Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  Like Brian, the young Mick Jagger was charming, but this was charm of a different species: he seemed younger, sporty, cheeky rather than fey, and was always nicely spoken. Mums loved him.

  When Mick, Keith and Dick arrived at Korner’s club in Ealing not long after it had opened, reputations were already being made. Brian Jones was asserting himself with an almost hypermanic energy that irritated some of the older musicians. The scene around Alexis Korner was always fluid, as was the line-up of his band, which relied on a constantly evolving cast of singers. Long John Baldry was a regular guest vocalist, as were Andy Wren, Art Wood, Brian Knight and Paul Jones. At first, Mick was too intimidated to get on stage; it took a few weeks for him and his friends to realize ‘we could do that’, says Dick Taylor. For most of the musicians present, Elmo Lewis, as the young slide guitarist called himself, remained the most significant guest, the one person whose playing and execution matched, even bettered, that of Cyril Davies. But as the weeks passed and the audience grew, some had their eyes on another band member. ‘I was in the pub down the road and a girl I knew came up,’ recalls Korner’s bassist Andy Hoogenboom. ‘She asked me, “Is that really crazy guy singing with you again?” I knew immediately she meant Mick. She really wanted to see him, and I simply thought, wow.’ Eventually, Mick Jagger became a regular second vocalist – as much as anyone was a regular with Alexis Korner.

  And so it was that the battle for supremacy in the future Rolling Stones got started.

  Bobbie Korner was a close observer of that little gaggle of musicians who assembled in 1962. Mick she found pleasant, but different from the others: ‘Mick was nice, but he wasn’t warm. But then, he wasn’t running away from a family, like the others were.’ Keith she found lovable, especially the time when her husband apologized for taking Mick away from the Blue Boys and Keith replied, ‘He’s so good, he deserves anything he can get.’ But it was Brian that she and her husband found the most fascinating. ‘He had this fey thing about him, he was attractive and he was charming, a nice boy. But most of all he was very willing – willing to put in a bit of a slog, which a lot of them weren’t.’

  The more hardened musicians around the scene also built up a respect for the ambitious young slide guitarist. Drummer Ginger Baker had followed a similar route to Brian, building up experience with a string of trad and modern jazz bands, and finally started guesting with Alexis Korner alongside bassist Jack Bruce at the end of June. He remembers being persuaded by Korner to back Brian, and Mick, for an interval slot at Ealing. ‘I liked Brian. He was cool – the real musician in the Stones. Mick, we used to take the piss out of, playing with the time signature and throwing him off. It was Brian who’d be shouting “One, two, three!” in his ear, pulling him back in!’

  Brian was good at keeping up appearances after he’d taken refuge with the Korners, but in reality things were getting desperate – all the more so when Pat Andrews discovered where he was living, got a coach to Victoria station, and arrived with their son Mark, as he was now known, at his fleapit new lodgings in Finchley. Brian stood leaning against the fence ‘with a face like the hangman’s just arrived’, Pat remembers. Pat soon established herself, finding a job at Boots which allowed them to move to a flat in Powis Square, where they attained a temporary, somewhat skewed domestic harmony. Brian took jobs at Whiteleys department store, and later the Civil Service Stores, to pay the bills, and soon became notorious around the musicians’ scene for petty thieving from the tills. The Stones would later enjoy trading stories of Brian’s larcenous nature, but according to Pat, he had no choice. ‘He wasn’t a bad person. How can I put myself in Brian’s position? He desperately wanted something. He’s thinking, “I’ve given up my parents, burnt my boats, I have to go forward – if I don’t, all that heartache will be for nothing.” He had to do it.’

  Brian was easily the pushiest of the young musicians around the Ealing scene – so pushy it bugged some people. He placed an advert for musicians in Jazz News on 2 May but really the ad served as much to publicize his arrival on the scene as to recruit musicians, for everyone who turned up at the jam sessions he organized, initially at the Bricklayer’s Arms in Soho, came from Alexis Korner’s circle.

  Yet Brian had a very different attitude about bands to his mentor. Korner favoured informal, fluid, jazz-style line-ups, under his umbrella. In 1962, bands were passé, but Brian wanted a gang. Right from the start he wanted musicians who’d stick together – to champion R&B, to become stars, to prove his parents wrong. That was why early singers like Andy Wren simply didn’t work out. The ideal recruits, as Bobbie Korner suggests, didn’t have a family, which is why Brian’s first choice, pianist Ian Stewart, was so perfect, so resonant.

  Stewart – Stu – knew Alexis Korner from before the Ealing opening and had been playing in little informal jazz and skiffle bands at pubs and parties for a year or two. Some time before meeting Brian at Ealing, Stu got a clerical job at ICI, and could be found many weekends at Bridport in Dorset where he and his friend Hamish Maxwell would take walks, fish for mackerel, and visit the two local pubs. Stu and Brian would be a great combination of opposites – ‘they had a common purpose’ according to Hamish. Stu was born in Pittenweem, Fife in 1938, although he spent most of his childhood in Sutton, Surrey. By his teens, he was already crafting his own piano style from a mix of jazz and blues. But unlike Brian, Stu was anything but driven. Although he had a genius for seeming unfazed – by fame, by musicians’ bullshit – he lacked confidence in his playing. In private ‘he’d put himself down, he didn’t think he was good enough’. Yet Stu hid his insecurity behind a lovable dryness and humour.

  When Brian first teamed up with Stu, the pianist’s propulsive left hand, banging out sixths, took care of the whole middle and bottom end of the sound, and Brian had a band. ‘Stu started the band with Brian, and Stu’s as important or more important – that’s my opinion,’ says Stewart’s friend and Stones engineer Glyn Johns.

  Paul Pond continued to regard blues as an enjoyable hobby rather than a career, so by April Brian was approaching other singers from Alexis Korner’s pool of talent, with Andy Wren the first one he tried out. By May, when Korner and Cyril Davies started playing Thursdays at the Marquee club, the pool widened. During the interval of one Korner set early in May, Brian approached Geoff Bradford, who’d played in a duo with Davies and often depped for Blues Incorporated, and Bradford brought along singer Brian Knight, who also worked for Davies’ panel-beating business. This seemed the most stable line-up for Brian Jones’s Blues Band, and rehearsals went on for some weeks. Keith, who’d done a couple of interval sets with Mick at Ealing, was the next to turn up.

  Today, Keith still waxes lyrical about that meeting at the Bricklayer’s Arms, an old-fashioned, lavishly tiled pub just off Berwick Street. He remembers the beautiful summer evening, Ian Stewart in a pair of Tyrolean leather pants (a charming detail unique to his telling) and the dodgy friendly hookers who hung around. Stu knew well the work of Johnnie Johnson, who co-created Chuck Berry’s sound. Keith was impressed by Brian, maybe intimidated, but these days he fixes on Stu as the engine room of the band. ‘It was Stu’s band,’ he says, the sigh implicit rather than audible, ‘still is.’ The phrase says everything about Keith – the soulfulness, the down-to-earth quality, and also the possessiveness. And the need to attribute ownership of the Stones to an unassertive character rather than the man who actually formed the band.

  Third-hand accounts suggest that this short-lived line-up fell apart after a fight between Keith and Geoff Bradford. The story is, says Bradford, ‘just cobblers’. Although impressed by Brian’s technical abilities, Bradford wasn’t that keen on electric slide, and wasn’t that keen on Brian. ‘I don’t know why,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you take to someone? I just wouldn’t have picked him as a friend. Kind of a spoilt boy.’ Nor did he like Chuck Berry, so he and Brian Knight drifted away, and the choice of singer seemed to narrow down to the Dartford boy wh
o had first plucked up the courage to speak to Brian: Mick Jagger. Mick had probably been on the radar right from the beginning. Keith himself reckons Brian didn’t want both the Dartford boys, but that Mick told him, ‘I’m not doing it if Keith’s not doing it’. Pat Andrews reckons Alexis Korner advised Brian, ‘Take one, don’t take them both’, knowing that Brian would lose control of his band. In any case, immediately he’d settled on Mick and Keith, Brian recruited a third Blue Boy, Dick Taylor, who’d been playing the drums in the Bricklayer’s Arms sessions. ‘Brian knew I played guitar. And one night at Ealing he said, “Why don’t you play bass?” So I went into a shop in Soho, bought an Emperor bass, and off we went.’

  With Dick switching to bass, the band was short of a drummer. Brian had mentioned to Charlie Watts as early as April that he was forming a band, and the group even managed to entice him to practice sessions, even to the odd gig, over the summer of 1962 – ‘at least a couple of times’ reckons Dick Taylor – but Charlie was committed to Alexis Korner and reluctant to quit his job in graphic design. Their eventual choice, Tony Chapman, responded to another ad Brian placed in Melody Maker.

  The band began to assemble a selection of songs that included mutual faves like Muddy and Chuck Berry, Brian’s Elmore James showcases, and Bo Diddley – a Mick and Keith fave. Keith and Mick had heard a little Jimmy Reed but Brian, says Keith, unleashed a whole bunch of his sides they’d never heard before. If there was any rivalry in those first sessions, it was probably over the harmonica: Mick hadn’t sussed out cross-harp, so Brian showed him how. Outsiders who watched the band remember Brian dominating the sound; insiders remember him defining something more important: the vibe. ‘He was more worldly-wise than us, most definitely,’ says Dick Taylor. ‘But very soon we started laughing, cos he was really good at making stupid faces. There was a hell of a lot of humour, particularly from Brian. That was why everyone got on well.’

  The Bricklayer’s Arms was a wonderfully sleazy hangout, right by Soho’s walk-up brothels, and the blues songs spilling out into the red-light district attracted a gaggle of girls who excelled in their own laconic humour. ‘I’ve been having trouble with me minge’ became a band catchphrase. Or there’d be long monologues, Brian or Dick impersonating oily ‘artists representatives’ who insisted the band should stick to country and western, buy suits, and go on a tour round US Army bases. Someone, Dick or Keith, drew a cartoon lampooning each band member. Mick posed with a huge, phallic microphone; Brian was marked ‘Elmo Lewis’ with a straight blond fringe; Keith was depicted with pinpoint pupils – the result, the band reckoned, of his nicking his mum’s period pills; Dick was pictured with a huge bass and straggly boho beard; while Stu sat by the piano, plaintively asking, ‘Can we play some Jimmy Witherspoon?’

  Above Tony Chapman, though, was a huge question mark with the words ‘probably in Liverpool’. The drummer’s lack of commitment and frequent absences were a niggling concern, which is probably why when the suggestion of the band’s debut at the Marquee club came up, Mick, the only future Stone with a phone, called up a pro drummer, Syd Paine, who advertised in Melody Maker. Paine suggested a younger substitute, Mick Avory, who turned up for one rehearsal. Avory didn’t really take to any of the band, bar Stu, nor did he want to play electric blues. ‘I was more interested in jazz so couldn’t see myself doing it for a living,’ he says. Although he offered to play the gig if necessary, he heard no more, so his career with the band, oft discussed, lasted for just that one rehearsal. ‘I know that completely contradicts all the previous accounts of what happened and is not as interesting,’ Avory comments, drily. ‘That’s the trouble with the truth.’ (Fifty years on, Keith Richards still reckons Avory played his band’s debut gig.)

  The band had been talking to Alexis Korner about a guest spot at the Marquee for a week or two when they heard that Blues Incorporated had been offered a BBC session on Jazz Club, on Thursday, 12 July. Mick hoped he might be guesting with Korner on his band’s radio debut, but Korner started sounding characteristically vague, before suggesting that Brian’s crew could fill in for the Marquee date along with a band fronted by Long John Baldry. Up to that point they’d thought of themselves as the Brian Jones Blues Band, reckons Dick Taylor, but now they wanted something tougher, sexier for a name. As he stood by the upstairs fireplace at the Bricklayer’s, Brian suggested ‘The Rollin’ Stones’ (as they’d officially style themselves for the next year), a line from the Muddy Waters song Manish Boy. Stu thought it sounded corny. The rest of them went for it.

  *

  There is a faint, maybe snooty smile on Brian Jones’s face as he swoops a bottleneck up his fretboard, coaxing glossy, glistening streams of sound from his acoustic guitar, all distorted by the add-on pickup and cheap amplifier, for his signature song, a long-forgotten number called Dust My Broom. To his left, Ian Stewart cheerily pounds out a sequence of sixths with his left hand – they anchor the band, holding down the bottom end, but the beer in the glass sitting atop the piano looks less secure, shaking and foaming. In the middle, Mick Jagger is moving a little jerkily, one of the girls in the audience thinks, but he too has a knowing, cheeky grin, like it’s all a joke and only he and his mates know the secret.

  The audience was a mixed bunch, older trad jazz fans plus a good number of younger kids. As we know, one girl in that audience understood the significance of that show more than any other. Here was black culture, the music of Elmore James and Jimmy Reed, making its first entrance under that stripey Marquee. The Stones’ first gig, on 12 July 1962, was not just the debut of a legendary rock band, it marked the beginning of an irrevocable change in popular culture. This was the first time a young, white, European audience encountered black R&B not as something foreign and exotic, but as their own; the first time that music largely ignored in its homeland was reforged, ready to spread across the world. This was the moment that finally made sense of Brian Jones’s confused life. It was ‘very exciting and very raw’, Cleo Sylvestre remembers. Both Brian and Mick, she thought, oozed sex appeal.

  ‘It was brilliant,’ says Pat Andrews. ‘We had become important. All of a sudden, we’re not satellites of our parents or our elders.’ The band themselves were modestly encouraged. ‘It got a pretty good reaction,’ says Dick Taylor, ‘but we weren’t aware that history was in the making.’

  Keith, Mick, Dick and the others chatted excitedly afterwards about how the show went, how it felt. Brian hardly participated. He was lost in thought, working things out: ‘OK – so what are we gonna do in a week’s time?’ Pat still remembers that perfect time, when Brian’s mind ‘was always ten feet in front of what was actually happening’.

  Over the rest of that summer, the key elements that would define the Rolling Stones’ fifty-year career were mapped out – namely, the music, the subject of care and devotion, and the first suggestions of nastiness, a struggle for top-dog status that was pretty shocking in its ferocity.

  In the first twelve months, Brian was the unrivalled boss. Recently, in his book Life, Keith Richards mentioned how he ‘assume[d] the mantle of musical director’ towards the end of the year – a claim that his friends recall differently. ‘There was no question about who was in charge,’ says Dick Hattrell, who moved into the Edith Grove flat with Mick, Keith and Brian that autumn. ‘You see, where Brian scored was he just worked damn hard. He’d listen to a record, practise and practise until he got to what he considered somewhere near that sound. In the early days in Edith Grove – oh my God, what a hellhole – they’d come back from a gig, [and] Brian would say to Keith, “That was a load of crap. We’ve got to go over and over it again until we get better.”’

  James Phelge, another flatmate, sums up the later Edith Grove period, when Keith was ‘musical director’, even more unequivocally: ‘If Keith did something wrong Brian would fuckin’ tell him! And Brian could play harmonica really well, so that was another string to his bow. Keith could play Chuck Berry stuff, but so could Brian �
� so Keith certainly wasn’t as indispensable as he says now. I think it’s just the fuckin’ drugs talking – he gets confused.’

  Occasionally, Keith waxes lyrical about the summer of 1962. Although the band was still only managing the occasional interval spot at the Marquee, Keith was the first to throw in his lot with Brian, leaving Sidcup Art College and moving in with him, initially into a flat Brian had found in Beckenham (Pat had returned to Cheltenham with Mark, although she continued to drop in on her elusive, unreliable lover). The thought still inspires warm memories, of magical days spent ‘toe to toe, working out guitar weaving’. Brian dominated the band vibe as well as the music – the funny voices, the piss-taking, the arrogance to try and do something different. Mick – and, for that matter, Dick Taylor, and doubtless Tony Chapman – saw their band as an engaging hobby. Keith saw them as ‘waving our little blues flags for a year or two’. Brian was the one with no escape route – a predicament which defined both his strengths and weaknesses as a leader.

  Dick, one of Mick’s posse, liked Brian’s humour and drive, but remembers his obvious vulnerability, too. ‘The thing was, after a while you used to wonder which Brian Jones you’d get. As in, what mood: whether it’s “We’re gonna conquer the world” or “Wow, is it ever gonna happen?”’ Many other people remember Brian’s moodiness from that summer – even, some say, outright despair. ‘He was very vulnerable,’ says Billie Davis, the singer who had at one point rented a flat adjacent to Brian and Pat’s at Powis Square. ‘He was working at a record shop, trying to get his thing together, and it was very hard. I remember most of all the fish paste sandwiches, horrible things that he’d make so he could get through another day without money. He had a very dry sense of humour, but I also remember him being very lonely and down.’ Keith, in contrast, was less bothered by setbacks – ‘after all, he had his mum, who would turn up to bring round food and collect his washing,’ comments Dick Hattrell. Together, Brian Jones and Keith Richards became the engine room of the band, incessantly working up their sound.