by Paul Trynka
The trio took Korner to one of Brian’s favourite clubs, the Patio. ‘It was then that Alexis told us he was forming a new band, playing the music of Muddy Waters,’ Dick recalls. ‘And that they’d be starting at a new club. And we said, “We’ll be there.”’ It was also at this meeting that Brian told Korner he intended to move to London and play blues. Korner’s reaction was illuminating. According to John Keen, the father of British blues reckoned Brian’s scheme was a madcap one. ‘He told Brian, “Don’t go to London! It’s no good, you’ll never make it there, it’s all too commercial – this blues style is never going to be popular.” Brian took absolutely no notice. In some ways he was so confident and strong-willed.’
Despite his conviction that blues would never become mainstream, Alexis Korner, then thirty-three, would become Brian’s most important patron. Chris Barber, with manager Harold Pendleton, was a business powerhouse who established key venues like the Marquee and the National Jazz and Blues Festival. Korner, in contrast, was more of a father figure. He established a bohemian household in an apartment on Moscow Road in Bayswater, west London, along with his wife Bobbie, herself a key early blues fan and supporter, and writer friend Charles Fox. And among the first younger visitors to Moscow Road would be Brian Jones and Dick Hattrell.
Korner was proprietorial about the music he loved, which caused fallings-out with supposed rivals like Chris Barber and Paul Oliver. Younger musicians, though, brought out the best in him. He would always be a sympathetic paternal figure in Brian’s life. ‘Alexis was a really nice bloke, in the sense that he took Brian seriously,’ says Keen. ‘Some people would write off a nineteen-year-old who had passion and interest but maybe didn’t know what he was doing. Alexis realized Brian was utterly devoted to the cause.’
From the outset Brian worked assiduously on his relationship with Alexis Korner. He and Graham Ride had recently moved to 56 Bath Road, a smaller apartment nearer the town centre, after an argument with their old landlord over money disappearing from the gas meter. The pair hated the new flat – it was too small for rent parties – but there was a handy phone box nearby that Brian had learned to hack. By tapping out the correct sequence of clicks he could dial Korner’s London number for free. Soon he discovered that Korner would be back in Cheltenham late in October, and once again he and Graham talked their way backstage at the Gaumont, where Brian had seen that lacklustre Bill Haley show. The pair then made their way to the Waikiki with Korner and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, two bluesmen who’d managed to evade the union ban on US musicians by billing themselves as ‘entertainers’.
Brian was at ease with Brownie and Sonny, whose eyesight was so bad that Brian and Graham had to read out the Waikiki menu for him. Sonny settled on steak and kidney pie, and the Mississippi bluesmen tucked wholeheartedly into British comfort food while Brian kept the conversation going. ‘He just turned on the charm,’ says Graham. ‘He was good at it, knowledgeable, and [he] could talk.’ It was one more stage in Brian’s induction into Alexis Korner’s extended family.
He and Dick Hattrell became regulars on the hitchhike trail into London. The trips were always gruelling, despite the kindness of the occasional truck driver who fell for Brian’s spiel and stumped up the money for egg and chips at a transport caff. ‘Oh God, it was awful, it would take so long to get there,’ Dick recalls. ‘But it was all worth it. When we got to Alexis’s house, it was like we were living in the house of the Lord.’
Korner laid out his plans to Brian, how he was forming an all-electric blues band with Cyril Davies, the ornery harmonica player he’d previously worked with at the Barrelhouse Blues club. Cyril, a panel beater by trade, looked a bit like Lyndon B. Johnson but was Britain’s first master of the ‘Mississippi saxophone’ – the amplified harmonica, as played by Little Walter and James Cotton. In turn, Brian made his own plans. For several weeks he tried to persuade a Cheltenham singer, Gordon Harper, to join him in an electric blues band. ‘Gordon was a short-back-and-sides insurance salesman, and a good bloke,’ says mutual friend Ken Ames. Harper enjoyed playing Bill Broonzy-style blues at the weekend – and thought that was as far as that music would take anyone. ‘You’ll never get anywhere with a blues band,’ he told Brian. ‘Not commercial. It’s a specialist market.’
It was the standard refrain of 1961. Brian Jones, the mad, bad boy of Cheltenham, was the only person who challenged this received wisdom, which came not only from outsiders but from insiders too. Even his new patron, Alexis Korner, persisted in taking the same line. Brian saw R&B (as he termed it) as popular music that just happened to be made by African Americans. But Korner and his circle loved the music precisely because it was unpopular. ‘We always thought it was exclusive and esoteric,’ says Bobbie Korner. ‘I guess we thought we were into something the vast majority would never understand. There was an arrogance [to that attitude]. We were tribal.’
It was Brian Jones alone who had a vision, that raw electric blues could appeal to the youth of Britain rather than only to a narrow circle of bohemians. He was undeterred by the fact that others didn’t see it that way, and broadened his search for like-minded souls. The Oxford scene, which he’d ventured into with a small coterie of CND supporters like Harry Washbourne and Barry Miles, looked more promising, especially when he bumped into aspiring blues fan Paul Pond, who’d recently moved to the city and had formed ‘what I thought was the only blues band in Britain’.
Much like Brian, Paul Pond – soon to be known as Paul Jones – had discovered the blues via jazz, and was taken with the Chicago blues sound, harmonica players like Sonny Boy Williamson 1 and 2, James Cotton and Junior Wells. Again like Brian, he had been forced to spread the net wide in his attempts to form a blues band: ‘I had two renegades from a trad group on bass and drums, I had a sort of a mainstream-cum-early-modern-jazz guitar player . . . and a saxophone player who was out-and-out modern jazz.’
Paul Jones would become Brian’s next musical collaborator, after John Keen. The date of their first meeting is vague, but almost certainly Paul first bumped into Brian in Oxford around October 1961, via the Cheltenham–Oxford art school or CND connection. Paul took to him immediately: ‘He was very talkative, very loquacious, very opinionated. About blues and everything. And I liked him very much; he seemed to me my sort of bloke. First of all, he was really good. But although he was so good, he didn’t rub your nose in it.’
Paul was the first peer who really understood Brian’s musical explorations. Brian had already gone beyond figuring out the electric slide: he’d mastered blues harmonica. Paul had struggled trying to emulate Little Walter and Sonny Boy; Brian showed him that the secret was to play ‘cross-harp’, using a harmonica a fifth up from its nominal key. Other musicians jealously guarded such trade secrets; Brian shared his knowledge. ‘It was like he’d opened doors to an unseen kingdom. The fact he unlocked the secrets of the harmonica was amazing. I was off and running. So I would always like him just for that. Then we started to play together, and that was that.’
Brian began to hitch to Oxford on Friday nights. ‘This wasn’t every week, but it happened more than once. He or I would find some party, and we’d go off, him with his guitar, and we’d jam or not depending on how open and generous the mood was.’ Paul bumped into the future Eric Clapton and his band the Roosters that same autumn; Clapton describes himself as having ‘the accelerator down’ over this period. But it was Brian Jones who was travelling the fastest, says Paul Jones: ‘He was so single-minded, and definite. And also he could really play. At that stage I didn’t know anybody who could play that well. No one – not Alexis, for that matter.’
Like John Keen, Paul was impressed by Brian’s drive and single-mindedness. He was evangelical in his belief that now was the time to form a blues band. Alexis Korner had already made the first move, unveiling an early version of Blues Incorporated, his Chicago-style electric band, in Croydon on 19 January 1961. The event had proved satisfyingly controvers
ial: the band was supporting Acker Bilk, and one trad jazz fan in the audience yelled ‘We came to see a jazz concert!’ before scuffles broke out. Korner, it turned out, was shaken by the episode. Brian loved the controversy, which was duly reported in Jazz News. When Alexis told Brian, during their regular talks, that he was planning to open a club in Ealing that would showcase his band, and electric blues in general, Brian became even more driven. ‘We’ve just been mucking about till now,’ he told his new mate Pond. ‘We need to take things seriously. First of all I’m going to leave Cheltenham and move to London. I’m starting a band, and I’m going to be rich and famous. Do you want to be my singer?’
No, Paul Pond informed him. ‘My theory at the time, my reason for saying no, was I had exactly the attitude of Alexis Korner. This is niche music. I will always love it, I will always play it, but it won’t give me a living.’
None the less, the duo made a tape together, which they sent to Alexis Korner, aiming for a slot at the opening of his club in March 1962. While they waited to hear, Brian continued with his other plans, working on ideas with Graham Ride, playing the odd jazz circuit show with John Keen, writing letters to the London music press, and telling his friends that once Korner’s club opened he’d move to London.
Brian Jones’s move to the capital would have far-reaching consequences. His vision of blues as mainstream youth music and his deeply felt evangelism would ultimately redefine the world’s cultural landscape. So far, so noble. But like new hero Robert Johnson he had to keep moving, for there were plenty of outraged townsfolk on his trail. He wasn’t just heading for London, he was escaping Cheltenham.
*
The consequences of Brian’s alley-cat sexuality were starting to multiply in his home town, as were his offspring. Any support Brian gave Pat Andrews during her pregnancy was intermittent; not for one moment did the two address the implications: ‘We didn’t talk about it. He knew I was innocent . . . maybe he was a coward.’ Like others who came after her, Pat was star-struck by Brian. She loved him, still does in a way, although she also uses words like ‘crafty’, ‘conniving’ and ‘chancer’. Brian stayed mainly faithful to Pat, but by the autumn of 1961 he’d acquired another girlfriend, whom Graham Ride refers to as Gee.
Over the next decade, rumours would continue to circulate about Brian. (Years later it would turn out he’d had yet another affair around 1959, with a married Surrey woman, who in turn had a child, Belinda, who in this case stayed with the family.) Often they underplayed the magnitude of his old-fashioned philandering, as in the story about the pregnant Pate’s girl who turned out to be two pregnant Pate’s girls. Exactly the same applies to rumours that Brian faced a legal threat from the outraged burghers of Cheltenham – for it wasn’t one threat, it was two.
Dave Jones, who’d briefly played with Brian, was working as an articled clerk for Rowberry and Warren Green, a prestigious law firm located on the Promenade, when he heard about the rumpus caused by his old grammar school friend. ‘Rowberry was a very well-known solicitor in Gloucester. And he was asked to write a letter on behalf of the parents of a girl, who I recall was under age.’ The Rowberry and Warren Green letter was finally sent on behalf of several concerned citizens. There was no specific legal threat, for there was little legal sanction they could take. ‘It was more, “What are your intentions?”’ remembers Jones. ‘I think this letter involved three different fathers. Then later it turned out there was another big law firm, Watterson Moore and Co., on Royal Crescent, who’d independently written a letter, from different parents, along the same lines.’
Jones recalls the two law firms arranging a meeting with Brian in a local coffee bar – with inconclusive results. ‘I don’t think he gave a damn. Not to say he was heartless or shallow – he wouldn’t have gone down in my book as a bad guy. He was a healthy eighteen-year-old [sic] lad going out with a number of girls. Sequentially, although there was some overlapping.’
Brian wasn’t intimidated, but the letters were more evidence that ‘things were hotting up’. As in the case of Val, Brian made intermittent attempts to be responsible. When Pat finally gave birth to his fourth child, Julian Mark Anthony – the Julian after Cannonball Adderley, the Mark Anthony to signify strength – on 23 October 1961, Brian appeared at her bedside with a huge bunch of flowers. He’d pop into the hospital often, when Pat’s mum – and her umbrella – weren’t around, and sold several of his treasured albums to buy her a mohair skirt. Yet for much of the time, he simply disappeared. When he and Graham Ride were thrown out of Bath Road early in 1962, he even managed to keep the location of his new digs quiet. He confided some of his plans to Pat, about the move to London when Alexis Korner’s new club opened, hinting they could make a new start in a new town – but it was always vague, always keeping her hoping.
That sketchiness affected other people, too, mostly friends he’d borrow money from. He’d do it with charm, and a kind of sincerity. But it rankled with many that they were expected to subsidize his lifestyle when they were also short of cash. Barry Miles remembers being touched for £2 – ‘and my entire student grant was £100 a year, so that was a lot’ – but there were bigger sums, £20 or so, owing to Pat’s brother, and probably more still to Dick Hattrell. Whether or not he’d had a calling to the blues, Brian would have had to move out of Cheltenham anyway, simply to find a new crowd to cadge from.
For all that, his friends loved him, and respected his bravery in taking off for London. John Keen and Graham Ride couldn’t imagine leaping into the void like that, although Dick, who still received an allowance from his dad, volunteered to take the train to London with him. The Thursday before Brian left, Graham struck lucky at the Cheltenham races and won £18 – timely winnings, for they allowed him to buy Brian a farewell Chinese and lend him £20 for his train fare and to help him find his feet. ‘We’d had a great time,’ says Graham, ‘in a world of our own, doing our own thing.’ ‘He told me he was going to catch this train, the weekend of 20 March 1962,’ says John Keen. ‘I felt he’d be back soon. How little did I know.’
Brian Jones left for London as a young man with a chaotic lovelife but a disciplined, honed sense of musical direction bolstered by the experience of all those live performances. It was this sense that he was already a fully developed musician that simultaneously impressed and intimidated Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor when the trio first saw Brian on stage at Ealing in late March 1962, the night he appeared with Paul Jones, aka P. P. Pond.
Dick Taylor would later become famous as the temporary Stone who went on to form the Pretty Things, the Stones’ R&B rivals. Taylor’s is the most tantalizing view of the band in its embryonic state, untouched by bitterness. He recalls Brian’s inspirational qualities, and his moodiness, but most of all he remembers the way Brian’s musical investigations went far deeper than anything they’d encountered: he’d studied the styles of Elmore James, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and worked out their secrets – powerful and arcane knowledge in the spring of 1962. Knowledge that would sustain the Stones for decades, to the present day – to a more profound extent than any of the band’s present members acknowledge.
Paul Jones is one of many who recall how generous Brian Jones was with this knowledge. Taylor remembers it too, and unprompted points out one of the telling quirks in the Stones’ story. A few people today, Marianne Faithfull in particular, theorize that Brian’s death left his old bandmate Keith free ‘to become Brian’ – to take his persona, adapt and improve it. What only Taylor seems to have noticed is that Keith’s trademark guitar style – his Open G tuning, a blues tuning with a distinctive country lilt – comes from Brian too. Curiously, for at least the last thirty years Keith has been describing how he took the style from Ry Cooder, a guitarist he met in 1968. ‘Brian used that tuning for things like Feel Like Going Home and I Can’t Be Satisfied,’ says Taylor. ‘Keith watched Brian play that tuning, and certainly knew all about it. Why he says he got it
from Ry Cooder I don’t know. It’s strange.’
Strange indeed that Keith would credit an outsider rather than his own bandmate for a distinctive technique that he’d seen him use, live and in the studio – a technique he would eulogize over several pages in his life story, detailing the notes, the sound, how the Open G tuning got back to the sound of old blues players, how it ‘transformed my life’.
It was Niccolò Machiavelli, in his book The Prince, who suggested we often resent people who open doors for us, who leave us with a sense of obligation. It would take a Machiavelli to disentangle the internal politics and feuding within the Rolling Stones over the next few years.
3
A Bunch of Nankers
THE TWO BOYS who would become Brian Jones’s best friends, his brothers, were pretty late starters. Keith Richards was a shy rebel whose musical career seemed to have peaked at the age of eleven when the Dartford Tech school choir performed at St Margarets, Westminster, in front of the Queen. But he became a fairly well-known figure at Sidcup Art College, strumming I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone in the cloakroom next to the office of the laid-back headmaster. ‘He came out of the office once,’ says Dick Taylor, who was his classmate, ‘and said, “It’s good you play guitar – but could you lower the volume please? A picture just fell off my wall.”’
Skinny, gawky and lovable, invariably dressed in a purple shirt, Wrangler denim jacket and skinny jeans, Keith hung out with Dick, who’d moved to the more arty Dartford Tech from the grammar school. Keith knew Dick was going to regular weekend practice sessions with Mick Jagger, an old acquaintance from Wentworth Primary School, but was too shy to ask if he could come along, until he bumped into him at Dartford train station. Along with Bob Beckwith – guitarist and later a stalwart of the Keighley Labour Party – and harp-player Alan Etherington, they practised in the Beckwith and Taylor front rooms. Their repertoire was the usual staples: Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, a bit of John Lee Hooker, plus Mick’s hokey take on La Bamba. Dick Taylor and Beckwith’s tastes were more hardcore blues, Keith was into Chuck Berry and Scotty Moore. The group made a demo for Alexis Korner on Beckwith’s little Grundig tape recorder that was, says Dick, ‘basic, and that’s being kind’, but they did have something special about them that entranced Mrs Taylor. ‘Contrary to all the stories that Mick learned to dance from Tina Turner, he danced all the while. He was unstoppable. My mum used to come in with Jaffa Cakes and tea so she could pop her head around the door and watch him dancing, cos she thought he was brilliant. My sister, too.’
