Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  Brian had outlined the plan, what music to listen out for, so eventually Johns ventured out to the Jemaa el-Fnaa on his own, to be faced with a mind-bending kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and smells. He recorded several bands, handing over wads of dirhams – every bandleader seemed to know enough English to say ‘make pay’ the moment they saw a tape recorder. There were Berber groups playing the Amazigh folk style with bowed one-string violins, solo musicians, and a group of Gnawa singers: a chief who’d lead his group of singers in a call and response, the rhythm beaten out by exotic Moroccan castanets and the tbel.

  Johns managed to cut a deal for the key Gnawa group to come back to the Getty house. There they played this sacred music, handed down from father to son, in front of Brian (by then recovered, transfixed by the power of the music), Talitha (who would be dead just a couple of years later) and Paul Getty Jr (who would become a virtual recluse after his wife’s death). Brian would never proceed with his plan to work on the tapes; the story went around that they were faulty, that the level was wrong, although Johns maintains they came out fine. Today, we can speculate that it was the memory of the last time he’d visited the Jemaa el-Fnaa, when he’d listened to the music as Anita and his band of brothers disappeared, that prevented Brian from engaging with the project. We can speculate that it was his now unconquerable insecurity that made him envision yet another scheme and not complete it. At the time, Johns simply concluded that this was another case of Brian talking big and not delivering. Yet there would be a more immediate, brutal reason for the idea being abandoned.

  Back in London around April, Brian moved into yet another new home, at Royal Avenue House just off the King’s Road, as the band cranked into action once again. Although he’d hardly had time to move his collection into the new third-floor mansion flat, Brian had started playing guitar again. Carrying excess weight thanks to the drink and downers, he was none the less the epitome of decadence in the promo film for Jumpin’ Jack Flash, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Sporting bug-eye alien specs, silver lipstick and an ice-blue Telecaster, Brian dominated the visuals, alongside Mick, setting out a template for the Stones’ fiendishly beautiful late sixties pomp. A few days later, on Sunday, 12 May, the band took to the stage in a surprise performance at the NME Poll Winners show.

  The Stones unleashed Jumpin’ Jack Flash to an ecstatic audience, and followed up with Satisfaction. The consensus was that this was the band at a new peak, Keith cranking out the main riff of Jumpin’ Jack Flash on his black Les Paul Custom while Brian played the little trebly flourishes on a Gibson ES330. ‘It sounded massive, they absolutely saved the show,’ says Adam Kinn, who saw their set. The appearance was taped, broadcast briefly on TV, and then disappeared into the vaults. It would become one of the most requested live Stones tapes of all time, for this would be the last live show Brian Jones ever played with Mick, Keith, Bill and Charlie.

  In the days after the performance it was obvious Brian had regained at least some of his powers, some of the confidence he’d lost in the months since Pilcher and his team had fitted him up. He chatted easily with John Peel and Johnny Moran in interviews for BBC Radio 1. In sessions at Olympic just after the NME show this troubled man managed to pull some perfect, eternal moments of beauty out of the ether.

  The album that became Beggars Banquet was envisioned as a ‘back to the roots’ project. It’s important to note that by this they actually meant ‘back to Brian’s roots’. It was Brian who first searched out the early music of Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and Son House, Brian who persuaded his fellow Stones of its potency, and Brian who showed Dick Taylor and Keith how to play in Open D, Open E and Open G tunings. In 1967 the Kokomo label had issued a new collection of Johnson recordings which inspired the Stones’ cover of Love In Vain; Brian is thought to have played slide guitar on an early recording of the song, which presumably remains in the Abkco vaults. The song, and Johnson’s dark magic, would become an integral part of the Stones’ esoteric power. Yet, strangely, Mick, in the words of one respected expert on this music who met him recently, seems ‘to have little sense of where [early American] music comes from. It surprised me. I don’t think he had any curiosity or knowledge about it, whatsoever. He is obviously a bright guy – but there was no interest.’ For a while, Mick tapped into Brian, Keith and Marianne’s obsessions, it seems. But only when there was a record to make.

  Some time between 13 and 20 May, Brian sat down in a circle with Keith and Mick at Olympic and together they recorded No Expectations – one of the simplest, most transcendent songs of the Stones’ career. His slide guitar part was subtle, totally without bombast or overemphasis, each little glissando anticipating the chord change by a beat, the perfect embodiment of the journey he’d embarked on in 1961. Brian would contribute several important parts to Beggars Banquet: this would be the last, best memorial to a sensitive soul.

  Even while the Stones were recording, the Drugs Squad continued to stalk Brian. On the evening of the 20th, the band celebrated the conclusion of the first set of sessions by watching a preview of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, after which Brian returned to his flat in Royal Avenue House. At 7.20 a.m., Detective Sergeant Robin Constable – a figure who, like Pilcher, was well known to Release and other organizations – entered the block through a refuse hatch and led a team of police up to Brian’s flat. As they swarmed into his room, Brian, who was already on the phone to Les Perrin, called out, ‘You know the scene, man. Why do I always get bugged?’ Their search apparently turned up a ball of wool sitting on a bureau in Brian’s bedroom which the police unwrapped to reveal a lump of cannabis resin weighing 144 grains. ‘Oh no,’ Brian was reported to have exclaimed, ‘this cannot happen again, just when we’re getting on our feet! Why do you have to pick on me?’

  The routine was sordidly familiar: the media had already been alerted and had prepared their headlines before the raid happened, and the police seemed to have a suspiciously prescient sense that the ball of wool contained drugs (although mentioned by name, Constable, unlike Pilcher, was never convicted of planting evidence and allegations against him were never proven). There was one crucial difference: Brian had been upbeat in the immediate aftermath of the previous raid; this time he was inconsolable.

  Once again he was taken to Chelsea police station and charged, with the inevitable press in attendance; later he was brought to Marlborough Street Court, then released on bail. Press reports suggested Brian was whisked straight off to the Priory; Ron Schneider, Allen Klein’s nephew and a man who’d enjoyed many cheery conversations with Brian back in the happy days on the West Coast, says Brian stayed at the Hilton before going to Roehampton. ‘In that last drug bust he was very upset,’ Schneider recalls. ‘I remember him being totally drained.’

  Desperate to find a new refuge, Brian begged Schneider to find him a room at the hotel; such was Brian’s reputation, Schneider had to book under his own name, then accompany him to his room. Panicking, shaky, reduced to a child-like dependence, Brian insisted Schneider remain by his bed until he fell asleep. As the troubled guitarist finally dozed off, Schneider watched over him for a while before slipping out of the room. When they met the next day for a meeting with their barristers, Brian was so grateful for the companionship he walked up to Schneider, hugged him and kissed him on the top of his head.

  Schneider felt sorry for Brian – but mostly, he says today, he saw him as the author of his own misfortune, thanks to his reliance on a cocktail of drugs. He saw no nastiness from Brian, whose isolation was, he insists, self-inflicted: ‘he did have support, everybody did care for him, all of us tried to help. It was just one of those things.’

  Perhaps Brian was beyond saving. Linda Lawrence, then in the throes of a star-crossed romance with Donovan, had returned from California and turned up to see Brian in the Priory. She’d made a shirt for Donovan’s upcoming Albert Hall show as a kind of love offering, using a beautiful gold silk fabric from Liberty,
with a matching smaller version for Julian, who was now nearly four. Brian’s companion, probably Suki Potier, remained in his room while Brian came out to see his son, marvelling over his shirt, hugging him gently. As Brian sat there, on a chair in the hallway, asking Linda how she was and whether she was going back to America, Linda felt a remnant of that old warm feeling. ‘But the spark, the light, the energy, was gone.’

  *

  Ron Schneider was in the Stones office, so he’s a genuine witness, and he thought Brian’s fellow band members were supportive of him as he gradually lost his way. Doubtless at times they were. Others tell a different story.

  Mim Scala was one of the new sixties generation who turned their passions into a career. He’d become friends with Brian in 1967, and followed a typical new aristocracy routine: hanging out at parties, dropping whatever drugs were fashionable, and putting people together with people – which meant that by the beginning of 1968 his movie agency, Scala Brown Associates, boasted an impressive roster, including Christopher Plummer and Richard Harris. During a weekend in Paris he was drinking in Chez Castel when he recognized Jean-Luc Godard, and was soon enthusing to the nouvelle vague director about the London scene. A few weeks later the phone rang – it was Godard’s producer, asking Scala if it would be possible for the French director to make a movie with the Beatles or the Stones. Scala made a few calls and soon had an agreement in principle from both bands. The Beatles had already made a good movie; the Stones were therefore the more attractive proposition. Godard arranged to start shooting in June.

  By the time Godard’s cameras were rolling, Brian was a fugitive ghost who seemed homeless, often kipping down for the night on a pile of cushions in Scala’s office. Later in the year he’d take refuge at Redlands, of all places, but around June ‘He spent a lot of time just driving,’ says Scala. ‘I don’t know where else he used to go. He’d come to stay in the office and a few times at my flat. Then he’d disappear for a few days, and you never knew where he went.’ Tom Keylock still seemed to be his main driver, a slightly sinister figure. In the aftermath of the second bust, Brian had teamed up with Suki again, but often he was on his own, in a condition that was ‘very sad – diabolical’, says Scala. ‘He’d turn up, he’d have a bunch of crumped-up velvet clothes in the boot of the car, come in, crash out, eat something, fall asleep, be there all day. Then we’d go eat something down at Baghdad House, hang out for a bit. Then he’d be gone and I wouldn’t see him again for a week, two weeks. Then like a bad penny he’d show up again. I never called him – he would just show.’

  This was Brian at a new low, one from which he’d never truly emerge. Unlike Ron Schneider, Scala’s impression was that there was simply no one watching the falling Stone’s back: ‘No, I don’t think he was getting any support.’ He adds that it’s possible the tiny organization was doing its best but that Brian ‘might have been paranoid that they weren’t really helping’. Scala stops short of blaming Mick and Keith, whom he watched push the band forward, creating a song as Godard’s cameras rolled. ‘They were driving this band. Keith never stopped playing guitar, always had one in his hands. And Brian wasn’t pulling his weight.’

  Brian’s isolation was such that he seemed not even to trust the Stones’ regular lawyers. ‘He probably didn’t know what kind of instructions they were all acting under,’ Scala says. ‘He asked us to help him, hence we got in touch with Harbottle and Lewis.’ Ultimately, the Stones office would find Brian a good barrister – he was represented by Michael Havers, defence counsel for Mick and Keith at the Redlands trial – but it was Scala who ended up taking Brian to Mr Vincent in Savile Row to get a suit made for his court appearance, at Marlborough Street on 11 June. This time, Brian decided to fight the charge and maintain that the cannabis was a plant. He therefore elected for a trial by jury, scheduled for September.

  Schneider says Brian got equal treatment. Others reckon that some were more equal than others. The drugs organization Release was in constant touch with the Stones throughout this period, and leading activist Jeff Dexter, who’d marched to protest against Brian’s first arrest, observes, ‘It was kind of weird – the Stones office themselves weren’t that sympathetic to the whole plight of Brian. There was a sort of gap between them and Brian already.’ The office was shell-shocked, under pressure, working at its limit. None the less, says Dexter, there was obviously ‘a certain division’.

  Chaos continued to engulf Brian. Jean-Luc Godard’s film, One Plus One, was an inspired mess, simultaneously pretentious and an amazing document of its time. It presented Brian, just a week or so after his bust, as a sad, lost figure, barely comprehending as Mick, who has now become competent on the guitar, shows him the basic chord sequence for the song that will become Sympathy For The Devil, and Brian struggles to keep up. The song, based around Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (which Marianne Faithfull had lent him), would be one of Mick’s finest compositions. Mick had taken Brian’s tricks, Brian’s obsessions, Brian’s chaos, and turned it all into great art.

  Brian’s state was every bit as pathetic as the movie footage suggested. ‘Physically he was starting to look dodgy,’ says Scala. ‘Blotchy, pasty, and his hands were getting blotchy with swollen fingers. I’d done weekend acid but wasn’t whacked on a daily basis, like he was. His diet was pork pies with HP sauce and drugs. I don’t know what he was taking: uppers, downers. He simply couldn’t sleep most of the time.’

  Brian never actually spoke of his victimized state. Keith and Mick’s accounts would have you believe he whined incessantly, but few others remember that; he kept his silence about his troubles. Instead, his resentment of his persecution by the police, and his isolation, was focused on Suki. ‘I was around from Beggars Banquet,’ says Sam Cutler, later the band’s tour manager, ‘and Brian was acting like an arsehole of the first order. He loved picking fights with his girlfriends.’ Mim Scala confirms, ‘It was horrible. I used to cringe about what was going on. Suki would hang in there, really cared about him – and he was really awful to her. I remember one night coming out of the Speakeasy, Brian gets in the car and gets the driver to take off – so there’s Brian going “Drive, drive, drive!” and this beautiful girl chasing him down the street. That kind of thing happened a lot, he just didn’t care.’

  The pair took their troubles with them wherever they went. On 4 July, Brian ventured back to Tangier, once again staying at the El Minzah, along with Christopher Gibbs. Gibbs had a fondness for Brian as a musician, the way he communicated with anyone, anywhere, even some street musician with an old drum or hand-made pipe – which he’d always manage to get a beautiful sound out of – bonding with the owner across a cultural divide. But this trip exhausted Gibbs’s patience. One night at the hotel, after yet another argument, Suki attempted to slash her wrists with a broken mirror. The long-suffering staff called an ambulance, yet again; then, when it arrived, Brian tried to palm Suki off on Gibbs, to get him to go in the ambulance. ‘He was really trying to pass the buck, as was his wont. I wasn’t interested: “No, get in there, mate, this is your baby.”’ Gibbs never warmed to Suki. It wasn’t a universal view, but his assessment of them as a couple has the ring of truth: ‘They were a disaster area. You know, as you go through life you know the people you can basically rely on. And there are some people who aren’t reliable and they were never going to be, either of them.’

  Over the time Suki and Brian were enmeshing themselves in a self-created chaos, Mick Jagger was planning how to tackle his role in another movie, initially titled The Performance, scripted by Donald Cammell. He discussed the part with Marianne, a far more experienced actor, who realized he had no idea how to go about it. She saw the character as dark and powerful, a pre-Raphaelite Hamlet who was also a little bit pathetic. The model, naturally, would be Brian. As rehearsals commenced, Marianne suggested an extra element, something stronger. So they added Keith into the mix. The result was the character Turner who, in a
set dressed by Christopher Gibbs, speaking words written by Donald Cammell, with music directed by Jack Nitzsche, and involved in a threesome with Anita Pallenberg, was the perfect composite of the Stones’ entire existence. While Marianne denies there was anything directly diabolical about Mick, she realized belatedly that by tapping into the essence of Brian Jones and Keith Richards, Mick would prove irresistible to Anita, the woman who had loved them both. Thus, even after Brian’s ejection from the band, Mick would ensure that the coital oneupmanship continued.

  When Nitzsche spent time with Mick at the end of 1968 after being called to work on the movie, he noticed the change – as if, having assembled Turner from the elements around him, Mick had decided to inhabit this character for life. Mick had been calculated before, careful at times, but now he was a different person. ‘It wasn’t loose and friendly any more,’ Nitzsche would comment later, describing how Mick now had ‘this aloof look – where he looks down on everybody’.

  *

  While Mick burrowed into Brian’s and later Keith’s psyches, Brian was embarking on the last great musical journey of his life – a journey that embodied many of his obsessions since reading Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning back in 1961.

  Brian’s trips to Morocco had charted his life: his moving on from Linda, his impossibly tempestuous relationship with Anita, that terrible moment when Mick and Keith, the only brothers he’d ever had, left him in Marrakesh. During those visits he’d spent more and more time with Mohamed Hamri (running up bills at his 1001 Nights restaurant) and Brion Gysin, who considered Brian something of a dilettante (takes one to know one) but bonded with him over music, namely the mysterious, powerful Pipes of Pan from Joujouka.