Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  In the survivors’ accounts, there’s no one who extols the potential new directions suggested by Brian’s ideas. Perhaps there simply wasn’t the time to discuss it, in the crazed goldrush. Instead, memories centre on the lazy, irresponsible Pan side of Brian, like the night when he arrived at the studio during the Aftermath sessions semi-conscious under the influence of some unknown drug. In later years, Oldham would sketch out the episode in detail: Brian collapsed in a fetal position on the wooden floor at RCA, out cold, a mess of ill-assorted fabrics. The atmosphere was dark and heady, each musician occupying himself with his instrument, and an earth hum buzzed from Brian’s Fender amp while Mick fumed, shooting significant looks at Oldham. Finally, the manager stepped over and flicked the toggle switch to off, obeying Mick’s unspoken command. Oldham would later recollect this as a moment of heavy portent, the instant when he realized Brian was doomed. Yet, given Jack Nitzsche’s memories of how Brian was being manipulated and humiliated during Stones sessions, the moment could hardly have come as much of a surprise.

  What Oldham doesn’t reveal is at what point he realized that he, too, was starting to outlive his usefulness. In the same way that Mick had learned from Brian in order to function without him, so he’d picked up on many of Oldham’s techniques, from his camp conversational style to the upfront brutality with which he’d announce a decision. Oblivious of such issues, Oldham prepared for the next ostentatious step in his own career – the move of his Immediate label to their own swanky offices on New Oxford Street – and embarked on another round of self-promotion. At his old Ivor Court office, the mantra had been ‘We’re gonna make money’. In the new era, buoyed up by Klein’s financial deals, the message was ‘We’ve got money and we’re gonna spend it’. Mick remained supportive of Oldham’s bigger business empire, producing the expensive, rootsy and commercially disastrous The Art of Chris Farlowe, recorded later that year, but as he gathered more experience producing other artists he was also starting to wonder how much Oldham actually contributed to the Stones sessions.

  *

  Mick’s careful calculations, the way he monitored the odds, were out of fashion in London’s glorious spring and summer of 1966, when it seemed that, having paused for breath, popular music was leaping into a gloriously thrilling Technicolor unknown. Brian, with Anita Pallenberg alongside him, had shifted the axis, and over the next few months Keith would be drawn towards him. Maybe it was a genuine attempt to rebuild their friendship – that’s Keith’s take. Maybe it was simple commercial good sense, for without Brian the Stones would have looked square that summer. Brian became, to use artist Nigel Waymouth’s words, ‘the peacock’ at the cutting edge of dressing and drugging, the two major innovations of 1966. And as psychedelia was crystallizing, the sexy but rather earnest and ambitious Mick Jagger was just a little out of place, as was his manager, according to the counter-culture crowd and heads like Jeff Dexter, the man who explained the inter-band rivalry with the words ‘Brian inhaled’.

  Dexter was spinning discs at a notable party in Chelsea as that wondrous year started to get going. The building was packed with key scenesters including Waymouth, producer Mark Miller Mundy and many more when there was a knock at the side window – Mick Jagger and Andrew Oldham, ready to make an impression on the beautiful people. A couple of the assembled throng opened the door, and as the pair walked in, skinny, cool and excited, the hubbub lessened for a moment.

  ‘Hey!’ one of them, probably Oldham, announced. ‘Guess what, we’ve got some joints!’

  There was a moment’s silence, before someone commented, ‘Well smoke ’em then!’

  ‘We were all pissing ourselves with laughter,’ says Dexter. ‘Like I said, tourists.’

  Keith, in the meantime, gravitated towards Brian and Anita. His motives were complex, but principally, says Stash, the Stones’ founder still had a hold over him. ‘Brian would be able to pull up a flute, say this is a quarter-tone off – he had this amazing musical ability. Whatever is being said now, by the modern band, is all rubbish in the sense that Brian was actually looked up to.’

  Keith’s own long-term relationship with the model Linda Keith was on the rocks at the time. Keith had been relatively faithful, compared to Mick, Brian and Bill, but Linda had her own drugs problems, of which Keith wasn’t especially tolerant, and the couple were drifting apart. Back in February, Keith had splashed out on a beautiful thatched cottage which dated back to the thirteenth century and was rumoured to have once hosted Anne Boleyn. Surrounded by a moat – in which, Keith proudly told visitors, he’d found Saxon arrowheads – and situated in the tiny village of West Wittering, not far from a beach that faced the Isle of Wight, Redlands was the ultimate period pad. Yet after the first few stays, driving there in his new Bentley Continental, Keith became something of an absentee owner, spending more and more time hanging out with Brian.

  Michael Rainey remembers well this newly empowered Brian, who with Anita and Keith in tow formed the centre of gravity of the Stones. Anita pushed Brian into more outrageous outfits, says Rainey: ‘The Arabian Pashas, the Nazi uniforms, I think that was all her idea.’ Brian, the sensualist, the narcissist, took naturally to such extravagance. Mick, in contrast, saw clothing as a tool, something to be used in the business: ‘he was only interested in dressing to project. Like, are the clothes gonna make my show even better?’ Nigel Waymouth remembers Brian embodying a distinctly British vibe: ‘It was an aesthetic movement, a Wildean, fin de siècle look about the way we dressed. It wasn’t just psychedelic drugs, it was velvet and William Morris prints, and frilly shirts.’

  Brian floated like a beacon through the London social scene during the band’s snatched breaks. On 24 April, he and Anita flew to the Luggala Estate in Ireland to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of their friend Tara Browne, son of Lord and Lady Oranmore and one of the heirs to the Guinness empire. Tara was a likeable floppy-fringed regular on the London scene; he owned the shop Dandie Fashions, could often be seen driving down the King’s Road in his psychedelically painted Buick 6, and shared regular acid sessions with Brian and Anita. The British social scene, with its centuries of tradition, was changing almost beyond recognition. Although Mick – still with Chrissie Shrimpton, despite documenting her increasing insecurity in songs like 19th Nervous Breakdown – was a key figure, Brian, with Anita on his arm, was a far more flamboyant symbol of the new, exotic pop aristocracy.

  The old aristocracy had a sense of entitlement, of continuity. There was none of that here. This was a world of change – senses in overload, meters running into the red. A potent example of the insecurity, the volatility of the London scene came at the end of May with Bob Dylan’s show at the Albert Hall, the culmination of a tour that saw irate acoustic fans shouting ‘Judas!’ at the skinny suited-and-shaded speedfreak. Brian turned up with his friend Stash to experience a whirlwind of angst and aggression. When the pair dropped in to see Dylan in his cramped suite at the Mayfair hotel, they were shocked by the sight of several people in his entourage openly shooting up. Another night, they attended a party at actor/director Christian Marquand’s apartment and Dylan cornered the pair in the bathroom, saying, ‘You know what I’d do if Woody Allen was here? Punch him in the face, knock his glasses off and tread on them.’

  ‘Dylan was extremely aggressive,’ says Stash, ‘way, way out there. He would corner you, jab his finger into your chest, and he would go on and on with this amazing rap. Then he’d try and enlist you in a vendetta. He’d have these passing whims, like a hatred of Woody Allen or [writer] Terry Southern – “let’s get him”, all of it like a whirlwind.’

  Dana Gillespie, Dylan’s lover while he was in London, saw him off at the airport, then hosted a farewell party in the basement of her parents’ house in Furlough Square. Brian and Anita turned up and, like many women, Dana was bowled over by this exotic creature. ‘Anita was wearing a rugby shirt, black, with knee length boots. And that was it. She was beautiful, a
bsolutely stunning.’ After the party, Brian, Anita and Stash bundled into Dana’s little Austin A35 and went on to antique dealer Christopher Gibbs’s house on Cheyne Walk, where someone handed her a glass of punch and said, ‘Drink this.’ ‘I think it was liquid mescaline – I was completely off my head.’ Freaked out, Dana insisted on driving home, a terrifying experience under the influence of this hallucinogenic drug; the traffic lights throbbed in rainbow hues. ‘I think they were trying to instigate a scene with Anita. But I was young, wasn’t really prepared for it . . . God knows how I got home.’

  This was Dylan’s last public outing before his motorbike accident, which seemed to turn him into a completely different person. For years afterwards fans would speculate whether some of Dylan’s songs referred to the Stone he spent the most time with. The figure of the dancing child, for whom time is on my side, was widely identified with Brian, as was the line ‘something is happening . . . but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?’ But Dana and Stash vehemently disagree. ‘There are always those myths, but the Mr Jones line would never be about Brian, it’s far too direct,’ says Dana. ‘It’s a fantasy,’ Stash concurs. ‘Certainly Brian didn’t even suggest there might have been a reference.’ Yet there was no doubt that for a short time Dylan was obsessed with the Stones’ founder. As Nico, one of several lovers common to both characters, later pointed out, ‘[Dylan] wanted to be Brian, not a folk singer.’

  *

  The Stones’ fifth American tour opened on 24 June 1966 in Massachusetts. The influence of Allen Klein was starting to become all-pervasive – Oldham was frequently absent, but Klein’s connections guaranteed constant airplay as the band played in unthinkably huge stadiums to crowds of ten to fifteen thousand screaming fans. The Stones’ sound was in flux, inconsistent, thrilling: Brian’s guitar-playing was still tight, picking out a wilder version of the jagged melody riff for The Last Time, but for the first time Keith’s guitar was on a different, higher level throughout – heavier, but beautifully honed rhythm parts. This would be Brian’s final tour of America. In his memoirs, Oldham reckoned, ‘Brian was more often hospitalized and missed a number of live dates.’ Records suggest he actually missed only one show (for that matter, for all his supposed unreliability, the best estimate is that Brian missed around twelve Stones shows in his life out of a total of around 930). What’s undeniable, from surviving live tapes, is that Brian dominated the sound, from the urgent wail of Not Fade Away’s harmonica through to the fragile luminosity of his dulcimer and sitar parts, which interlace perfectly with Keith’s guitar. Instead, it’s the songs where Brian is not integral which falter: Mother’s Little Helper is a messy Kinks rip-off, and Satisfaction, a song which the band would take decades to master live, is a lumpen shuffle. At the apogee of their success so far, there was still a sense it could all fall apart in a year or two.

  Beyond the intimidating presence of Dylan – who seemed to spool out songs within minutes – another potent new entry to the British music scene appeared within the first couple of days of the tour when Linda Keith, who’d recently disappeared to New York, told them about an amazing guitarist, Jimmy James, who was playing at the Café Wha? in the Village on 2 July. They went along and were impressed; so was Chas Chandler – former Animals bassist, and aspiring producer – who turned up at Linda’s instigation a couple of nights later. Linda, it’s said, gave Jimmy James one of Keith’s Fender Strats, around the time Chandler encouraged him to come over to London and change his name. Brian would be one of Jimi Hendrix’s key supporters in Britain; in turn, Hendrix would sometimes give Brian refuge in the dark days to come.

  By the time the Stones convened for more recording sessions at RCA on 3 August, the band sounded tired. Maybe, as some said of the album spliced together there and later in London, the whole sound was tired. But maybe Brian Jones was running out of road, too.

  Certainly his trip to Tangier that August was a little set-piece in his life, a demonstration of both his power and his helplessness. The city was the perfect location for the scene. Tangier had a uniquely twisted, depraved history, and boasted its own special brutality. ‘The city had never tolerated broken men,’ commented writer Ian Finlayson. ‘Scenting the blood of a man at bay, it never hesitated to move in for the kill.’ It was known for housing femmes fatales and vamps – literally: beautiful women like Lib Holman, who killed off two husbands, and the famed Vampire of Tangier, who kept phials full of the blood of rent boys. Its magic was potent: jaded English characters would venture there and somehow become trapped, never returning to their homeland. Among the Stones’ inner circle, Robert Fraser was one key link to Morocco; the other was Christopher Gibbs. And in the background lurked the dessicated presence of Paul Bowles, the writer who had moved to the city in 1947 and remained at the centre of its cultural life, a spider sensing the vibrations across its web. Bowles wrote one great novel out of his Morocco experience, The Sheltering Sky, then holed up in the city, taking young Moroccan boys as lovers in that timeworn fashion of sexual colonialism; he later watched as his wife Jane, a more natural writer than he, went mad. Bowles’s influence was still potent in 1966, but the vibe was changing as characters like William Burroughs and his friend Brion Gysin – the maverick artist, writer and inventor of the cut-up technique, as well as self-styled inventor of the magical but never quite functional Dream Machine – made their mark.

  Brian loved the city, the way the pavements were crowded with people in native dress, their donkeys plodding alongside them, the streets full of shit and exotic sounds. For this trip, he and Anita were accompanied by Gibbs, who’d first visited Morocco around 1960. Fraser was always more indulgent of Brian, for the pair shared a congenital unreliability, especially when it came to paying back loans. Gibbs, who’d remain friends with both Mick and Keith, had a much more nuanced view of Brian, who he reckons ‘had just enough charm to get away with being an absolute nightmare. Just. Because he was a nightmare.’

  Somehow, Brian’s time in Tangier seemed to epitomize his key character traits – the most outgoing Stone and also the most unreliable. He was the Stone who had travelled the most, hitch-hiking across the south of England, sleeping on floors; yet by the time he hooked up with Gibbs and Anita at the El Minzah, he’d become addicted to the whole star trip, staying in luxurious hotels, leaving clothes strewn around and lapping up the attentions of complaisant Moroccans. All this informed Gibbs’s view of him as ‘the most selfish, the most spoilt, the most wilful, the most thoughtless, demanding, wheedling, maddening, sweet and charming person’.

  The Moroccans Brian encountered shared the same mix of emotions. It was likely on this trip that he first met Mohamed Hamri, who was briefly the lover and later friend, pupil and assistant of Brion Gysin. Hamri came from a small village named Joujouka (often spelt Jajouka), up in the Ahl Serif mountains, where his uncle had been leader of a remarkable group of local musicians. In December 1954, Hamri and Gysin had launched their own restaurant, where celebrated visitors like Christopher Isherwood and Cecil Beaton would savour Moroccan food, listen to the exotic sounds of the Master Musicians of Joujouka, and ogle the young dancing boys. A few years after the venture broke up, Hamri launched a solo restaurant of the same name in Asilah, a few miles down the coast, where Brian became a regular visitor.

  Hamri and Gysin would become friends with Brian, spinning stories of Joujouka filled with myth, magic and music. But Brian was also a pain, turning up to dine at the restaurant, then after praising the food extravagantly complaining he’d had problems changing his currency and would have to pay for the meal next time. The wealth, the presence of flunkies and the plentiful supplies of hash simply acted to amplify the selfish traits that had first surfaced in his teenage years. Most friends remember Anita challenging Brian, taking him to the edge, adding a dark glamour that allowed him to outshine Mick or Keith. But Gibbs, during that trip, saw the relationship in an entirely different light: ‘There might have been a sensual buzz to it,
and there was a sort of chemistry – but it was destructive. Because they were so different, in character and experience of life, of what turned them on and how they could cope.’

  Brian and Anita holed up in the El Minzah, with Gibbs attending on them. The blond-haired lookalikes argued constantly, Brian hectoring Anita, who shot back fiery retorts, enraging Brian, who finally lashed out. ‘I couldn’t say whether he was lashing out in general, or trying to hit Anita – and I’m sure he couldn’t say either,’ says Gibbs. ‘But he was in a rage, and [swung his arm], and instead of connecting with Anita, his fist connected with a metal window frame. And he broke his arm, which is not a good thing for a musician.’

  In fact, it seems Brian broke a bone in his wrist. An ambulance whisked him from the El Minzah to the Clinique Californie where he was forced to stay for the best part of a week. Anita, unfazed by the drama, went off for adventures with Gibbs. During one of their first days of ‘freedom’ they chanced across Akhmed, a diminutive, energetic character who seemed to be looking over his shoulder enticingly. They followed him into his tiny shop off the Escalier Waller – steps leading down from the Minzah towards the fish market. Inside, the shop was empty but for a few items of jewellery and a large box covered by a blanket. It was filled with hashish. With such pleasures on offer, Anita ‘wasn’t at all downcast. We did go and see Brian, every day,’ Gibbs points out, surmising that remaining calm in the hospital, eating three meals a day and being attended to ‘by a bossy Moroccan nanny with a hairbrush saying do what you’re told, or wallop’ was the best thing for him.

  At first it was thought the injury to his wrist was potentially serious. After returning to London, Brian had follow-up visits with a Harley Street surgeon and recovered full use of his hand within a few weeks, in time for him to make a competent job of his guitar work for the band’s short UK tour in September, sporting a velvet jacket and brandishing a brand-new Gibson Firebird.