitzsche, the band was working on a fairly hackneyed F#m, E, D chord sequence, similar to the Animals’ Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower and a thousand rather more forgettable tunes.

  The session would have gone nowhere but for the fact that the Baja Marimba band, a ludicrous novelty Mexican outfit, had left their instruments – including a marimba – in one corner of the huge RCA studio. Brian went over, started experimenting, and after a few minutes came up with what Eddie Kramer, one of the Stones’ key engineers at Olympic studios in west London, describes as ‘genius. A riff that makes sense of what could have been a nonentity. Because he could think out of the box.’

  Nitzsche was the one who saw the marimba part as key to the song, for he was the contributor who, unpaid, did for the Stones what George Martin did for the Beatles. And Under My Thumb, one of the best-known songs credited to Jagger-Richards, was accordingly transformed from forgettable to unforgettable in the hands of Nitzsche-Jones. It’s worth pointing out that the backing track had its own subtle genius – Charlie’s stomping, upbeat drums and one of Bill’s most fluid, propulsive basslines. In a grandiose feat of revisionism, Keith memorably theorized that Mick’s sexist, put-down lyrics maybe ‘opened their minds to the idea that, We’re women, we’re strong’, although in truth the appeal of the song comes from the tension between the sweet, upbeat ambience and the sneering put-down of upstart girls. It may have been obnoxious, but it was honest. Mick Jagger would inhabit a role in many of his best-known songs, but in this one, as Marianne Faithfull and others point out, he was essentially portraying his own attitude – and that of his bandmates, including Brian and Keith.

  Aftermath demonstrated Brian’s unique genius, that ability, as Kramer puts it, to think outside the box. Kramer, who’d be heavily involved in the band’s next album, today states, ‘Much as I adore Keith, I must preface everything by saying that I always considered Brian the most gifted of the Stones, musically speaking.’ Keith would develop his own distinctive understanding of sound, layering acoustic guitars or processing instruments through cassette recorders, but Brian was the one individual who understood, says Kramer, ‘tone colour. His sense of tone colour was magnificent, that’s how he’d think out of the box, to put a different tone colour on something to make it speak. That’s exactly what he did with the marimba part.’

  ‘Well, without the marimba part, it’s not really a song, is it?’ says Bill Wyman.

  Nitzsche and Brian, on harpsichord and dulcimer respectively, added a similar touch to Lady Jane, a limpid ballad with a lyric widely considered to have been inspired by Jane Ormsby-Gore and a tune that was, once again, transformed by Brian’s counter-melody. More fundamental still was his contribution to a song that started out with Bill messing around on the organ, doing a piss-take in tribute to ex-manager Eric Easton’s earlier career as an organist on the chicken-in-a-basket circuit. Charlie joined in with stomping on-beat drums, while Brian fashioned a melody on the sitar. Mick added his vocals, tracking Brian’s sitar line, and the Jagger-Richards song partnership notched up one of its greatest songs, Paint It, Black. According to Bill, ‘funnily enough, it was never credited as a Nanker Phelge composition . . . I can’t think why.’

  Brian’s influence within the Stones would never be stronger than within Paint It, Black, a song whose melody he wrote, according to Bill, a sound that would never have happened without him. All this in a period of which Keith speaks with resentment, because Brian wasn’t playing guitar. In this resentment we can sense that it was not Brian who was conservative, as Oldham suggests; the band, after Brian’s departure, were happy to keep the same groove for four decades. Eric Burdon is one of many who regard the song as the summit of the Stones’ early achievements, but an avenue that the band would never fully explore: ‘Paint It, Black, that song influenced me so much that I recorded it three times with three different bands. And as a musician, Brian was the one who was pushing for that direction.’

  Brian’s exploration of Eastern themes paralleled that of George Harrison, who’d added sitar to the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood the previous October, and recorded Granny Smith (later retitled Love You To) at Abbey Road on 11 April. George’s exploration of Indian music and philosophy, which culminated in a visit to Bombay that November, would have a significant cultural impact on the Western world, popularizing Buddhism and other philosophies. Brian’s own take on the sitar was distinct: Paint It, Black, with its Eastern pentatonic scale rather than the straight European classical scale of Norwegian Wood, integrated the new sounds into a wider b
lues context, and anticipated an understanding that we’ve attained only recently, of how much modern blues-derived music has roots in North Africa.

  ‘It’s very relevant today,’ says Burdon. ‘Paint It, Black has an Eastern feel, the influence of Islam. And no matter how you feel about Islam – we have this perception that it’s the enemy – the music is amazing, the art is fantastic, [and] if you can insert that into rock’n’roll, you’ve got something that’s really special. That’s what Ry Cooder would end up doing later, mixing other cultures, all of which are close to blues.’

  Andrew Oldham and Keith Richards saw Brian’s investigation of ethnic music as an affectation, a diversion – a distraction from playing guitar. He was ‘pretentious’, says Mick Jagger, the devotee of Georgian chinoiserie. Yet history has vindicated the opinions of the unreliable, maddening, pretentious founder of the Rolling Stones, the man who told Mick and Keith the blues would be huge, the man who committed the sin of being right.

  Today, our knowledge of ethnic music has broadened to the point where it’s incorporated within a wider tradition rather than regarded as exotic, spicy ear candy. We know how Arabic and Sudanese music informed the blues, as did Scottish music, that these cultures have borrowed from each other for centuries. Hence our new understanding of world music, on the basis that as well as being different, it is similar. Brian Jones was the first popular musician to spot this. ‘I think he would have taken that music another stage further,’ says Burdon. ‘The last time I heard of him, I was driving around in the south of Spain, Seville, and I heard, “He’s across the water in North Africa, recording musicians.” But the rest of the band weren’t happy about changing direction. Why would they be? Right around the world they were the second band only to the Beatles – fame, fortune, good times. Why would they change that for some freaky music?’