Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  The song died into silence. Then – to the singer’s vast astonishment – there was a burst of applause. Even tetchy ‘Squirrel’ Davis was prepared to clap someone whose love of blues could take him so far beyond the embarrassment barrier. The fact that he had copied Chuck Berry’s phrasing note for note was further proof of being a true disciple.

  The next time Mick Jagger sang for Alexis Korner, it was for a fee of fifteen shillings, plus beer. Within a month, he had become Blues Incorporated’s second-string vocalist, singing with Korner for that same modest stipend whenever Long John Baldry was not available.

  On Saturdays, it became a habit for the Dartford boys, Mick, Keith, Alan and Dick, to call at Alexis’s flat in Bayswater and spend a couple of hours with the Korners before going on to Ealing together. Bobbie Korner would give them tea while Alexis told them stories of what Muddy and Broonzy had said in that very same kitchen – how Big Bill could never pronounce his fellow bluesmen’s names (he called Fats Waller ‘Fat Wallace’) or how T-Bone Walker, fuddled by distance and drink, had once enquired, ‘Is this Paris, France?’

  The Korners both remembered Jagger in this period as quiet and polite, though with political pretensions that Alexis found mildly aggravating. ‘We were talking about the blues one day and Mick said, “Why are you playing our working-class music?” I said, “Mick – you’re at the LSE! What could be more middle class than that?”’

  Keith, by contrast, was instantly sociable and engaging. ‘He’d sit at the kitchen table and talk to Bobbie for hours. I remember how he loved words. I didn’t really know him as a musician then – only that he played guitar in that group of theirs in Dartford. He never pushed himself forward as a musician. He just seemed happy to be around Mick.’

  By this time, the hospitable Korners had another young visitor regularly sleeping on their kitchenette floor. It was the boy Alexis had talked to in Cheltenham, little realizing how that morsel of encouragement had ignited the boy’s fierce desire to be in London, playing blues. So, late at night in Moscow Road, the kitchenette window would slide up. A dim figure would roll sideways across the table, down to the floor. Like Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy before him, Brian Jones would fall asleep somewhere between the cats’ bowls and the legs of the electric cooker.

  Hatherley Road, Cheltenham, lies just outside that smugly elegant Gloucestershire spa town which will be ever associated in the English mind with retired army colonels and colleges for genteel young ladies. Hatherley Road is a long suburban avenue of identical 1930s houses, each with a single bay window, a neat front lawn and a wrought-iron ‘sunrise’ gate. Here and there, beyond a uniform creosote-covered garage, one can see the terraces of Cheltenham’s exclusive district and beyond, the soft green Cotswolds, striding away towards Wales.

  That Lewis Jones was a Welshman could not be doubted by his colleagues at Dowty and Co., Cheltenham’s aeronautical engineering works. Short, straight-backed, severe in manner, he possessed the inflexible virtues of Welshness in exact measure with its irreproachable faults. He was, in other words, respectable, decent, hard-working, religious, conventional, puritanically intolerant of those less strong-minded than himself. Like many of his countrymen, he regretted the advance of the twentieth century almost on principle. ‘Times change but I don’t,’ he would say, adding a heartfelt ‘Thank God!’

  The Welsh have almost an obligation to be musical. Lewis Jones played the organ at his local parish church for some years, until his dislike of petty ecclesiastical politics led him to resign. His wife Louisa – also Welsh – possessed a more pronounced talent, and supplemented Lewis’s income from Dowty’s by giving piano lessons to local schoolchildren.

  Their first child, Brian Lewis Hopkin Jones, was born on February 28, 1942. Of the two daughters who followed, only one – Barbara, born in 1946 – survived. The other, Pauline, died of leukaemia when Brian was three. Brian thought his parents had given her away and, for a long time afterwards, lived in terror that the same would be done to him.

  He was, his father said, a thoroughly normal and happy small boy, healthy but for childhood ailments and an attack of croup which left him prone to bronchitis and chronic asthma. At his first school, Dean Close, he worked well, enjoyed sport – particularly cricket and badminton – and became an excellent swimmer and diver. Sea air aggravated his asthma, however; after a single day at the beach, he would be confined to bed, wheezing and croaking piteously.

  Like his parents, and the race from which he sprang, Brian Jones was instinctively musical. Louisa started giving him piano lessons from the age of six; he afterwards took up the recorder and clarinet. Though able to read music, he mastered the reed instruments by ear and intuition, stumbling on melody by means he himself did not fully understand. So marked was his talent as a small boy that Lewis Jones thought he might be destined for a career as a classical musician.

  He passed the eleven-plus exam without effort and went on, as his parents had hoped, to Cheltenham Grammar School, down in the exclusive district of ‘The Promenade’, the retired generals and the Ladies’ College. This exclusive seminary, in fact, stood immediately adjacent to Cheltenham Grammar School and daily provided its senior boys with an unreachable fantasy as the young ladies ran forth, squealing, for their mid-morning break.

  Brian began well at Cheltenham Grammar, getting good marks for work, especially science and languages, excelling at cricket and swimming and winning a place as a clarinettist in the school orchestra. ‘Then, all of a sudden,’ Lewis Jones said bleakly, ‘he became very difficult. He started to rebel against everything – mainly me.’

  The trouble began when Brian ceased practising classical pieces on piano and clarinet, and began listening to a kind of music that Lewis Jones abhorred. At thirteen, he discovered jazz and, at fourteen, the saxophone-playing of Charlie Parker. He sold the clarinet his parents had bought him and used the proceeds to buy a second-hand alto sax. Within a few days, to his parents’ horror, the sound of a first, shaky solo brayed through the quiet house in Hatherley Road.

  He was soon good enough to sit in with local bands playing the trad jazz of Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttelton. Even Cheltenham had its bohemian quarter, centred on the art college, on coffee bars like the Aztec, the Patio and the Waikiki, or pubs like the Wheatsheaf Inn, Leckhampton, where the 66 Jazz Club convened, with Brian Jones as membership secretary.

  At Cheltenham Grammar, meanwhile, he became known as a troublemaker, able to disrupt a whole class by his blandly outrageous behaviour. A classmate, Peter Watson, remembers how Brian would sit in class in football boots, claiming they were more comfortable than shoes. ‘Brian said it was boring to drink the regulation milk at break time, so he started the fashion of drinking brown ale instead. It became a whole fashion to drink brown ale at break time instead of milk.’

  At break, according to immemorial custom, the whole class would crowd at the window and gaze longingly down on the Cheltenham young ladies as they frolicked on the grass below. Brian Jones, it was well known, belonged to the select few Grammar School boys whose sexual adventures had gone beyond mere kissing and ‘petting’. It was known, too, that he scorned the Durex contraceptives that other boys carried symbolically in their wallets. ‘Bareback’ was the best way, he would insist, smiling a smile so lascivious, yet so mischievous, no one knew whether to believe him.

  They believed him when, in 1958, a fourteen-year-old pupil at the girls’ Grammar School became pregnant and named Brian Jones as the father. The news caused a scandal in Cheltenham and even got into a Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, where Brian was destined to feature many times more. The baby was born but put out to adoption. All that could be hoped, after bringing such disgrace on his family and himself, was that Brian had well and truly learned his lesson.

  The scandal brought about his premature exit from Cheltenham Grammar School, despite nine passes at GCE O-Level and Advanced-Level passes in Physics and Chemistry. For the next eighteen months, he worked variousl
y as a shop assistant, a coalman and a trainee in the Borough Architect’s office of Cheltenham Council. A boyhood passion for buses led him to a brief career on Cheltenham municipal transport, as conductor and driver. He continued to play alto sax in various trad bands, then in a rock ’n’ roll combo called the Ramrods, which enjoyed some local fame until its lead singer went away on honeymoon and choked to death while eating a chip.

  In 1961, Brian made a second girl pregnant. Her name was Pat Andrews: she had met Brian at the Aztec coffee bar during one of his spells of unemployment. He had left home by now and was living with a friend named Dick Hattrell at a flat in Cheltenham’s art college district. This time, he seemed resigned to marrying the girl he had put ‘in the club’. After the baby was born, he visited her in hospital, bringing a vast bouquet of flowers he had bought by selling some of his precious LPs. On his insistence, the baby was named Julian, after the jazz musician Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.

  Brian did not marry Pat Andrews. Instead, shortly after his conversation with Alexis Korner, he took off for London suddenly, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, to start a job his father had found for him with a firm of opticians. Lewis and Louisa Jones heard no more from him until he had become nationally notorious.

  He continued to write to Pat Andrews, assuring her he still loved her and would be sending for her and the baby soon. Pat grew increasingly restive after learning he had several girlfriends in London. Finally, one day in 1962, she bundled Julian Mark in her arms and, with just one pound note in her purse, set off from Cheltenham by long-distance bus to track the baby’s father down.

  He had left even his name behind in Cheltenham. It was not Brian Jones but ‘Elmo Lewis’ who made his first guest appearance with Blues Incorporated at the Ealing club. He had changed instruments, too, from alto sax to electric guitar, a brand-new, shiny Gibson, bought with money half saved, half stolen, and mastered by his usual blend of intuition, willpower and desire.

  No greater contrast could have been imagined between the middle-aged, rather beery-looking blues sidesman and the boy who stepped up beside Alexis in his neat Italian suit, holding the shiny new Gibson with one finger pointed stiff across its pearled fretboard. His debut was the Elmore James classic Dust My Blues. In his West London bedsitter, he had taught himself to play it exactly as James did, with a metal ‘slide’, swooping the metal bar along the guitar neck to lengthen each note into almost a second angry, sarcastic voice. The sudden appearance of Pat Andrews and baby Julian had only temporarily interrupted the transfiguration of Elmore into Elmo.

  Even then, Alexis remembered, his stage presence was subtly but unmistakably flavoured with aggression. The fact that he stood absolutely still somehow intensified an air of challenge to all comers, even as his eyes remained studiously downcast, his wide mouth pursed in virginal tranquillity. ‘He’d learned how to bait an audience, long before anything like that occurred to Mick. You should have seen those kids’ reaction when Brian picked up a tambourine and gave it one tiny little shake in their faces.’

  Even the Korners, his best London friends, knew almost nothing of Brian beyond what he inadvertently betrayed. He told them nothing of his home or family, and only under gravest sufferance mentioned the detested word ‘Cheltenham’. Alexis and Bobbie, as surrogate parents, came to realize in time that frustration and unhappiness of an abnormal depth lay beneath Brian’s driving wish to become famous by any means whatever.

  He had abandoned his traineeship as an optician by now, and had a job as an electrical-appliance salesman at Whiteley’s department store in Queensway, just a block away from the Korners’ flat in Moscow Road. Alexis would sometimes see him after work, crossing the road to meet a girl waiting reproachfully for him in the doorway to the MacFisheries shop. Though Pat Andrews and the baby had moved into Brian’s tiny Notting Hill bedsitter, she saw little more of him now than she had in Cheltenham. Eventually, she was forced to take a part-time job to support the child Brian now scarcely acknowledged as his.

  To the Korners and the Ealing club crowd, he presented the aspect of a young bachelor, interested only in clothes and in forming a blues band that would take the world by storm. Each time he arrived at the Ealing club he seemed to have a new suit, a new tab-collar shirt, a new bouffant-haired girlfriend admiringly in tow. The money for both, more often than not, would have come from Pat Andrews’s minuscule pay packet or from robbing the till in Whiteley’s electrical department.

  He stayed always one jump ahead of retribution, buoyed up by belief in his destiny and by that way he had of looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. When Brian fixed anyone with his big baby eyes and spoke in his soft, lisping, well-brought-up voice, it was impossible to imagine such chaos accumulating behind him. ‘He had a way of talking that was all his own,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘It was a most beautiful mixture of good manners and rudeness.’

  Ostensibly still living with Pat, Julian and Dick Hattrell, he contrived to lead a semi-nomadic life in London and outside, travelling from town to town, reconnoitring the music clubs, sitting in with local groups in the hope of finding musicians for a band of his own. One of his regular haunts was Guildford, where he would play at the Wooden Bridge Hotel with a scratch band called Rhode Island Red and the Roosters, featuring a pale and – it then seemed – deeply unpromising guitarist named Eric Clapton.

  In Oxford, a city catacombed with student-run jazz and blues clubs, he became friends with an English undergraduate named Paul Pond who led a blues group called Thunder Odin’s Big Secret. Paul Pond subsequently became Paul Jones, singer with the Manfred Mann group, ‘Brian was terribly smart in those days,’ Jones says. ‘Italian box jacket, winklepicker shoes, never a hair out of place. Whenever he passed through Oxford, he’d sleep on my couch. I remember waking up one morning to hear this awful wheezing and snorting from the next room. Brian was lying on the couch, hardly able to breathe. He gasped out that he’d got asthma and had left his inhaler at the party we’d both been to the night before. I had to jump on my bike and go dashing off to get it back for him.’

  After sitting in with Thunder Odin’s Big Secret a few times, Brian decided that ‘P. P. Pond’ was the blues partner he needed. The two made a tape which impressed Alexis Korner so much he gave them the job of interval band at the Ealing club. It happened that P. P. Pond was singing Dust My Blues, accompanied by Elmo Lewis on slide guitar, when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor walked through the door together.

  On Keith especially, the effect was instant hero worship, heightened by Keith’s tendency to mix up one name with another. ‘It’s Elmore James,’ he kept whispering to the others. ‘It is, man – really! It’s fuckin’ Elmore James!’

  They met up with Brian, afterwards and, over half pints of beer, talked blues for the rest of the night. To the Dartford boys, he seemed a raffish figure, only a year older than Mick and Keith but already a ‘semi-pro’ and – it emerged – the father of a baby. Keith remembers how, at close quarters, Brian’s slight body seemed to thicken on his short and powerful legs. ‘He was like a little Welsh bull,’ Keith says. ‘He was broad, and he looked very tough.’

  That first conversation produced only an exchange of views. Brian, interested mainly in jazz-influenced blues, had not yet discovered Chuck Berry. He listened intently to what Keith told him about Berry and Jimmy Reed. He made it clear, though, that his ambitions went somewhat higher than Alexis Korner’s part-time student vocalist and a red-nosed, pimply guitarist whose only public appearance to date had been in the garden of a Bexleyheath council house.

  The partnership between Elmo Lewis and P. P. Pond lasted only for that one engagement. Paul Pond returned to Oxford to resume his studies and await his destiny with Manfred Mann. Elmo Lewis, on the lookout for partners again, placed an advertisement in Jazz News, Soho’s club information sheet, grandly inviting prospective sidesmen to audition with him in the back room of a Berwick Street pub, the Bricklayer’s Arms.

  The first recruit,
Ian Stewart, arrived by racing cycle, looking anything but the part of the blues pianist he claimed to be. Thick-set and muscular, with a long, pugnacious jaw, he entered the rehearsal room in leather shorts, carrying a pork pie he had bought for his lunch. When he sat at the piano, however, all such visual reservations vanished. Pumping with one burly leg, he could make even those nicotine-yellowed keys give out the hectic, tinny airs of ragtime and barrel-house. He then sat back, took out his pork pie and began to eat it nonchalantly.

  ‘Stew’ became the nucleus of Brian’s group, together with an accomplished solo guitarist, Geoff Bradford. Over the next few days, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor also drifted in and auditioned to Brian’s satisfaction. Stew recognized them from the Ealing club, but rated none of them as musicians in his or Bradford’s class. Tough and short-spoken as he was, there was something about Keith, especially, that put him on his guard. ‘I think Keith was very shy in those days. Mick had got very friendly with Brian, and that seemed to make Keith edgy and uncomfortable.’

  Soon there were arguments between Geoff Bradford, a pure blues guitarist in the Muddy Waters style, and Keith, the Chuck Berry acolyte. Bradford refused to have anything to do with ‘rock ’n’ roll rubbish’ like Roll Over Beethoven and Sweet Little Sixteen, and walked out, never to return. By this time, Elmo Lewis, the three Dartford boys and the lantern-jawed Stew had found enough in common to carry on together.