Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Page 20
By the autumn, Brian and Anita were officially installed in what would become one of London’s most legendary rock star pads: 1 Courtfield Road, overlooking Gloucester Road tube station – ‘a veritable witches’ coven of decadent illuminati, rock princelings and hip aristos’ as one of the key participants, Marianne Faithfull, describes it. Marianne was a crucial contributor to the decadence: in those first weeks she had sex with Brian (half-hearted and rather unsatisfactory, she says), then moved on to Keith, who turned her over to Mick with the words ‘He’s not that bad when you get to know him, you know.’ Even today, after accusing Mick of some of the most Machiavellian and cynical behaviour in the history of popular music, she confirms that judgement: ‘I don’t really blame Mick, for anything. In a funny way, I understand.’
Brian and Anita played the part of renaissance decadents; Keith, who spent more and more time at Courtfield Road, became the funny, flinty character we know today over those months; Marianne brought sweetness and light to the heady mix. ‘She was funny, and intelligent, and witty, and beautiful,’ says Keith Altham. Yet Marianne was also sensitive, like Brian, and was destined to be damaged profoundly by what transpired over the next six months.
The psychodynamics were mind-bogglingly complex, considering what we know in retrospect. Some visitors reckoned Keith’s infatuation with Anita was obvious, or speculate that Brian’s distrust of Anita caused tantrums and violence. Stash Klossowski, one of the few outsiders who was close to all three, remembers a very different atmosphere: ‘Keith didn’t mention that time in his own book – he seems to have erased it from his memory. But Brian and Anita didn’t slap each other around then. It wasn’t Brian’s style – it was easier just to disappear than to get in a fight. Personally I never witnessed that.’ Today, it’s impossible to disentangle Keith’s true feelings – like many male musicians, he’s not necessarily interested in what makes other people tick. One of his key descriptions of Brian is as an unpredictable ‘bunch of guys’, but as James Phelge points out, ‘then he calls Mick a bunch of guys, too. I don’t think he can really remember.’
Instead, it’s left to Marianne Faithfull to deliver an account that actually sketches in other characters and tries to understand their motivations. She recalls being worried by the vibrations she was seeing. Marianne had, initially, set her sights on Keith but ‘knew in my heart of hearts that Keith was in love with Anita’. She found Brian maddening, irritating, a self-indulgent Pan figure who was adrift, desperate to impose himself as he continued to be manoeuvred into irrelevance. Like Pan, Brian was being demonized, she reckons – by Mick, who would later pull the same trick on Andrew Oldham; and then, she adds, ‘it started happening to me’. Above all, she remembers the long genesis of one of the Stones’ greatest songs, which sprang from two of Brian’s obsessions – Elizabethan lute music and Delta blues.
‘It’s a cross between Thomas Dowland’s Air on the late Lord Sussex and a Skip James tune’ – that’s how, according to Marianne, Brian introduced a plaintive, haunting melody that he’d worked out on a recorder. Keith, like a dog with a bone, picked up on the melody. The pair laboured over the song for several weeks, with Brian also contributing piano to an intricate, almost baroque arrangement. ‘Look,’ says Eddie Kramer, who started his engineering work with the Stones that year and would soon work closely with Jimi Hendrix, ‘I was amazed when he played those melodies, both by the way he thought to use it, and the way he played this thing – it was a descant, or the next size up, something you’d see in English schools. Mick and Keith, not to put them down, would never have thought of something like that.’
Mick later described Ruby Tuesday as a great song, even though he hadn’t written any of it. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that the Jones-Richards partnership was never credited – it’s likely that Brian never asked. In all the sadness that pervades the era – Keith’s loss of Linda Keith, the impending ejection of Andrew Oldham, the imminent breakdown of Brian – it’s a moment of pure, sweet beauty. Whatever great ballads Mick and Keith would summon up after Brian’s departure, only Wild Horses, a tribute to Marianne Faithfull, comes close.
Throughout popular music there has always been tension over songwriting, debate about at which point a crucial riff defines a song and should be reflected in the credits. Yet even notoriously hard-nosed operators like David Bowie would offer up a slice of the songwriting income when a riff, like Carlos Alomar’s needling funk line on Fame, is the first, central building block of a song. But with the lock that Keith, Mick and of course Oldham had on the management, such generosity was never on offer for songs like Ruby Tuesday, Paint It, Black or Under My Thumb. Stan Blackbourne, the Stones’ accountant from 1965, was one of many who thought this completely inequitable. ‘I used to say to Brian, “What on earth are you doing? You write some of these songs and you give the name over as if Mick Jagger has done it. Do you understand, you’re giving ’em thousands of pounds!” All the time I used to tell him, “You’re writing a blank cheque!”’
Devoid of support within management, however, there was little Brian could have done, even had he been assertive enough.
Marianne sees Brian’s defining contribution to Ruby Tuesday as a Herculean last effort to regain his place at the centre – a musical gift to the band that might elicit some thanks and appreciation. ‘He desperately wanted someone to say, “Good work, Brian!”’ she says. ‘But of course, no one did.’ The attempt brought Brian no credit, in any sense of the word. That fiver, again.
And so 1966 dwindled to an end, a vivacious, colourful, mostly joyful year which made the dark moments seem more unfair, harder to deal with. On 17 December there came a cataclysm: the impossibly gilded youth of Tara Browne was terminated when the twenty-one-year-old jumped a red light and smashed his Lotus Elan into a parked lorry. His girlfriend, Ossie Clark model Suki Potier, survived. Brian, Anita and Keith were all deeply affected by Tara’s death. The trio spent much of Christmas at the Georges V hotel in Paris, blotting out reality on downers.
Chrissie Shrimpton, Mick’s long-term girlfriend, finished 1966 in a similarly miserable state. Mick had first appeared in public with Marianne on 15 October, at the launch of counter-culture journal International Times, or IT (whose founders included Barry Miles and Graham Keen, Brian’s chums from that square old place Cheltenham). Chrissie discovered the relationship was over when she read it in the papers. A couple of days later Chrissie was hospitalized in a reported suicide attempt. British newspapers gleefully followed the breakdown of their relationship, alleging that Mick had arranged for the removal of Chrissie’s possessions from their flat, and later returned her hospital bills unpaid. Mick and Marianne announced their inauguration as a celebrity couple with a shopping session at Harrods and an interview with the Mirror’s Don Short. With Marianne – feisty, independent, fragile and impossibly glamorous – at his side, Mick would acquire a new potency.
As for Brian, as ever there was a compulsion to find fault. Even in the flat of his dreams, with a renewed friendship with Keith and a celebrated love affair with Anita Pallenberg, still he often pondered and became morose. Towards the end of the year Peter Whitehead turned up to film the Stones again, ostensibly to make a promo film for the upcoming single Let’s Spend The Night Together. Whereas Stash and, to some extent, Marianne remember Brian making a meaningful contribution in the studio, Whitehead’s camera captured a profound transformation. Brian was barely functional. ‘He was a total embarrassment, to himself or to anybody else. You couldn’t talk to him; it was like he was paralytically drunk. Yup, he was a wallflower – and by that time you know, he’s gonna have to get a grip or he’s had it.’
Throughout his interaction with the Stones, neither Brian nor anyone else had ever mentioned to Whitehead that Brian was the founder of the band, or mapped out their first influences. ‘That makes it even sadder,’ he adds. ‘He would have felt exploited – and raped, basically. Somewhere he was broken along the line. But no
one thought about it. Especially the speed at which things were happening – so much information in every direction. There was no room for weakness of any kind.’
*
The sense of storm clouds gathering started to spread, of course, blown by a desire to sell newspapers. The generation gap that had opened up in Brian’s teens continued to crack ever wider. Some parts of the media welcomed this youth rebellion, the growth of expression and new ideas. But the same people who’d issued dark warnings about the Beats in 1960 were just as intent on exposing the homegrown threat, as British rock music grew up. The stormtroopers of the establishment in 1966 are familiar to us today: strident newspapers, eager to horrify their readers and sell more copies, ready to expose corruption with an open chequebook, acting in collusion with an unaccountable and demonstrably corrupt police force. ‘We didn’t know it yet, but people were paying attention to us,’ says Donovan, who would be the first victim of a new alliance.
Donovan Leitch was something of a figurehead of the Bohemian movement; he’d already namechecked London’s hash-smoking youth in Sunny Goodge Street, a song of blissed-out reportage that depicted the city’s switched-on scene, just in case anyone had failed to notice. And in January 1966, the documentary A Boy Called Donovan constituted the proverbial red rag to the establishment’s bull.
The film, directed by Charles Squires, was intended to document Donovan’s vagabond past (incidentally, it featured Brian’s old girlfriend Linda Lawrence, whom the singer would pursue over the following years). Squire requested a beatnik party as the centrepiece of the film so Donovan, with Dave ‘Gypsy’ Mills, a companion since the singer first hit the road in January 1963, assembled a group of acquaintances from their old haunts. Donovan arrived late to the party, to see his friends ‘in the throes of this crazy party, all out of it, openly rolling joints, smoking, dancing. I said to Charles, “What have you done?” And he said, “Well, it’s a bohemian party, so I brought twenty gallons of wine!”’ At one point the local police showed up; with their old-school deportment and handlebar moustaches, they looked like extras. But they weren’t, and their presence over the next few months would become less comedic and more sinister. That summer, Donovan’s Sunshine Superman became a hit in the US, its title incorporating the current slang term for LSD, with a B-side that happened to be called The Trip.
Up to that point it’s arguable that the mass media and even the police had regarded musical performers as cheery, useful characters. Once the Stones, the Beatles and Donovan started to break outside that showbiz box with mocking social comment and talk of expanding consciousness, they began to constitute a threat. Some of Donovan’s descriptions of what followed sound like the reminiscences of a conspiracy freak – but for the fact that it’s all there, on the record.
Donovan’s old friend and running-mate Gypsy Dave was the first to notice the signs. He and Donovan shared a flat in Earls Court, and during a time when Donovan was away around the summer of 1966, Gyp found a policeman attempting to break in through a rear window. ‘He threw him out,’ says Donovan, ‘but this was the first example. And from now on, it’s going to get organized.’ There were other portents: suspicious officials in the USA, and then evidence that their flat was being watched from a building opposite. Later, after a move to a new flat in Edgware Road, an old girlfriend attempted to track down Gyp, contacting the police to find out his whereabouts, and was drawn into the saga.
It was indeed getting organized, and the man responsible was Norman Pilcher.
Detective Sergeant Norman Clement Pilcher, aka Semolina Pilchard, aka Groupie Pilcher, was rising fast that year. A family man from Kent, he was popular with his colleagues thanks to his ready wit – ‘leave it to yer old dad’ – his hard-working attitude and his sizeable network of informants. In his mid thirties, Pilcher was comparatively young for his rank, and he gathered a youthful team around him who were impressed by his souped-up Ford Cortina, his gun licence, his modish gangster chic outfits – and his hunger for publicity. It was with Donovan, whose flat was a regular hangout for the Beatles, the Animals and others, that he would start to make his name.
At 1.30 a.m. on 11 June 1966, there was a knock on the door. Gyp ran down the stairs to investigate and saw his old girlfriend through the window. He opened the door, ‘then the girl stands aside and in come nine burly policemen with Pilcher’, Donovan recalls. ‘And they smash the place up. I’m jumping naked on the back of policemen’s necks, they’re smashing up beautiful things in the room, it’s terrible. They’ve been down the pub of course, and we were roughed up.’ The squad had also broken into the flat below, rented by Donovan’s agent, Ashley, and girlfriend Anita. Up in his flat, Gyp’s old girlfriend cowered in the corner. ‘And this is how they use people, this poor girl who was dragged into it.’ Finally, Ashley told Donovan that ‘they found two ounces of Lebanese in my place, and they found two ounces in yours’. ‘You know,’ says Donovan today, ‘we couldn’t even find that stuff to buy in London. The little bit of hash we did have, we’d already smoked.’
With this first raid, Pilcher established his modus operandi. There would be accusations of planting evidence (‘he had good connections’, says Donovan, for he had access to good-quality drugs to plant), dragging in innocent parties either through bribery or blackmail, and close collaboration with the tabloids, who were instantly tipped off about Donovan’s bust. Then, once the pair were taken to the local police station, Pilcher demonstrated, for the first but not the last time, the most surreal part of the process. ‘Sorry about this, we’re only doing our job,’ he told Donovan. ‘Can I have an autograph?’
Semolina Pilchard would gather quite a few more rock star signatures in the coming months.
8
Butterflies and Wheels
BACK IN THE 1920s and 1930s, Brian Jones knew, making music was a life-or-death proposition: a blues singer who hit the road with a guitar in the Southern states took his life into his hands. This was part of the music’s force, an intrinsic part of the legend of blues singers like Robert Johnson, who’d died of strychnine poisoning, aged 27, crouched on his hands and knees, coughing like a dog. Brian, the first Stone to delve deep into the blues, was more aware than most of the forces that threatened the music’s first pioneers. Fatefully, he had little clue that he was about to face a similar assault from forces who found his lifestyle an affront to their values.
Posterity would ascribe the undoing of Brian Jones to a woman; yet the hammer blow, it turns out, came from a very different source. In a cruel twist, the corrupt, cynical attack of the establishment which was the making of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards proved to be the breaking of Brian Jones – the real butterfly broken on the wheel.
*
The year 1967 began beautifully. Back in September 1966, Anita Pallenberg had started work on her first big movie, Mord und Totschlag, directed by the twenty-eight-year-old wunderkind Volker Schlöndorff, his follow-up to The Tin Drum. The film was based on a true story, of a woman who’d killed her friend more or less accidentally; rather than go to the police she hires two men to dispose of the body. ‘The picture was about the total absence of old values,’ says Schlöndorff; ‘an unresolved crime story, no redemption, no morals.’ Anita played the main role, and Brian had joined her for the filming. The media firestorm around the couple was so intense that Schlöndorff lent them his little flat in Munich as a hideout. (Brian and Anita became embroiled in a mini-scandal soon after their stay in Munich, when Brian dressed up in an SS uniform for a playful but ill-advised shoot for Stern, all of which helped secure their status as the definitive bad-boy-and-girl couple.)
The shooting was well in progress when Brian asked if he could do the soundtrack. Schlöndorff’s reaction was, ‘I’d love to – but I can’t pay you.’ Brian’s response was, ‘Well, I’ll do it for free.’ Largely as a result, Schlöndorff spent quite a lot of time with Brian at the end of 1966 and the beginning of 1967 and consider
ed him ‘amazing. He was a Shelley-style character, a dandy. He could be spoiled and nasty, but at the same time he was creativity incarnate, and had great intuition.’ Schlöndorff was struck particularly by Brian’s sensitivity; he seemed to sense mood, and instinctively understand what was necessary for a film. ‘He also had quite an education, and quite a horizon, so I really thought, this is the best music I could ever get for a movie.’
Once the main movie edit was completed, in January 1967, Brian joined Schlöndorff for a spotting session, working out the main themes and timings. He was full of ideas. ‘He’d say, “Yeah, there could be country music here, a Highland style here, we’ll have Nicky Hopkins playing here,”’ says Schlöndorff. ‘So we establish a list, take the timings, and we get a spotting list, with all the timings for the scenes and short descriptions.’
Schlöndorff was delighted with his coup. When he arrived in London in February, he met Brian at Courtfield Road. Brian started playing him various themes on the sitar – ‘and that was when I realized nothing was actually ready’.
Once Schlöndorff actually got Brian into the studio, however, the work went well. Engineer Glyn Johns remembers Brian being ‘together, and hard-working’. Drummer Kenney Jones agrees: ‘We started around eleven in the morning. He was alert and was wonderful to deal with.’ Jones recalls that Brian had a real knack for working with musicians, a distinctive emotional insight. ‘He was guiding me – I had to improvise a drum solo part. This was for a chase, around a playground I think, and I had to use a kind of emotional technique to fill in the blanks and get the excitement going.’
For those who claim Brian couldn’t write, this score is the counter-evidence. One particular theme, a sweet, stately recorder melody that resurfaces several times, is as good a testimony of his potential as you could wish to find. But Brian was also infuriating: he procrastinated; he delayed committing to ideas. This was his main problem, for as Schlöndorff points out, ‘in creativity, you have to be ruthless’. Then there was that old bugbear, his sheer unreliability. ‘Most of the time it was just a nightmare to get Brian to the studio. First of all he would only work at nights. I would show up at five or six to pick him up, but to get to the studio and get him going . . . he had no discipline whatsoever.’