Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  Marianne, so witty and funny and unconcerned on the surface, was quite aware of the potency of this rift: it was beyond Brian being a fuck-up; this was a man being ‘destroyed and humiliated’ to his very core. And what Marianne witnessed in 1967 and 1968 was the concluding acts of a process that had started at the band’s very beginning. Dawn Molloy, who’d given birth to Brian’s son in March 1965, emerged profoundly damaged from her experience with the Stones, yet today she speaks as powerfully of the antagonism within the band as of her own treatment. ‘Keith would be at Brian, all the time,’ she says. ‘It was often plain, bloody nasty.’

  Fighting your bandmates is one thing, fighting the system quite another. As Stash observed, Brian’s first drugs bust – almost certainly the result of Norman Pilcher’s planted evidence – had been the most powerful factor in his subsequent decline, leaving him isolated and reliant on sleeping pills. There was no concealing his terror of his upcoming trial in London; yet this time he would be far more aggressive in his defence. This was a high-risk strategy which seemed all the more dangerous once Brian and his team realized that the judge who’d presided over his previous hearing, the nearly noble Reginald Seaton, was also overseeing his new trial.

  Arriving at the Sessions in a dowdy suit on the 26th, Brian looked haunted, almost decayed; those once-clear blue eyes were hardly visible in his puffy face. When he took the stand, his plea of ‘Not guilty’ was hardly audible, but he seemed to pick up confidence once Detective Sergeant Robin Constable and two other policemen had presented their evidence. Brian’s barrister, Michael Havers, then led him through his own version of the bust, focusing on the fact that he had no knowledge of the ball of wool which contained 144 grains of cannabis resin. Asked about the effect of the discovery, Brian replied, ‘I just could not believe it. I was absolutely shattered.’

  ‘Was the wool yours?’ Havers continued.

  ‘I have never had a ball of wool in my life. I don’t darn socks, I don’t have a girlfriend who darns socks.’

  Asked if he had the slightest knowledge the wool contained cannabis, Brian insisted, forcefully, ‘Absolutely not.’

  Against all expectations, Judge Seaton’s summing-up of the case was remarkably even-handed. He pointed out to the jury that there was only circumstantial evidence that the cannabis resin belonged to Brian Jones. Brian’s defence team was feeling quietly confident when the jury withdrew. But when the foreman delivered their verdict just forty-five minutes later, it was devastating: guilty. Brian had his head in his hands and was rocking backwards and forwards as an official shouted for silence. A few minutes later he was asked to stand, to hear the sentence pronounced by his old adversary.

  Remarkably, when the words came, they were ones of mercy – words that echoed William Rees-Mogg’s insistence that for justice to be served, a celebrated rock star should receive no greater sentence than any other offender (doubtless, too, the prospect of losing another appeal aided Seaton’s objectivity). ‘I am going to treat you as I would any other young man before this court,’ he told him. ‘I am going to fine you, and I will fine you relative to your means: £50 with 100 guinea costs . . . but you really must watch your step and stay clear of this stuff. For goodness’ sake do not get into trouble again.’

  Mick and Keith had arrived in court just as the jury were deliberating. The trio, and Suki, posed for photographs afterwards, Mick telling interviewers, ‘We are very pleased Brian didn’t have to go to jail – money doesn’t matter.’

  Brian’s conviction had some disturbing implications, principally for his US immigration status, but the lenient sentence was a turn for the better. As was the country house he bought soon after his stay at Redlands, Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, East Sussex. A red-brick cottage set in a large sloping garden, the house was celebrated locally as the home of Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne. Romantic, with echoes of a childhood arcadia, it seemed to be the perfect location, far from the predations of the press and Norman Pilcher. For a while it seemed that with this second trial behind him, and his own rural refuge, somehow Brian would be able to rebuild his physical and psychological stamina.

  That’s what Al Kooper thought, anyway.

  In November, the new songs were still flowing from Mick and Keith. The pair were calling in more musicians, including Ry Cooder, a friend of Jack Nitzsche, on slide guitar and mandolin; Cooder used Open G tuning, the same as Brian on some early Stones tracks, but played it in a more country-infused style. (Even today, Cooder finds the memory of those sessions painful. Maybe Mick and Keith did a number on him, like they did on Brian.) Al Kooper was another musician the band wanted to call in – the man who lit a fire under Bob Dylan’s career when he came up with the unforgettable organ riff for Like A Rolling Stone.

  Kooper was bushed, and had come to London to recuperate after working sessions for three months straight. Somehow, Denny Cordell, the producer and fixer, found out where he was staying and called him. Kooper told him he didn’t want to play with any band in London. Not even the Rolling Stones. ‘Forget it,’ he told Cordell, ‘I need a rest.’

  It was later that day that he was walking down the King’s Road on a fine autumn evening and he saw Brian Jones walking towards him. Brian was radiant, confident. ‘Al, it’s so exciting that you’re playing at the session,’ he told him, sweetly, irresistibly. They spoke for a few minutes, Brian telling him more details about the recording they had scheduled and how much he was looking forward to working with Kooper, whom he’d last seen at Monterey. It was impossible to turn him down. The session was the next day, the 17th.

  When Kooper arrived, producer Jimmy Miller was presiding over the desk. Mick and Keith walked in and took control. Bizarrely, they handed acoustic guitars to each musician and asked them to play along. It was a weird device to break up the formality, and it worked: everyone was taken out of their comfort zone. Except Brian. As Mick and Keith walked around, Brian lay on his stomach on the studio floor, his eyes fixed on a book. ‘It was a textbook on biology, I recall,’ says Kooper. Brian was in his own world, unreachable. No one could work out what drug or combination of drugs he was on; the other musicians could cope only by ignoring him – ‘not in a nasty way, it was simply that it was impossible to reach him’, says Kooper.

  The session was as loose as it was possible to be. Percussionist Rocky Dijon rolled up joints with one hand as the rhythm rolled without dropping a beat. Keith listened intently, hearing Kooper repeat a riff he’d lifted from Etta James’s version of I Got You Babe which was incorporated into his own rhythm work. Out of the inchoate, thumping noises they crafted a magnificent, throbbing epic: You Can’t Always Get What You Want. This was the birth of the Stones’ gloriously shambling country-flavoured blues gumbo. And it was one of the last great Stones songs crafted in Brian Jones’s presence. Except that he wasn’t really there. Using the vestiges of that winning charm to persuade Kooper to attend and make the session a success was Brian’s final contribution to the band he’d formed.

  It is impossible to work out exactly what substances Brian was abusing in these last months of 1968; in the main, it seems it was Mandrax, other prescription medicines and alcohol, and that his depressed mental state was, as a psychiatrist would say, situational. He’d formed this band to escape his old life and now his band had escaped from him. Eddie Kramer, present at many of the later sessions, agrees that Brian’s plight was ‘very sad’ but adds a crucial proviso: ‘He was not a well person. I related to that as I suffered from asthma as a child. You could hear it, in his struggles with breath.’ It’s worth remembering the words of his neighbour, Roger Jessop, about Brian at the age of eleven, how he resented his asthma and ‘he resented himself, because of it’.

  Brian’s final appearance with the Stones was a messy affair, all round. Mick and Keith had been bigging up the idea of a circus-style tour for a couple of months now, but when they finally embarked on filming a mini-movie, to be titled Rock and Rol
l Circus, the logistics proved beyond them. Guest act Taj Mahal had to be smuggled into the country without mentioning he was working. Jethro Tull had to rely on guest guitarist Tony Iommi, who pulled his hat down over his eyes hoping no one would notice him moonlighting with another band. John Lennon was the star guest, but his slot with Eric Clapton on guitar and Mitch Mitchell on drums was marred by Keith’s horribly out-of-tune bass. Filming ran so late that the Stones didn’t hit the stage until around two in the morning – at which point, says Tull’s bassist Glen Cornick, a roadie had to lead Brian’s hand to the fretboard before he could play.

  Brian’s sad state was a shocking revelation for those who cared about him. ‘My favourite sound of the Stones was when Brian had his hand on the tiller,’ says Taj Mahal. ‘Something was off, and I was concerned, and shocked. There was some sort of disconnect – I should have said more, given more energy to him.’

  Chris Welch, the Melody Maker writer, had got on well with Brian, and was the man with whom Brian had shared his vision of a post-Stones existence back in March 1965. They hadn’t exchanged a word over the last three and a half years. Much later he realized that Brian had become upset because Welch had referred to him in print as a mere rhythm guitarist. The perceived insult still clearly meant something: ‘He saw me in a corridor. Turned round. Then ran away.’

  Pete Townshend had hung out with Brian at the Scotch for years, bonded with him over a love of pop music, and today remembers how Brian encouraged his writing. ‘He was always very kind. He loved my first Who song, I Can’t Explain.’ He was ‘very upset by Brian’s condition. Brian was defeated. I took Mick and Keith aside and they were quite frank about it all; they said Brian had ceased to function, they were afraid he would slip away. They certainly were not hard-nosed about him. But they were determined not to let him drag them down – that was clear.’

  11

  Just Go Home

  THEY SAY THAT pioneers get all the arrows. This would be the grim lesson as the 1960s shuddered to their end, and a succession of the decade’s greater stars slipped away to form the infamous 27 Club. Today, even when we know more about depression, bipolar conditions and drug addiction, we still lose them. The story, says Pete Townshend, remains the same: ‘We applaud, we wait, then we nod sagely when they burn out. It’s despicable.’

  By the beginning of 1969, it was obvious even to those who harboured no resentment of Brian that the show couldn’t go on. Freed of Andrew Oldham and with Mick and Keith’s drug bust comfortably consigned to the past, the band had a new artistic momentum – and Brian was holding them back.

  There were odd moments when he pulled back into focus in early 1969: you can hear his booming drums (Moroccan tbel) after the breakdown in Midnight Rambler, and autoharp in You Got The Silver, all recorded in February or March. Overall, however, it was painfully clear that, as George Chkiantz puts it, ‘He wasn’t listening. If he was going to put anything on, it wasn’t in the spirit of the track.’ It’s said he played on an early take of Honky Tonk Women, but his guitar part was wiped; still, it’s been said for years that this happened to Ry Cooder too, who recorded one part, with a distinctive riff based around the top G string, which was wiped and replaced by Keith’s version – a ‘sponge job’, just like Brian used to do to Keith’s guitar parts all those years back, in 1964.

  For one late-night session in March, Tom Keylock had driven Brian all the way from Cotchford to Barnes, and Brian decided he wanted to overdub a saxophone part on one of the tracks. No one present could imagine how it might work, but George Chkiantz set up a mic and screens around Brian, who was sitting on a plastic stacking chair all by himself in the cavernous main room at Olympic. After a couple of passes Brian stopped playing. Mick, Chkiantz and a couple of others listened in the control booth, until they heard Brian’s voice over the monitors: ‘Um . . . there’s a problem with this reed. I need to change it.’ Ten minutes passed, then another ten minutes. Chkiantz left the booth and walked over to Brian, who was staring foggily at the mouthpiece, struggling with the adjustment screws. He asked Brian if he could give him a hand changing the reed. ‘No, no,’ Brian told him, ‘it’s OK.’

  And so it went on, for an hour, ninety minutes, Chkiantz, Mick, others walking over, and Brian, not aggressive, not stroppy, insisting he didn’t need help. Of course, he did need help. ‘You have no idea of how dreadful it was,’ says Chkiantz today. ‘But no one could reach him, no one could get close to him. It was clear, in that awful situation . . . [that] he was just a nuisance.’

  And in that awful situation, did Mick and Keith seem considerate?

  ‘Ha ha ha. Um . . . they were fed up with the whole bloody thing. No, I don’t think they were very considerate.’

  Other insiders share Chkiantz’s perception of a hardness at the heart of the Stones, most notably Jack Nitzsche. Throughout 1965 and 1966 he’d noted rancour during the band’s RCA sessions. When he resumed work with the band towards the end of 1968, he reckoned the atmosphere had changed – for the worse. His vignette of seeing Mick with Brian is chilling. ‘Brian came up to me, looking pretty shaky, and asked me what I thought he should do – he didn’t know where he fit[ted] in. I told him to just pick up a guitar and start playing. Then he walked over to Mick and asked, “What should I play?” Mick told him, “You’re a member of the band, Brian, play whatever you want.” So he played something, but Mick stopped him and said, “No, Brian, not that – that’s no good.” So Brian asked him again what to play and Mick told him again to play whatever he wanted. So Brian played something else, but Mick cut him off again – “No, that’s no good either, Brian.”’

  The dysfunction at the heart of the band was all the more glaring in that Keith was looking at Mick, all the while trying to work out what had gone on between his primary school friend and the lover he’d taken from Brian. Nitzsche remembered that ‘Keith and Mick weren’t even speaking to each other during this period’. Mick, consequently, spent a lot of time with Ry Cooder. Today, Keith claims to have had his revenge by sleeping with Marianne. Such was the collateral damage in pursuing great music, and creating today’s corporation. As Sam Cutler, road manager from that spring, points out, it was the dysfunction, the anger, that gave the music its power: ‘That madness, that tension, is what makes bands. They use that negative energy, transmuting it into something else. It goes from lead to gold.’

  Cutler has no love for Brian, but sees this period as one of utter, sickening coldness, as Bill Wyman was reduced to an irrelevance and Brian to a shell. ‘No one realizes, to put it bluntly, what cold cunts Mick and Keith can be. They specialize in it. All I can remember from that time is Brian, sitting on the floor in the studio looking lost. It was too painful for him. A lot of people take drugs to mask their inner unhappiness and turmoil, don’t they? And Brian was one of them. Yes, Mick and Keith did make it worse. They just treated him like he didn’t exist. The Stones have a very cold way of dealing with people, man. OK, you’re not on the radar any more. You don’t exist. They treat you as if you’re not there.’

  At the end of the session for Sister Morphine, Mick walked up to the founder of his band and said, ‘Just go home, Brian.’

  *

  Was Brian resigned to his fate, like the little grey goat he’d seen led in front of him as the tbels thundered? Undoubtedly he was. Even before his last spiral into despair began in late 1968, he knew how to escape. He simply chose not to.

  Soon after his return from Joujouka, Brian had turned up to see Cleo Sylvestre, the woman who’d seen his very first Marquee show, to play records and chat. He mapped out an escape route that was just about as radical as the one that gave birth to the Rolling Stones. ‘He’d been to Morocco, he was terribly excited, was talking to me about the rhythms, the drums, the instruments, how he wanted to have this group,’ says Cleo. ‘He wanted to bring over some of the musicians he’d met. Really, it was a vision of what we now call world music. In those days it was
totally radical. It’s amazing when you think of all the records you can get now; back then there was rock’n’roll, R&B, blues and jazz and everything was very well defined, and everything had a boundary. To have the vision, to break out and do something different, showed tremendous creativity and insight.’ Brian had already planned the release of the Joujouka album, which Elektra were interested in, but which was being stalled by Allen Klein. This conversation was very specific: Brian spoke about using the Moroccan polyrhythms, with guitars on the top, and Cleo singing. This, rather than the Robert Johnson blues which Brian had already explored, was the vision he wanted to follow.

  Brian was articulate and coherent as he laid out his plans to Cleo over several phone calls. Cleo thought he had a good chance of realizing his vision, but she didn’t react that positively to his suggestions. ‘I was so insecure about my singing, I just said, “Oh Brian, you’re sending me up.” He said, “No, I’m serious.” So I said let’s meet, but I didn’t pursue it.’ Today, she dearly wishes she had been more responsive.

  Others remember similar optimism at the prospect of starting over. During a shopping trip to Harrods over the winter of 1968/69, Brian had noticed a pair of paintings by the astronomical artist David A. Hardy, who had made his name via his artwork for Arthur C. Clarke novels and had recently been the subject of an exhibition at the London Planetarium. Brian was intrigued: around this time he’d built a telephone relationship with the science fiction author and even went to stay with him in his new home in Sri Lanka. The paintings were large, beautiful canvases, each around two by three feet: one was a view of Jupiter from Io, the other a depiction of Uranus from Titania, with a large methane lake. Brian asked about the works, only to be informed they were no longer available for sale, and were being returned to Hardy.

  Some time later, the phone rang in Hardy’s house. Hardy had a ten-minute-long conversation with the well-spoken caller, who asked whether he could buy the paintings. The pair chatted about space and astronomy for a while, and the caller soon agreed, without demur, to Hardy’s asking price – a substantial amount, around £50 each. As the conversation moved on to delivery and payment details, the caller gave his name: Brian Jones.