by Paul Trynka
So, for all the generation divide, the young Brian – softly spoken, with an impeccably middle-class accent, fascinated by music from an early age – was recognizably his parents’ son.
The Joneses were, say their neighbours, quiet and punctilious; they kept their drive swept, and were the first to take action if there was a problem with noise or minor vandalism in the area. ‘You couldn’t have a more conventional English middle-class family than that,’ says Roger Jessop. ‘I don’t mean that in a snide way.’ The Jessops were close with the Joneses and found them ‘reserved but friendly’. They didn’t socialize in the way we would today – no dinner parties or trips to the pub – but Roger’s dad Frederick, a geography teacher at the boys’ grammar school, helped the ten-year-old Brian out with homework, while Lewis assisted Roger with maths and engineering-related problems. Lewis was a patient, logical teacher – he’d work through a problem methodically, enjoying the elegance of the correct mathematical solution.
The young Brian Jones certainly looked like the son of a science geek. He was well spoken and confident but looked gawky, with his horn-rimmed specs and gap-toothed smile, and was a serious, earnest boy, ‘almost priggish’ according to one of his teachers. ‘He was quite nerdy,’ says Roger, who remembers Brian disappearing for long trainspotting sessions at a vantage point close to the nearby private school Dean Close, which Brian attended.
Yet a couple of people noticed the sensitivity that set him apart from his dutiful, conventional parents. Trudy Baldwin’s family attended church with the Joneses, at St Philip’s and St James, where Brian, wearing crisp white robes, sang in the choir from around the age of ten. The two families grew fairly close, and Trudy, a few years older than Brian, became a regular babysitter for the Jones children. She remembers the young Brian well, in particular his revelation about a sister who was completely unknown to the Baldwins: ‘Brian told me there was another child in the family – a sister who died. He showed me photos of her. He seemed to need to let me know, as if it was something not talked about – my parents were quite close friends, but I don’t think they ever knew. It must have been awful, to hide something like that away.’
Trudy Baldwin, like many Cheltonians, looks back on her upbringing and marvels at how strict, how grim it was, bound by deference and repression of emotion. Happiness and approval came from pleasing your elders. These were also the rules for the young Brian Jones, at home and at Dean Close, all tall gothic buildings in sprawling grounds, where he was easily one of the brightest kids in his year, exceptionally adept at English and French, but good at maths, too.
Brian’s conventional, slightly nerdy look was complemented by the many interests he shared with his dad, particularly a fascination with engineering. Around the age of ten his parents bought him an expensive, finely engineered green mini steam engine, which he’d tinker with in a state of rapt attention, fuelling it with methylated spirits. His interest in machinery survived well into his teens: he could often be seen examining the shelves of toy trains in the model shop on the high street, or cycling off for an afternoon of trainspotting with his friend Tom Wheeler; while in his later teens he shared an interest in Derbyshire’s tram system with friends John Appleby and Tony Pickering, spending hours sanding tram bodywork or shovelling cinders for the track.
This dutiful schoolboy was also good at the traditional sports practised at Dean Close, especially cricket. Lewis often moved his dark-coloured Wolseley out of the drive so Brian and Roger could practise batting and bowling against the garage door. Brian spent a fair amount of time at the Jessops’, too, especially around the time when he was preparing for the eleven-plus, the traditional and, for some, intimidating exam that decided a child’s eligibility for Cheltenham’s ancient grammar school – which, with distinguished alumni like Handley Page, founder of the famous aircraft company, was arguably a more prestigious educational establishment than Dean Close. Active and intelligent, Brian seemed the epitome of the grammar school boy who was likely to achieve. But Roger saw the first problems behind the middle-class facade: ‘He was a good spin bowler. We’d play cricket down the drive. But then he’d start to wheeze and splutter: he was asthmatic, extremely asthmatic. He was good enough to play in the school team – for two overs he’d be good, but he didn’t have the stamina to play in a match. And always, I think, he resented that.’
It was probably Brian’s asthma that inspired his parents to pick out a clarinet for him: playing a wind instrument was standard therapy in the fifties for British kids suffering from this condition. Otherwise, treatment was rudimentary, and relied on blowing a pingpong ball around, or inhaling water vapour from a pan of boiling water – more or less placebos. The clarinet-playing was the one positive aspect of an illness that was at that time rare, sometimes terrifying, and above all isolating.
Brian sailed through his eleven-plus, and on 8 September 1953 enrolled at Cheltenham Grammar School, an intimidating edifice whose Victorian spires and crenellations dominated the high street. It took kids from Cheltenham and the suburbs, and there was a strict pecking order: older pupils were more important than younger pupils, and top streams – once the boys were tested for academic ability at the end of the first term – were more important than lower streams. It was repeatedly drummed into new arrivals how the school’s origins harked back to Elizabethan times; a couple of days after starting, the nervous new first years would be ‘ducked’ under a tap in the central courtyard in an ancient bonding ritual.
The eleven-year-old Brian was one of a small group of boys who seemed unfazed by such things. He was well turned out and at ease in this sort of company, one of just two boys in his form who’d arrived from Dean Close. Indeed he stood out: blond-haired, relaxed, academically ahead of most of his peers and looking ‘like a cherub’ says one friend from Year 7, Philip ‘Pip’ Price, who sat at an adjoining desk. ‘That was my first impression, with his blond hair and smiley face.’ Many kids struggled with new subjects, but for Brian it seemed ‘like plain sailing’. He actually seemed to enjoy lessons, and although Dr Arthur Bell, who joined the same year, later described Brian as ‘essentially a sensitive and vulnerable boy’, Pip and others thought the opposite. ‘I couldn’t describe him as a shy person. Not the way he was around town, and with the people he knew.’ Compared to most of the Cheltenham kids he was confident, put his hand up often, and ‘helped other kids’.
In those post-war years, grammar schools took boys from a wide range of backgrounds, hence Brian and his classmates embodied a new social mobility. But before they came to define, or subvert, the system, they had to conform to it. Grammar school boys from working-class Cheltenham families frequently ended up as doctors or professors, and there was heavy emphasis on how many boys achieved scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge. There was a large contingent whose fathers worked at Dowty, or GCHQ – an elite crowd who seemed destined for success, bright boys of whom the teachers approved.
In those first years, L. B. Jones, too, made a powerful impression on his teachers. ‘Very able,’ one of his internal report cards notes, ‘with signs of brilliance.’ In a school that relied on rigorous county-wide selection, this was a significant accolade. ‘He was a clever bloke,’ confirms Colin Dellar, who became friends with Brian around the beginning of 1954, ‘and confident too, there’s no doubt about that.’ Roger Jessop, whose father was by now Deputy Head at the school, regarded Brian as one of the group who studied in ‘an intellectual, rigorous way. He was the top of an A stream in which there were some very bright people, who later got starred entry to Oxbridge. You could see he had the ambition, too.’ Frederick Jessop approved of the boy who lived next door, thought he had the kind of ‘striving ambition’ which the school aimed to foster. In those first couple of years at the grammar school, says Roger, ‘my father was very pleased with him’.
It wasn’t to last.
*
Many years later, Lewis Jones would speak to the BBC about Br
ian. There was much puzzlement in his account, for Lewis seemed to know little of the internal life of his son. The pair, alike in some key ways, were separated by a generation gap that in their case was a yawning chasm. It opened up in 1956. The cause was jazz – or, more accurately, jazz and sex.
The broadcaster Alistair Cooke once recalled the day his mother first heard him listening to a Louis Armstrong record: she burst into tears, mortified to hear what her contemporaries regarded as ‘degraded, negro depravity’. For boys like Brian and his friends Graham and John Keen, this music was ‘a revelation’. But even the Keen brothers, with their comparatively enlightened parents, ‘just had to keep quiet about it, for the time being. It was considered a bad influence.’
Brian didn’t keep quiet about it. Jazz, and the other black music forms that exploded into British teenagers’ consciousness that year, would become the major focus of his life from that moment on. Ultimately, the way his parents dealt with this dreaded new phenomenon would come to define his life.
Plenty of British youngsters discovered jazz, or rock’n’roll, in 1956, the Year Zero for teenagers, symbolized by the cinematic release of Rebel Without a Cause, the James Dean movie which defined the iconography of youthful rebellion. That year, according to Brian’s future bandmates, there were also seismic changes in Dartford, Kent: ‘it was the start of teenage culture, and from that time on our class was divided into musical sects,’ says Dick Taylor, a future Stone. Dick’s A-stream classmate Michael Jagger was already a Yankophile, famously obsessed with baseball, and seized on to this music, as did friends like Bob Beckwith. But Dick and Mick’s parents were indulgent of this new obsession, happy to see their sons’ friends turn up with a guitar and make a noise in their living room. The same turned out to be true of Keith Richards, whom Dick met at Sidcup Art College three years later. But for Brian and his parents, the advent of ‘degraded’ music opened up a rift that would within three years become unbridgeable. Plenty of people have heard second-hand reports of Brian’s affection-free upbringing as a child; by the time we reach his teens, they become first-hand reports. If they did have affection for Brian, it was conditional on his adhering to their rules. ‘It’s difficult to pinpoint this with psychological accuracy,’ John Keen comments, ‘but my mother knew his mother quite well – and I don’t think his parents treated him with the love most kids get.’
Cheltenham Grammar tracked the progress of its pupils year by year, and there is something poignant about their judgements on Brian, how the brilliant, confident child who’s singing in the church choir at the age of eleven, keeps a rabbit, is a keen scout and a member of the Gloucester Youth Club (Railway Section) becomes estranged. His form teacher, Jim Dodge, noticed a change in Brian’s behaviour as early as the summer of 1955, commenting that Brian ‘suffers from a dominating father, and has to show off to compensate’. Mr Dodge was, his pupils remember, a shrewd, worldly man, and he’d hit on a key element of the young Brian’s psyche. ‘It was a tension-ridden family,’ Roger Jessop recalls. ‘I would have hated to have Lewis as my father. Whatever [Brian] did wasn’t right for him.’ Compared to the anodyne lines in other boys’ reports, Mr Dodge’s venture into psychology in Brian Jones’s case is hugely significant; it’s followed, year on year, by reports that Brian is clever but ‘needs careful handling’. Ultimately, his teachers would never learn to handle him.
There was another factor to add to the music and the rush of teenage hormones: Brian’s asthma. It was this that became the final nail in the coffin of his future as a grammar school high-achiever. For the first year or two he’d held his own at sports. Then, says Roger Jessop, who cycled to school with him most mornings, he simply dropped out of the sporty set. ‘Often he wasn’t fit enough for proper games. And I think he resented himself – gave himself a complex. He didn’t have the physical well-being to overcome what were nature’s blockages.’ Brian’s teachers remarked on his health problems: there were fifteen days of absence from school in the summer of 1956, and comments that he was sleeping poorly.
At Cheltenham Grammar School, boys who got ahead played rugby or cricket – they were the only ones worthy of mention in the annual school magazine. So Brian’s health alone marked him as a boy apart. Roger Jessop was one of many grammar school boys who stayed in touch with each other and went on to make their mark in respectable professions. But after the first couple of years cycling to school with Brian, he and Brian began to take different routes – in their lives, too. ‘He was popular in the early years,’ says Roger, ‘in the way that young boys who were good at classes and could help with homework would be. But very quickly he lost street cred with the mainstream. So he wasn’t popular, I would say, when he left.’
If Brian’s parents ever read the rush of British newspaper headlines from the mid 1950s on that fulminated against the corrupting influence of rock’n’roll, jazz or the ‘Beatnik horror’, as the Sunday People put it, they would have felt they were living through a case study. Their inflexibility was, it seems, the downfall of the Jones family. Louisa occasionally confided in her choir friend, Marian Keen, telling her that Brian was out of control. Marian, once she was told her sons were obsessed with Louis Armstrong, bent with the wind, letting them listen to jazz. ‘My parents were adaptable,’ says John Keen. ‘I got the feeling Brian’s parents were rigid, quick to reject anything outside what they were comfortable with.’ The result of this was that Brian Jones turned into a wild child, in Cheltenham terms, within twelve months. When his schoolmates talk about that period, they start to use the same words and phrases, many of them ones that recur through his life: ‘chip on his shoulder’, ‘rebellious’. From that point on, too, everyone starts to talk of him as a musician, almost exclusively, always seen with a clarinet or a guitar. One person uses another term that also crops up later: ‘the devil’.
When the music first hit Brian, it all came at once. It’s likely that Bill Haley, whose Rock Around The Clock streaked to the top of the UK charts in November 1955, was the first harbinger of a new way of life. Immediately, Brian started to work out where this music had come from: he investigated all the rawer country records that had fed into rock’n’roll, including Johnny Cash and, as we shall see, Tennessee Ernie Ford. Along with a younger music fan, Phil Crowther, he got into skiffle in 1956 when Lonnie Donegan enjoyed a string of hits and inspired thousands of British kids – including, of course, John Lennon and Paul McCartney – to try their hands at this defiantly DIY genre. Via Donegan, Brian learned about Leadbelly, whose music was also being spread around the Cheltenham coffee bars; this was probably one of the factors that inspired him to acquire a guitar, around the winter of 1956. In the coffee bars, from the new set that he started to hang out with, he learned more, about trad jazz and more modern jazz from Count Basie and Duke Ellington through to Charlie Parker and, by the late fifties, Cannonball Adderley. He devoured all this music, obsessively, as if it were a code to a new way of existence. Which of course it was.
Music was a means of escape, as well as a form of therapy. For there’s another word that describes Brian from that period on: lonely. Pat, Brian’s girlfriend of 1960, remembers his loneliness. But that sense of isolation, the claustrophobia he felt at home, was a spur to get the young Brian out of the house. Mick Jagger, Dick Taylor and others played their music in the living room; Brian would strap his guitar to his back and get on his bike. The gulf between Lewis Jones and his son meant that over the next few years Brian would amass playing experience far beyond his fellow Stones, and possibly any aspiring blues guitarist in England.
Cheltenham, boring, staid Cheltenham, was now a hotbed of musical experimentation. A little jazz coterie had begun to coalesce at a celebrated building, 38 Priory Street, where an indulgent mum, Mrs N. E. Filby, had allowed her daughters Jane and Ann to open a basement coffee club. ‘It started with four grammar school boys, a band led by John Picton,’ says Jane. ‘All my sister’s friends, basically. They’d do their homewor
k upstairs first. Then it was friends of friends – it was never open to the public.’ Within a year or so, visiting musicians like Lonnie Donegan and bandleader and trombonist Chris Barber were dropping by when they came to play the Town Hall; by late 1956, the little club had become a second home for Bill Nile, whose Delta Jazzmen were the town’s hottest ticket. Brian was a regular at the club by the age of fifteen. ‘I saw him at Filby’s by early 1957,’ says Graham Keen, who was going out with Ann Filby. ‘He’d brought a guitar with him, although I can’t remember much about his playing. But I do remember he was really worried about getting home on time, cos his mum and dad wanted him in around ten o’clock.’
Brian’s interest in being the top kid in class may by 1957 have completely evaporated – ‘an awkward attitude’, his teachers noted – but he’d turned that formidable focus on to music. At home, he’d spend hours playing records on the family gramophone, obsessively working out riffs and chords and sounds with a devotion that would soon make him stand out. At the grammar school, a small bunch of boys had started to arrange lunchtime music sessions under the supervision of teacher Bill Neve. Neve brooked no nonsense – he’d cuff Brian around the ear if he talked back – but was open-minded musically, and allowed the boys to form a jazz band, led by clarinettist Colin Partridge. The bandleader got on reasonably well with Brian, who turned up with a guitar for the sessions, and it was immediately obvious to Partridge that he’d been practising: ‘He’d clearly been playing a while and had been listening to the right music, although I felt there was more to his vision than strictly jazz.’ Or at least Partridge’s version of jazz, a purist New Orleans revival style in the vein of Bunk Johnson. ‘It was rigid, not Brian’s style at all,’ says the band’s singer Dave Jones, who would continue to play with his near namesake. ‘My impression,’ Partridge states, ‘was that he was a loner.’
