Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  Dick was enthusiastic and skittish, like a young puppy-dog. Although six years older than Brian, he’d always remain the more junior member in their relationship, partly because he didn’t play, partly because he was unassertive, ready and willing to follow Brian’s whims. Dick’s father was a pillar of the establishment, and when Dick’s partying and love of jazz became the talk of Tewkesbury, his dad, politely enough, gave him his marching orders. This happened just at the time when Brian had outstayed his welcome at his current abode, a room rented from Pat Andrews’ brother. Brian had found a flat in Selkirk House, an impressive, stucco-fronted building at 73 Prestbury Road, and talked Dick into sharing the large space. Together, they developed a lifestyle that would have been pretty familiar to Brian’s musical heroes. ‘We had a great life,’ says Dick. ‘We’d survive by holding rent parties, like in the old New Orleans days. When trad jazz bands were playing in Cheltenham, we’d encourage them back for a few beers to let their hair down. We’d buy a load of beer and stuff to eat, encourage the musicians to play in the flat, then charge an entrance fee, which all went towards the rent. Then we’d take the empty bottles back the next day and get the money back. We had some good times.’

  The pair usually got up around noon, then wandered into town, most often to the Barbecue, which hosted jazz shows in the evening. Brian was the one who’d usually venture out to shows and persuade musicians like Eric Allendale, and many others, back to the flat. His charm and focus were incredible. Teenage disenchantment played a part in this lifestyle, but only a minor part, says Dick. ‘It was a lot deeper. He wanted to be a good musician. He was on a musical journey.’

  Brian had turned his back on Cheltenham society, as it had on him, but there was a major payoff: this was the making of him as a musician. In those months, spent constantly practising on a Hofner f-hole archtop he’d acquired, he moved far ahead of most of his peers.

  It was most likely on Monday, 18 April 1960 that Brian had first met John Keen, whose band was playing at Filby’s basement. Like Dick, Keen was several years older than Brian; he’d recently returned from the Merchant Marine and had made his name locally fronting Bill Nile’s Delta Jazzmen during Bill’s National Service. Kind, self-deprecating – although he had a formidable reputation on the Cheltenham and later the London 100 Club scene – and incisive, Keen is also the most valuable early observer of Brian Jones that we have. He came from a similar background, and his latter-day second career as an educational psychologist allows him valuable insight into interactions within rock’n’roll bands. Keen may have spent more years on the planet and seen more of it when they teamed up, but he insists that ‘Brian was streets ahead of us. He was very skilled musically, very impressive on the guitar. We couldn’t understand the chordal things he knew. My skills weren’t far advanced compared to Brian.’

  The pair spent much of 1961 working together; Keen got to know a different side of Brian from Dick, and Brian’s later flatmate, Graham Ride. They all witnessed Brian’s moods, but with Keen, the nineteen-year-old showed minimal self-indulgence. There was plenty of messing around – that almost telepathic banter you develop in a little band, plus the endless pursuit of women – but when it came to music, Brian was super-serious. ‘He really knew what he wanted to do. It was really impressive, his focus. He was ambitious, and he felt like a fish out of water in Cheltenham. He had no interest in the business side, so I did the fixing. Brian’s main interest was the music – and if it didn’t sound right, he would say so. So quite often, although he was three or four years younger than me, he was the leader. I realize these things now, but I didn’t realize when I was younger.’

  Keen, along with Graham Ride, was Brian’s closest collaborator in 1961 – although Brian turned up at many shows independently, and towards the end of the year linked up with a new circle in Oxford, a common destination for many Cheltenham teenagers who were into jazz and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Along with other pickup musicians and soon Graham Ride on sax, they played shows either as John Keen’s Jazz Band or the Brian Jones Blues Band, depending on who had arranged the gig. Their set included classics like Tin Roof Blues, St Louis Blues, Memphis Blues and Careless Love, which always went down well with the audiences at Filby’s. The group ventured out to little village pubs in the Cotswolds like the Royal George in Birdlip and the Bear Pools in Stroud, house parties in Evesham, or played back home at the Barbecue. For bigger shows, when he was supporting touring acts like Acker Bilk at the Town Hall, Keen would book a six-piece band, with a banjo player, and Brian would stay at home. ‘Banjos are over,’ he’d tell Keen. ‘A band with a banjo in has no swing.’

  Brian had long grown tired of the ‘Purist Jazz’ movement and instead searched out the work of Freddie Green, the guitarist in Count Basie’s band. ‘Listen to this guy,’ he’d persuade Keen, ‘how his chordal work makes the whole band swing!’ Inspired by Green, Brian studied deeply the intricacies of big band guitar playing. ‘He didn’t differentiate between traditional jazz, mainstream jazz, modern jazz and blues,’ says Keen, ‘he kind of drew out of all of it, while the blues evolved into his main interest.’ Although rock’n’roll had spluttered into self-parody in both Britain and the US, Brian was still enthused by Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, too, showing other guitarists how to play Chuck licks. He was also listening to Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman’s visionary guitarist. ‘There was a lot of knowledge that simply wasn’t around then,’ Keen continues. ‘It wasn’t in books, so how would we know? But Brian had his fingers in all sorts of pies.’

  Although Dick Hattrell or John Keen would often tag along, Brian had the confidence to take off on his own, turning up at a gig at the Town Hall or at the club above the swimming baths and talking older, more experienced musicians into letting him share the bandstand. After one show at the Town Hall, bandleader Kenny Ball sat with Brian and was almost gushing in his praise: ‘You’re so young – how did you learn to play like that?’ Keen, who was there that evening, sat by, without interrupting, content to bask in the reflected glory. The same happened with Alex Welsh’s band at St Luke’s Hall, where Brian contributed a forceful, propulsive rhythm guitar over several songs as the older musicians gave him looks of approval. ‘They were definitely appreciative,’ says Keen. ‘A bloke that young, out in the provinces – they were obviously surprised.’

  Keen reckons that in 1961, including a couple of dozen shows with their own band, Brian notched up ‘well over a hundred’ gigs and guest appearances. Add in his stints with Bill Nile, the Barn Owls, and earlier minor slots at Filby’s basement, and it’s obvious that the young guitarist was accumulating experience much faster than most of his contemporaries.

  His rapid, obsessive quest to search out new music had intensified from the summer of that year when new housemate Graham Ride arrived on the scene. Graham had discovered the work of Leadbelly a couple of years earlier, and like Brian was aware of Chicago blues via the pioneering work of Chris Barber, who had ventured out to the Chicago South Side in 1959 and brought innovators such as Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Britain, all in the face of opposition by the British Musicians’ Union, which attempted to keep out ‘foreign’ performers. Graham had moved to Cheltenham from Liverpool and was playing clarinet in a local band when he first met Dick and Brian, in May. During their first afternoon together, Graham listened to the pair enthuse about music and argue about who’d been stealing food from the fridge – a typical day at Selkirk House. Graham moved into the flat later that summer, bringing along a copy of The Blues, an EMI/Vee Jay compilation featuring Elmore James and Jimmy Reed that would become a cornerstone of Brian’s little world.

  Graham and Brian became good chums. Graham was more forceful than the easy-going Dick and rarely suffered from Brian’s moods, but right from the off he noticed the tensions around the young guitarist. It wasn’t difficult. That summer the pair bumped into Brian’s sister, Barbara, on the Promenade: the fifteen-year-o
ld, who looked quite a bit like her brother, seemed anxious, as if she’d been forbidden even to talk to him, and walked off after exchanging only a couple of words. Brian would never mention his parents, either to Graham or to John Keen, whose parents knew the Joneses well: ‘If the subject ever came up, he’d avoid talking about it, but you got the impression he wanted to escape their influence, any way he could.’ Pat Andrews, who spent most of that summer with Brian, believes Brian’s estrangement from his parents, never really resolved, would go on to cause real psychological damage: ‘All he ever wanted was for them to say well done. It was all he wanted, but he never got it.’

  Graham was well aware of Brian’s faults, but he liked him; he was smart, well read, enthusiastic and focused. The manipulativeness, he says, ‘didn’t affect [me]. I don’t think he ever put a charm offensive on me. Yes, he charmed money out of me, cos I paid for more cigarettes, more drinks. But that’s par for the course, a part of growing up. You’re away from home and mates are pretty important.’

  In fact Graham came to enjoy that slight sense of chaos; he and Brian would laugh about the encounters that characterized Brian’s life. Around May or June, Brian had confided in Graham and Dick, telling them that his girlfriend Pat was pregnant. For most of that summer, says Dick, Brian was well behaved – ‘he stayed faithful to Pat at this point’ – but there would be no reward. Later that summer, Brian and Graham were ambling up the Promenade, headed for the Waikiki, when Brian let out a sudden curse. He’d been spotted by Pat Andrews’ mum and sister. The mum marched up, launched into a tirade of abuse, and smacked Brian with her brolly. Graham, too, had to dodge the blows, but the mum’s switch of attack gave Brian the chance he needed and he ran off at full speed, laughing, with Graham bringing up the rear.

  Graham, John and Dick were all close witnesses to Brian’s messy life, spent on the edge of penury. He was always cadging cash. Many other frequenters of Cheltenham’s coffee bars found themselves suddenly cornered by Brian, fixed by his boyish, apologetic smile, and were somehow compelled to hand over a few shillings for a cup of tea or a sandwich. But for the trio, who were involved in the music, Brian’s commitment and focus always outweighed his flakiness.

  It was the autumn of 1961 when the obsessions that shaped Brian’s life finally cohered into a musical manifesto. He’d heard a lot of blues, but it was the sound of Jimmy Reed and Elmore James, along with the Muddy Waters records he’d already discovered, that became his lodestone. Thanks to the Stones, these giants of electric blues would become celebrated, and their influence would pervade the sixties and seventies. But in 1961 they were mysterious figures whose lives and musical output had to be pieced together from disparate sources.

  First of all, Brian fixed on the music of Elmore James, a shimmering, glossy, thrillingly electric sound unlike anything he’d heard before. He played Coming Home from Graham Ride’s Vee Jay compilation over and over, working out that he was using a slider or bottleneck, with the guitar tuned to an Open D chord. Brian started experimenting with a steel and brass tube he’d found in a Cheltenham junk yard; later he found a glass tube that did the job better. Once he’d nailed the tuning, he focused on the sound. ‘I don’t know how he did it: he converted a reel-to-reel tape recorder into an amplifier,’ says Dick Hattrell. ‘He plugged his guitar in there, an acoustic with a DeArmond pickup, and he was playing as close as he could to the style of Elmore James. If you didn’t know it was Brian you’d think it was a record of Elmore James.’

  Brian unleashed this new sound on the public towards the end of 1961. That first performance was likely in a pub in one of the outlying Gloucester villages Birdlip or Painswick. Using a Vox AC15 amplifier he’d persuaded John Keen to buy on hire purchase, Brian Jones kicked off a new era in musical history. There was no other electric slide player in the UK, and quite possibly no such white player in the US (Elvin Bishop had yet to venture out to the Chicago clubs). Brian’s use of amplified blues guitar came within a couple of weeks of Chris Barber’s first experiments in electric blues, with his recruitment of guitarist Alexis Korner. Barber had played a crucial role in championing the blues form, but Brian was about to take up the baton and take the music somewhere completely new. Few other people in the UK, apart from John Lennon and Paul McCartney, were working out how to fuse together such different strands of music into a coherent whole.

  One other cornerstone of Brian’s music was hoisted into place in 1961 when he brought home a copy of Robert Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues Singers. This album of sixteen tracks compiled by researcher Frank Driggs would become a key artefact of British blues, regarded in mystical terms by Keith Richards, who’d hear Brian’s copy at Edith Grove (where they lived in a flat together). Brian played the album over and over at Selkirk House. Having followed the work of Jazz Monthly writer Paul Oliver, a pioneer in the research of early blues, he’d also bought a copy of Oliver’s landmark book, Blues Fell This Morning, soon after its publication. ‘He wasn’t only playing this stuff,’ says Keen, ‘he was reading about it too. It was fascinating.’

  Johnson’s music would become the leitmotif of Jones’s life. The bluesman’s short existence was shrouded in myth, and did indeed seem to draw on some dark power. Johnson was the man who told his fellow musicians, like Son House, that he’d learned his fiendish guitar skills at the Crossroads, an intersection of two roads in the desolate depths of Mississippi where he’d met a ‘Black Man’ who took his guitar and retuned it. The Black Man was, scholars suggest, a representation of the old African god Elegua, or Legba – a manifestation of the Devil. This was a potent tale for Brian, who instantly recognized the value of Oliver’s groundbreaking research.

  There was substance to the Crossroads myth. Robert Johnson had undoubtedly spiced up the tale to impress fellow musicians and shock God-fearing Christians: his friend Honeyboy Edwards heard the story from Johnson and qualified it with the words ‘Robert was a big bullshitter’. Yet Honeyboy and others felt the presence of the Devil in Mississippi where in the 1930s a black man on the road with a guitar was subject to summary imprisonment, or worse. Musicians who didn’t ‘Yassuh, Nossuh’ the white man – in other words abase themselves like children – often found themselves looking down the business end of a lawman’s Colt. Many were ostracized by their families simply for choosing the blues, the Devil’s music, over God-fearing gospel. Brian was a pioneer, perhaps the very first British musician to pick up on the potency of Johnson’s myth and music. For comparison’s sake, at the time when Brian was immersed in the world of Robert Johnson, hitching round the South West to find someone who would let him share a stage, Mick Jagger was enchanting mums in the front rooms of Dartford singing songs by Buddy Holly.

  In later years it was important for those who survived Brian, like Charlie Watts, to dismiss him as a middle-class boy from Cheltenham, with some nasty ways: ‘He was a pretentious little sod. He was from Cheltenham. Does that sum it up?’ Some of it was justified; much of it was that Confucian twist: we hate a man who does us a favour. Brian Jones was responsible not just for the musical inspiration of the Rolling Stones, but their dark magic, too. He was the Stone with something of the dark about him. There were other aspects of his personality, like his sexuality, that also seemed portentous. Barry Miles remembers that in respectable, polite Cheltenham there was a bookseller who furnished clients with the works of the Marquis de Sade – works that would be devoured throughout the period of sixties counter-culture Brian helped inspire but which in 1961 were esoteric indeed. ‘Brian knew of de Sade,’ Miles confirms, ‘even in Cheltenham, I think.’

  *

  Cheltenham . . . that supposedly pretentious provincial town turned out to be a centre for a range of beautifully nefarious activities. Thanks to its role as a hub of trad jazz it would also host a pioneering blues performance, when Chris Barber, who had worked with Muddy Waters on live dates in 1959, decided to try his hand at electric blues with the aid of Alexis Korner.

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nbsp; A fascinating figure who would become a key influence in Brian’s life, Korner boasted a complex Austrian, Jewish and Greek heritage, had lucked into a job with the British Forces Network in 1947, and had discovered the blues, via Leadbelly, a couple of years later. Within a year he was playing guitar in a trad jazz band with Barber, who had begun his own journey into the heart of jazz and blues thanks to a discarded biography of jazz clarinettist and dopehead Mez Mezzrow that he’d found in a USAF rubbish dump. The pair reunited in 1961 and were destined to become regarded as the two key British patrons of blues, despite their generally incompatible personalities. ‘Chris led a jazz band and Alexi really didn’t like traditional jazz,’ says Korner’s wife, Bobbie. ‘Chris was an amazing businessman and Alexi was an appalling businessman. They just were not at all similar.’

  For all their differences, Barber and Korner would prove crucial catalysts. Brian had followed Korner’s work religiously in the pages of Jazz Journal, and when Barber’s band was booked into Cheltenham Town Hall on 10 October 1961, Brian was ready. This was his chance to penetrate the heart of the country’s embryonic electric blues scene.

  He enrolled Dick Hattrell and John Keen as moral support, and when Barber announced the segment of his set that featured Korner, ‘Brian and I were shouting our heads off!’ says Dick. ‘I think we were the only two people there who had heard of him.’

  Brian found it easy to hustle his way backstage where he went straight for the main man, Barber. They discussed mutual acquaintances, says Barber, probably meaning Bill Nile. ‘He knew a lot about the business, and knew what he was doing. I thought he was a very nice guy. Serious about music. But I let Alexis do all the talking with him, he was the bluesman there.’