by Paul Trynka
2
Crossroads
SECOND WEEK AT Alexis Korner’s club in Ealing and you’d think they would have sorted the teething problems, but no. Condensation dripped steadily on to the stage, the place smelt funky, and the beers were warm. Yet while Keith Scott rippled through the piano parts, Alexis Korner laid down a simple rhythm guitar, and a young drummer called Charlie skipped lightly along a funky path, all led by the grizzled, ornery harmonica of the grizzled, ornery Cyril Davies, no one minded. It was the glorious spring of 1962 and British rock was being hotwired, jump-started, Frankensteined into life, so who cared about being electrocuted?
Mick Jagger was the one who’d sorted the trip, as usual persuading his Yankophile dad to lend him the family motor for the forty-five-minute drive from Dartford. He looked carefully around the room, his usual bounce and cheeky confidence just a little dampened. For the past year he, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor had pretended they were grizzled blues buffs, but really they’d only ever played in a living room. Yet when Mick sidled over to talk to Korner, with his little band’s tape in hand, he got a warm Greek welcome. Korner liked the boyish sincerity, and spoke to the skinny would-be bluesman like an exotic moustachioed uncle. Sure, he’d listen to the Blue Boys’ tape, he assured him, and there’d probably be a slot free soon.
Someone else had snaffled the guest slot for this week. There was a hurried conversation on the rickety eight-inch-high stage before Korner announced, in a rich, gravelly voice, his special guest for the evening: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I present, on guitar Elmo Lewis, on vocals P. P. Pond!’
As the swooping, glassy, erotic sound of the slide guitar filled the basement, Dick and Keith craned their necks, trying to work out how the hell he achieved it. Korner, one of the first electric blues guitarists they’d seen, was pretty good; Elmo was far better, the way he kept up that loping, clipped rhythm as Pond sang out the vocals, then swooped up the strings with a glass bottleneck for his lead licks. The guitarist, short hair, serious expression, white shirt and houndstooth trousers, looked impossibly cool. What the hell tuning was that? How the hell did he get that sound? Who the hell was he?
Dick and Keith, the two Blue Boys guitarists, didn’t bother trying to hide their shock. ‘He’s not just good,’ Dick told his art college mate, ‘he’s really, really good.’
It was a hell of an evening, as you’d expect of the time when the future Rolling Stones met each other, when the focused, driven Brian Jones so impressed Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor who in that spring of 1962 were merely schoolboy fans of the music Brian had already mastered. Ideas and thoughts ran through the Dartford trio’s minds, and one question above all: How the hell did he get to be so good?
*
The contrast between the musical development of Brian Jones and his future fellow Stones was obvious within minutes of their first encounter. What wasn’t obvious was the tortuous, gruelling nature of the journey Brian had undertaken into the heart of the blues. For the first time we can document that Elmo Lewis, aka Brian Jones, had notched up a hundred or more gigs before he walked on to that stage in Ealing, every one of which separated him just a little bit more from his exasperated parents.
As the 1950s, that grim British decade of repression and conformity, dwindled away, Brian still seemed locked in its clutches. He was treated like a child, forced to comply with his parents’ wishes. His three A levels – Physics, Chemistry and General Studies (he failed Biology) – while hardly stunning, were respectable for those days, enough to get him into a red-brick university or polytechnic, so Louisa and Lewis decided this merited a special holiday. But not a family holiday. Lewis couldn’t take time off from Rotol that summer of 1959, so Brian was sent to stay with friends in Germany for six weeks. In his future retellings, Brian embellished the trip into a hobo adventure, one boy and his guitar hitch-hiking around Europe. In fact his hosts were elderly, like his parents, and the whole experience was like ‘being in an open prison’, as he’d tell friends later. The pressure to conform increased on his return, and Brian acceded to his father’s wish that he map out a respectable professional career as an optician by enrolling on a course in Applied Optics in London, reportedly at the Northampton Institute (later City University), to start in September.
From what we can tell, Brian missed Val – but not as much as Val missed Brian. ‘Her life at that time really centred around Brian,’ says Carole Goodsell, a friend of Val’s. ‘She was quite outgoing, happy and friendly – but he really was her entire life.’ In the time Carole spent with Brian and Val she found the aspiring musician ‘arrogant and self-centred – but Valerie loved him, which is all that mattered’.
Then, some time in the autumn of 1959, Valerie discovered she was pregnant. As so often happens, the news spread rapidly, but randomly. Initially, says Val’s school friend Anna Livia, Val seemed overjoyed. ‘She was all excited. I remember her saying, “Oh, I’m going to live in London with Brian.” And then there was some incident . . . she broke down in tears and ran out of the room. I suppose that must have been when it had all fallen through.’
The story shared around the coffee bars and basement clubs in Cheltenham was pretty straightforward: Brian had done a runner. Everyone around the tiny scene knew the couple well and shared much the same opinion as Jane Filby, who declares, ‘Brian was a big shit. Or, as my husband says, he was actually a little shit. After all, he wasn’t that tall.’ But none of them really knew the full story. In the 1950s, the outcome of a teenager’s pregnancy was decided not by the teenagers but by their parents. Only years later would Graham Ride, one of Brian’s friends, who later married Val, discover what had happened: ‘Brian made an offer to marry Val, but it all went wrong. It surprised me, when I found out, but that’s what happened.’
In the early weeks of her pregnancy, Val, her mother and Brian exchanged letters; for just a few weeks, Val was happy, indulging fantasies of family life with Brian in London. But her parents, seemingly in collusion with Lewis and Louisa, soon put paid to that notion. They were horrified by the thought of their daughter heading for the bright lights to live with Brian and refused to give the necessary permission for him to marry her. This, it seems, was what caused Val’s tears, rather than Brian’s cold-hearted refusal.
In the spring of 1960, the messy situation turned tragic. Val’s father, whom everyone remembers as idolizing his daughter, died of a heart attack. Ken Corbett had worked with Lewis Jones at Rotol; Brian’s father, says Graham Ride, blamed his errant son for the tragedy – another outrage to compound the pregnancies of Hope and Val. It was in the traumatic aftermath of Mr Corbett’s death that the decision was made to have Val’s baby adopted.
Years later, Graham saw the paperwork on the adoption, including various correspondence which showed that Brian renewed his offer to marry Val. Some time around June 1960, Brian arrived from London to visit Val and his son, Barry David, who was recuperating following surgery on his stomach after his birth on 29 May. Yet at some point in the weeks that followed, Val received a letter from Brian that persuaded her to have nothing more to do with him. No one knows its contents, but the most likely explanation is probably the simplest one, which is that while Brian had offered to marry Val, he said he’d felt pressured to do so, and that he wasn’t in love with her.
Val was forced into a commonplace, heartbreaking routine, and gave Barry David up for adoption. She would, it turned out, see Brian again; but her Cheltenham friends, like Roger Limb, mostly share a similar impression when they encountered her over the following year: ‘She seemed a rather defeated sort of person. Certainly not the bright smiling young thing I had known before.’ Brian’s younger sister Barbara suffered, too: Miss Lambrick, the Head at Pate’s, resented her lothario brother and reportedly would only supply a terse, ungenerous college reference which hampered Barbara’s ambitions to become a teacher.
Graham Ride would be a good friend to Brian during a def
ining time in both their lives, and via his later marriage to Val would come to understand some of the emotional carnage Brian had wrought. He uses the phrase ‘charming but manipulative’ of Brian. Friendship with him had its drawbacks, such as embarrassment when seeing ex-girlfriends, or having to cope with his unreliability. The cause, says Graham, was that ‘Brian was a very instant person. He lived in the here and now, so if he wanted to make love, that’s what he’d do. He never thought about the consequences. If he hadn’t been so fertile it wouldn’t have been such a problem!’
Brian Jones was typical of a particular generation of men who’d rejected the repressive morality of the 1950s but retained many of that era’s misogynist traits. Barry Miles, who’d define, participate in and document much of the sixties counter-culture, encountered Brian many times and remembers, ‘He did have a horrible attitude to women. But that was a very common thing in those days – the way most people behaved. There was a lot of misogyny over that decade.’
Through 1960, then, Brian laid down many of the lifestyle traits of his future band. More significantly, over the next twenty months he built the foundations of their music, too, discovering crucial touchstones from Jimmy Reed to Robert Johnson, Elmore James to Slim Harpo. While his future bandmates continued their studies and played music at home for fun, Brian immersed himself in a journey deep into the heart of the music he loved.
By the late spring of 1960 Brian had given up hope of placating his father – ophthalmology, you might say, wasn’t something he’d ever really focused on – and over the summer he returned to Cheltenham. By the autumn, many of the grammar school girls and boys had turned their backs on him, as had his parents. It was the making of him. While scraping together money from a variety of jobs, he turned to music as his only salvation. Here, rather than always giving less than he promised, he was happy, indeed motivated, to give more.
In those first months back in Cheltenham, when he stayed with his parents in Hatherley Road, his income was erratic: he worked in Boots the chemist, did a spot of van driving, and later did a stint in the architects office at the County Council. But by the end of the year a large part of his income was starting to come from gigs and music. As his obsession with the blues grew, he also developed a nomadic, rent-party lifestyle that would have been familiar to the musicians who kicked off the genre in Mississippi fifty years before.
Brian had kept up his friendship with Phil Crowther, and when Phil left school that summer the pair spent hours working on songs at Phil’s dad’s newspaper warehouse. Phil was more of a rock’n’roll fan; Brian, dogmatic in so many ways, enjoyed working across genres, figuring out songs by Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, King Curtis and Duane Eddy alongside the usual jazz numbers. When Phil teamed up with a local ex-Boys Brigade turned skiffle band to form what would become the Ramrods, Brian tagged along. Given that the band already had a guitarist, and that was Phil’s main instrument too, Brian switched to tenor sax (he’d also owned an alto at one point). He made plain this wasn’t his main gig, but he put the effort in. ‘He knew what he was doing,’ says drummer Buck Jones, ‘no question about that.’ Barry Miles, then at the art college, remembers he had a greasy rock’n’roll King Curtis or Earl Bostic style ‘all figured out’.
He impressed his fellow band members, especially considering the sax was just a sideline; they’d also seen him depping on guitar with Bill Nile at Filby’s basement on the odd occasion, and knew of jazz dates over in Bath that he’d played with Harry Brampton, another ex-grammar school boy. Brian remained good mates with Phil throughout his Cheltenham chum’s short life (he choked to death on his honeymoon in 1964) and, according to Buck Jones, Brian was laid-back and supportive. But bassist Graham Stodart remembers a perfectionism that sometimes gave way to frustration. ‘We all liked him. He was a brilliant musician. But he wanted things to be absolutely perfect. And it’s when things weren’t absolutely perfect that he would show his darker side. We didn’t see it an awful lot but he could get a little moody if things hadn’t gone the way he’d liked.’ The odd black look, the occasional depression when things weren’t moving on, would recur later. But in 1960, such moods were fleeting.
Harry Brampton had bumped into Brian at Sid Tong’s Record Shop, where he worked in late 1960, and the clarinettist had persuaded Brian to join him on guitar for a series of Wednesday-night shows in a Bath pub, augmenting a five-piece band every week for four or five months. The material was simple – ‘the usual stuff, Just A Closer Walk With Thee, Royal Garden Blues, all that kind of thing’ – but Brian was unfazed by being asked to turn up at short notice. ‘He was a confident guy,’ says Brampton. ‘In those circumstances as a musician you encounter your share of jobsworths, but he was always a pleasant guy to be around.’ With the regular shows with the Ramrods, and in Bath, plus numerous sessions dropping in with visiting and local bands, Brian was already rated, says Brampton, as a ‘serious musician’.
In his music, Brian was applying all the focus that was lacking in his efforts to find a conventional career. Back home his relationship with Lewis and Louisa was at breaking point, but in other respects this period was often a blissful one. Away from the straight kids at school he had a wide group of friends who met regularly at the cinema or at barbecues up at Kemton Hill. Around September, one of his musician acquaintances bumped into a fifteen-year-old girl named Pat Andrews and told her how his friend had lost touch with the Cheltenham scene after stays in Germany and London. A few days later, Pat turned up for a blind date at the Aztec coffee bar on the high street, and in the alcove, behind the Chianti bottles and mugs, saw a striking, golden-haired ‘angel. I couldn’t speak. I literally couldn’t speak. There was this light coming from I don’t know where . . . I don’t remember what he said, I was so focused on this angelic blond hair, but we agreed to meet again, and started going out for walks.’
In those first weeks, spent wandering in the hills around Cheltenham, in its coffee bars, and even around the railroad tracks, Pat’s fascination with the teenager who was blessed with immense charm and an enchanting imagination grew. ‘He would tell all sorts of stories, he could be amusing, he could capture you with card games, he could do magic tricks. And of course when I sat there and listened to him playing, I was transported into another world, another realm.’
In those early days, Brian lived up to that first angelic impression, and Pat became a little besotted with him. But she noticed some worrying traits, too. ‘I’d been going out with this German boy for months, then he’d gone back to Stuttgart. He used to write me all these letters, and one night in the Aztec, Brian asked, “Do you have any cigarettes?” So I look in my bag and of course forgot the letters were in there. Brian pulled them out, saw the pictures, and got really upset, grabbing everything. I was shocked, going, “They’re mine, don’t tear them!” We’d only been going out a week. And I thought, bloody hell, this is someone who’s really jealous.’
Some days with Brian were bliss, spent fooling around on carefree walks. But there were dramas, too, with even darker undertones. In particular there was a Wednesday afternoon when Pat was helping Brian get his clothes ready before they went on to a Jazz Night at the Rotunda. Pat had met Brian’s parents a couple of times, found Lewis polite but withdrawn, but was convinced that Louisa looked down on her. Pat had taken it upon herself to iron Brian’s shirt, in the Jones family front room. Louisa walked in. ‘She just lost it,’ says Pat. ‘I think she was upset I was ironing his shirt, as that meant [intimacy] . . . She got really cross, and this happened really quickly, but Brian’s guitar was on an armchair nearby, and she went to grab it.’ Brian leapt in front of the guitar, his mother screamed at him, and he slapped her across the face.
Today, sitting in a coffee bar in Crystal Palace, Pat is anxious to point out, ‘It was not a big slap. It was a slap to bring her out of her hysteria, which it did.’ Brian’s ex-girlfriend is keen that ‘no one should judge him too harshly’. Yet it was immediately
obvious to her that there was something dysfunctional about the Jones family. In the following months, Brian confided in Pat and spoke of what happened after his sister Pamela died. ‘Brian’s mum told him that if he didn’t behave, he’d be sent away – just like his [dead] sister,’ says Pat.
Just a few weeks after the ironing incident, in December 1960, the fault lines in the Jones family relations split wide open when Lewis, Louisa and Barbara went away for Christmas and left Brian’s bags in the drive. Long before Andrew Oldham manufactured the Stones’ image as icons of outrage, Brian Jones had passed irrevocably beyond the boundaries of the decent, aspirational middle class.
*
Those who knew Brian well often observe that he’d plead ignorance when he’d destroyed a relationship, or make unconvincing apologies. That didn’t happen after this formative, fundamental split. There was no looking back; he seemed hardened to his parents’ rejection, barely mentioning it to others. Instead, all the energy he’d spent dealing with his earnest, uncomprehending parents was channelled into music. Two friends would become Brian’s main accomplices as he abandoned strait-laced society: Dick Hattrell, the son of a successful Tewkesbury solicitor, and John Keen, the former Cheltenham Grammar School boy whose parents had been friends of Lewis and Louisa.
Dick was a Filby’s regular who’d also bumped into Brian during jazz shows at Bishop’s Cleeve Village Hall and the Waikiki (also known as the Barbecue) on the Queen’s Circus, and finally got talking to him one night at the Rotunda. Brian was moving fast; ‘he was already frustrated by the jazz scene,’ says Dick. ‘He knew I read Jazz Journal, so that first night he said to me, “Can you write me a complete discography of Muddy Waters?” The following week, I gave him a list of everything Muddy had recorded, on various labels, not just Chess, and he was delighted. Then it was, “Can you dig out some information on Elmore James?” I said yeah, no problem. And so on.’
