Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Page 28

  Gysin had first heard the Master Musicians of Joujouka at a moussem – a celebration at the tombs of local saints – in Sidi Kacem. There were many strange, evocative strains of music that day, but Gysin was most taken with a group dressed in rough woollen djellabas and pointed leather slippers who had once, it was said, been musicians by appointment to the Sultan. ‘That’s my music,’ Gysin told himself. ‘I just want to hear that music for the rest of my life.’ These were the Master Musicians of Joujouka, and Hamri would be both Gysin’s and ultimately Brian Jones’s entrée to their exotic, spartan realm.

  Hamri was one of the many fascinating, multilayered cultural crossover types who seemed to gravitate towards the Stones, Brian in particular. He had been at the centre of his own Tangier feud, a love triangle between him, Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles, a notorious tightwad who once lent Hamri a suit that wasn’t returned and resented its loss for decades. Gysin was far more relaxed, taught Hamri to paint, and admired his independence – the Moroccan had made a living as a pastry chef and smuggler, ferrying sweets and chickens between the French and Spanish zones in his country. Hamri’s uncle was the leader of the Master Musicians of Joujouka – hence as a child, Hamri had danced Bou Jeloud, the powerful goat-man, a ritual of which it was said, ‘If you put the goat-skins on, you never take the goat-skins off.’

  It was Hamri who took Gysin to the source of the music – perhaps the first outsider to witness it. Brian would be another initiate. Once a year, the Joujouka musicians united to enact an ancient ceremony that Gysin was convinced was the equivalent of the Roman Lupercalia, or Rites of Pan. ‘The point was to contact Pan, the goat god, who was sexuality itself,’ he later told writer Terry Wilson. He found the music utterly seductive. ‘You know your music when you hear it,’ he would say. ‘You fall into line and dance – until you pay the Piper.’

  Gysin is often described as a friend of Brian’s. He wasn’t really: he considered him ‘a spoilt boy’ who’d do stupid things. He told Gysin he’d wrecked the Gettys’ phone in Marrakesh, and kept badgering him about what he thought, whether the Gettys were offended, as if Gysin had any idea. But Gysin thought that Brian ‘really could play guitar’, and knew that Brian understood the music. For this reason they bonded over the Pipes of Pan.

  The music was a glimpse into an ancient world, perhaps the very beginnings of the sound that had always entranced Brian. Yet the manifestation of the god Pan was something just as potent: Pan had brought syncopated, dangerous sounds into our world, was the ultimate progenitor of what some righteous people called the Devil’s music, and was the god of fertility. As his psychic lover Romi had suggested, who was Brian really but a manifestation of Pan himself?

  It was John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins who commented that he never saw Brian smile except when he had a guitar in his hands. Yet Brian smiled often at Joujouka, a unique age-old spot where the earth was charged with a certain energy. Some ascribed this energy to the local saint, Sidi Ahmed Schiech, whose shrine dominated the village. Just like an early Christian basilica, the site, and the music connected with it, boasted special healing powers. In its early days, Islam incorporated older beliefs, as had early Christianity. The Bou Jeloud ceremony was the most potent example of this harnessing of ancient forces.

  Brian and Suki flew in to Tangier around 30 July. Brian had called Olympic studios and requested an engineer the day before he left, so tape op and technical whizz George Chkiantz had just one afternoon to pack his bag, collect Brian’s two Uher recorders (with dud batteries) from his new flat at the bottom of Hampstead Heath; then he returned to Olympic for a night session before getting a taxi to Heathrow. Suki and Brian were waiting for him when Chkiantz arrived at Tangier airport at 9 a.m. on 1 August.

  Chkiantz had managed to stay out of the Stones’ psychodrama; hence the Brian he encountered once he’d walked across the blazing hot tarmac was more like the Brian that Paul Jones remembered – ‘my sort of bloke’. Brian encouraged the imposingly tall Chkiantz to step over the little rope separating the table and chairs from immigration, checking on his flight and the whereabouts of his luggage, and sharing the plan for his trip. ‘He was totally together, and knew exactly what he was doing. He explained we were off to meet Hamri, and couldn’t be late.’

  Brian and Suki had a taxi waiting, a shiny new six-cylinder Chevrolet in which they travelled back to the El Minzah to have breakfast, and pick up Brion Gysin. Brian told Chkiantz they were going up to the mountains, where electricity was unheard of, so he used the one-hour break to stock up on batteries. Before long they’d picked up Hamri from the 1001 Nights and were making their way slowly, now with two cars, on a bumpy two-lane road. Chkiantz was in the Chevy with Brian, Suki and Gysin; the writer wove tales as they drove the ninety miles to their destination, of how the music they were about to see stretched back centuries, enthusing at the chance of capturing these old songs.

  There was a brief stop-off, probably in the ancient town of Ksar el-Kebir, where Hamri, the local, picked up water and other supplies, then to the local Caid, who checked their passports. They were now in the old Spanish zone – a long-standing geographical link, for this area was ruled from the Spanish province as part of the Roman Empire. Then the Chevy struggled on a dirt road up the mountain, the final ten miles or so taking well over an hour.

  When Brian, dressed in white, Suki, wearing trousers with her hair cut short, and the six-foot-tall Chkiantz finally pulled up in the village and walked into an olive grove, the villagers looked on, stunned, at these alien apparitions. The party settled down on rugs for a picnic with just a couple of villagers as the taxi driver contemplated his once shiny car, wrecked by the drive up the mountain, and mournfully handed his battery over to Chkiantz, who needed it to power the Uhers. Then the four outsiders sat down to watch the rituals.

  Donkeys and chickens wandered around the fields as the music resounded around the mountain. The main performances took place in the middle of the village in an open space dominated by the saint’s shrine, old gnarled olive trees and a communal well from which the villagers drew water. There were gentle, reflective moments: pastoral flutes, which recalled the courtly Elizabethan vibe Brian had brought to the Stones; small groups of women, singing in a modest courtyard, an obscure song Gysin had never heard before and whose lyrics he was keen to decipher. On the second day, they were told, they would hear the music of Bou Jeloud.

  Brian, Suki and Chkiantz slept in a placid, spartan house of white stucco with blue doors, set around a courtyard with fig and palm trees. It was just up the hill from the main square, with views on to the Jebel mountain, an imposing, resonant presence which had in centuries gone by overlooked significant battles and had been settled since the Neolithic period; one stone cave was reputedly home to Bou Jeloud. Brian was happy, and had no problems drifting off to sleep in the clear, pure mountain air.

  At some unknown time in the morning there was a scurrying noise outside the window of the bedroom the trio were sharing, and suddenly there came the deafening blaring of seven or eight rhaitas (primitive mountain oboes). Brian, Suki and Chkiantz emerged laughing and bleary-eyed but could see no trace of who’d given them their morning alarm call. Their little house was medieval in its simplicity: thick stone walls, pounded mud floors, water pulled up from a well splashed in your face for a morning shower, the toilet a simple drain, no electricity, no flunkies on call – and Brian had never seemed more content. ‘He was so relieved for a moment from the pressure of being a Rolling Stone,’ says Chkiantz. ‘He didn’t have to impress anyone. The villagers didn’t give a toss – and he wasn’t competing, he wasn’t conscientiously being the bad boy. He’d come because he admired the musicianship and he was here, in a sense, to learn.’

  Some people who knew Brian, like Stu’s friend Keith Altham, saw his friendliness, the way he’d fuss over you, plying you with cups of tea, as designed to elicit sympathy or curry favour. That’s not how George Chkiantz saw it in this remo
te, bare location, where Brian was ‘considerate, together – concerned for people. I couldn’t have been more comfortable.’ Brian made sure Chkiantz could do his job, and was euphoric (‘although’, Chkiantz adds, ‘his hand-clapping we could have done without’).

  The massed rhaitas and tbel drums, played by two banks of around twelve musicians, were probably recorded on the second day. Their set was abbreviated compared to their normal three-night-long ceremony, which was known to promote ecstatic states in the audience, but still, this was an experience beyond words: the rhaitas blared out a call and response, each theme modulating constantly, ancient melodies mapping out a cosmic meditation. Meanwhile, on the right, the drummers pounded out a juggernaut rhythm, powered by the zyeki and boomboo, small and big versions of the hand-hewn, military-looking tbel drum. Each drummer maintained a resounding heartbeat pulse on the bottom skin, and a fast machine-gun rat-a-tat on the top skin, the rhythms steady and hypnotic yet ever-changing via some deep telepathy. The volume was immense, echoing across the mountain, audible for miles around. Brian, Suki and Gysin sat back on cushions in the shade, calm, enraptured, their gaze steady, while Chkiantz scurried here and there, trying to work out how to capture the sound without overloading the Uher. In the end he decided to point the two microphones at the ground and record the sonic vibrations bouncing off the earth. The recordings therefore immortalized both this immense, profound music and the land that gave birth to it.

  Bou Jeloud did not emerge that evening; the villagers explained he would come out only when the moon was full and the fruits of the earth were ready, for Pan’s appearance was designed to enhance and celebrate the fertility of the land and its people. Brian would later write for the Joujouka album sleeve that this was something of a relief: ‘I don’t know if I possess the stamina to endure the incredible, constant strain of the [full] festival. Such psychic weaklings has Western Civilisation made of us.’

  In the original ceremony, a goat would have been slaughtered, its skin stripped off, then laden with salt; a teenage boy would be sewn into the skin, the blood, salt, heat and the intensity of the music promoting visions, all the better to perform the dance, chasing young virgins and whipping them with olive branches. This was the role with which Brian identified. He discussed with Hamri whether he could return for the full festival to dance Bou Jeloud. Some young men were resistant to putting on the skins, knowing they would be forever changed – marked out, touched by Pan.

  In their brief visit – one night and a full day, then departure the next lunchtime – they did partake in some of the ritual. Brion Gysin would remember, vividly, how he, Brian, Suki and Hamri were reclining on cushions when ‘the most beautiful goat anyone had ever seen – pure white!’ was led in front of them, and how Brian leapt up and shouted, ‘That’s me!’ And then the goat was led off for slaughter. George Chkiantz remembers the goat being led in front of the group, although in his memory it was a less poetic grey. He is certain that Brian did not see the goat’s sacrifice as a dark portent, ‘But it was a powerful moment. By then, the music had become especially intense, and by then Brian had been smoking too much, too. And the goat knew what was happening. It’s curious. It was quite resigned.’

  A few hours later, the goat was brought to them, and they ate it in Roman style, holding the food in their right hand and wrapping it in bread. Gysin remembered Brian saying this moment was ‘like communion’.

  The next day, the exhausted group bumped their way back to Tangier in the two cars with hours of music on tape. Chkiantz had by now missed out on around two nights’ sleep and crashed out the moment he reached his room at the El Minzah.

  Brian shook him awake a few hours later. Grumbling at the intrusion and only dimly aware of his surroundings, Chkiantz staggered into the guitarist’s room and plugged in a few cables as Brian and a few friends waited. Later he’d wonder if he’d dreamt a pale, cadaverous figure in a raincoat, wearing a hat. Only now do we know, thanks to Burroughs’ biographer Barry Miles, that the first person to hear the Joujouka tapes, along with Brian, Suki and Gysin, was William Burroughs, who also venerated the music of the Ahl Serif musicians, writing in The Ticket That Exploded about ‘the Pan God of Panic piping blue notes through empty streets’.

  The following morning, well rested, Brian and Suki took Chkiantz on a tour of the city Brian loved, to the site where Romans, and before them natives of long-lost Carthage, were buried. Then it was on to the beach. Again, Brian ministered to Chkiantz carefully, warning him not to swim far into the water, for the sea shelved rapidly at a certain point, beyond which there was a vicious undertow. ‘If you do go in to cool off,’ Brian told him, ‘don’t go any deeper than your ankles or they’ll find your body fifteen miles down the coast.’ Chkiantz snoozed in the August heat; when he awoke, he saw Brian swimming out into the Mediterranean. ‘I remember the economy with which he swam, a fast crawl, very little splashing. He swam out a long way, and waved to us, then swam all the way back. And walked in his own footsteps back to the beach. With currents that strong, it gives you a good idea of what a good swimmer he was.’

  After three days of being a good boy, maybe it was predictable that Brian should kick over the traces during Chkiantz’s final night at the El Minzah. Brian had ventured down the Escalier Waller to Akhmed’s little emporium and loaded up on hashish. As dawn broke the next morning, to the sound of Suki’s furious complaints Chkiantz and Brian, his eyes half closed, were peering down from their balcony at passers-by making their way down the Rue de la Liberté and shouting out ‘Salaam alaikum!’ If any of the Tangerines failed to respond to this elegant, formal Arabic greeting (‘Peace be upon you’), Brian would shout down a more Anglo-Saxon term: ‘Fuck you!’ Then suddenly, frighteningly, Brian simply passed out cold, keeling over on to the floor ‘without even putting an arm out’, says Chkiantz. ‘I was thinking, Jesus, what’s happening? Suki said, “Fuck him, this happens all the time.” Then she put a blanket over him.’

  Brian invited Chkiantz to stay on for more days in Tangier, but he had work to do, and he felt guilty about the £100 a day Olympic were billing Brian. Brian returned a week or so later, tanned and more healthy-looking, ready for an especially miserable September.

  *

  The month was laden with portent, for Brian’s trial was due at the Inner London Sessions on 26 September. This month, Keith Richards would suffer his first real taste of Stones misery, as the sexually charged filming of Performance took place at Lowndes Square. Donald Cammell was the figure who’d tried to enmesh Linda Lawrence, Brian, Anita and countless others in his sex games from 1965 onwards; he doubtless took satisfaction from witnessing Mick’s session with Anita. The pair’s highly publicized fling would launch a feud that, as Keith revealed in Life with his observations about Mick’s tiny todger, endures. Mick and Keith were now free to snap at each other, of course, because they’d effectively dispatched Brian.

  Keith had temporarily left Redlands, where Brian had now holed up, to stay closer to the action at Robert Fraser’s flat. He often sat, depressed, in his Bentley outside Lowndes Square, his grim mood eventually giving birth to Gimme Shelter, while Brian was sometimes just a couple of doors down, with Mim Scala. In the first few days after his return from Joujouka, Brian was hugely enthusiastic. Although he’d initially intended to use the tapes as the basis for his own collages, like the Gnawa project, instead he started touting the release of the tapes as an album, to promote the music. But once back in the same old surroundings, his mood soon worsened.

  One of the most poignant details of Brian’s decline is that, even with close friends, he never bemoaned his lot. ‘He never stated any resentment,’ says Scala. ‘You’d just get a morose face. You knew it was because he’d started this band called the Rolling Stones and was being blown out, but he never once slagged [them] off.’ Instead, it was Suki who continued to share the pain. ‘I think the secret had to be kept,’ says Michael Rainey. ‘So there was this kind of
bravado, I’m all right, so he never complained. I actually didn’t know how they were treating him until Suki gave me the lowdown. She told me how the emotional warfare went. “Oh come on, we’re doing a session tonight, why don’t you come round?” Brian would turn up with Suki at the studio, sitting on a sofa waiting to be called in . . . then at five in the morning, it was, “See ya, Brian!” It was that way that he simply got railroaded out of the picture.’

  ‘Brian had become frightened to come in the office,’ says Tony Calder. ‘All those stories, the microphone not switched on, are absolutely true. He had no faith in himself, because it was all taken away.’

  Some people, like Ian Stewart, had no sympathy at all. Glyn Johns, Stu’s long-term friend, felt just the same: ‘I wasn’t sad, I was really frustrated – cos he was just a pain in the arse. He couldn’t play – he was physically incapable of holding a chord down. It was pathetic. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for him, because he’d done it to himself.’

  Though today Marianne Faithfull voices her sympathy for Brian, in 1968 she kept her own counsel. But now and again she’d share her concern with close friends. Like Mick, Marianne had her regular lovers on the side, one of whom, a young artist, stayed with her at Cheyne Walk during one of Mick’s frequent absences that summer of 1968 (‘It was a more sharing community then,’ he laughs – respecting his discretion, we’ll call him Jake). Marianne showed him a letter addressed to Mick, one of several Brian had sent to Cheyne Walk over recent weeks. She had opened this one in Mick’s absence.

  ‘Please let me come back in,’ Brian had written. ‘I’ll play bongos, anything, but please let me come back in.’