by Paul Trynka
The happy, fulfilled musician whom John Keen had seen at Richmond was at a new summit – finally vindicated, with the music he’d been championing for nearly three years now at a tipping point. ‘This was his band – his realization of the dream,’ says Bill Wyman. Yet, in a cruel twist, this moment was also the one, Bill adds, when ‘he proved the most vulnerable’.
Brian was still comfortably the top dog of the Stones in August 1963. The first threat to this status came on the 27th of that month when exhaustion caused him to miss a show at the Ricky Tick Club. This first obvious bout of ill health lasted only two nights, but by early September he had developed a rash, with ‘blotches all over his face’, says Bill. The Stones coped with Brian’s absence by bringing back Stu on piano, miking the instrument up to fill out the sound.
Bill Wyman would speculate in his memoir, Stone Alone, that Brian suffered from a mild form of epilepsy. It’s an intriguing possibility, which we’ll never be able to confirm, but what’s undoubtedly true is that Brian’s health problems stretched back eight years or more, to when – as neighbour Roger Jessop remembers – he dropped out of the school cricket team because he was ‘extremely asthmatic’. What’s most telling about Jessop’s recollection is not the fact that Brian resented his condition, it’s that he also ‘resented himself’. Brian was now on the brink of achieving musically what he’d been looking for, and again his physical weakness was jeopardizing everything.
Linda Lawrence remembers the summer of 1963 as a joyful period. Brian loved being in the bosom of a family, enjoying cooked breakfasts, chatting about music with Linda’s mum, borrowing clothes from her brother: ‘He had a direction, and was doing what he loved.’ But as the band’s schedule intensified and Brian succumbed to nervous rashes or bouts of asthma, she noticed, like Dellar, the resentment of his own frailty. ‘I only realized slowly. But then he started talking to me, about how he wouldn’t live past thirty. He just didn’t feel his health, his body, was in good shape.’
Brian’s main response to his physical shortcomings seemed to be a form of self-loathing. A secondary response was recklessness. He was a daredevil driver. In 1964 he took delivery of a sleek, phallic Jaguar E-type, took it for a spin with Linda, and lost control. The sports car rolled over but miraculously Brian and Linda walked away unhurt. (The drama inspired Linda’s dad to go out and source Brian a solid, safe Humber Snipe.) Another time, Brian and Linda were enjoying an idyllic afternoon boating in Windsor when Brian spotted some fast water, like rapids, running up to a sluice gate. He steered the little motorboat straight for it, laughing manically as Linda spotted the danger and screamed. ‘It was child’s play, daring, seeing how close to the edge he could take it. And it was scary.’ Actions without consideration or fear of the consequences – Brian seemed to relish the panic, the energy, that unleashed. As the pressures on him intensified over the coming years, it was always hard to predict whether he’d respond with depressive, self-hating torpor or slightly crazed escapism.
For all the minor portents, though, Brian and his band were managing to ride the wave. As they approached the end of 1963 there was the niggling need to come up with a second single that would capitalize on the modest success of Come On, their decent but unadventurous debut. After a couple of studio sessions failed to gel, the solution fell into their lap. Mick and Keith were driving down Charing Cross Road in a cab and spotted Paul McCartney and John Lennon window shopping. They shouted mocking greetings at their friends and rivals.
‘Hey, hey, give us a lift!’ Paul and John yelled in reply.
The taxi pulled to the kerb, the pair stepped in for a natter, and Mick mentioned that the band were looking for some new songs.
‘Ah, yeah, sure,’ Paul responded. ‘We got one. How about Ringo’s song? You could do it as a single.’
The gift of I Wanna Be Your Man was as big a coup for the Beatles as it was for the Stones, helping them gain part-ownership of the success of their rivals. ‘It was a throwaway,’ John Lennon would later tell Hit Parader. ‘We weren’t gonna give them anything great, right?’ Although in later days they would be closer, Tony Bramwell says, ‘I’m not sure exactly how much the Beatles actually liked the Stones in those early days, but they did make us all realize there was a world way beyond Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.’ Brian Jones, in particular, opened up that world for the Beatles, who continued to regard him as the lead Stone.
As a result of the mix of friendship and rivalry, the Beatles sent their road manager to sit in on the I Wanna Be Your Man session and keep tabs on the Stones. After the comparative luxury of Abbey Road, Bramwell was shocked by the grottiness of the studios the Stones worked in. ‘We’d hardly been outside EMI, which was like a laboratory; the Stones usually worked in Regent Sound [on Denmark Street in London], which was tiny, ropey, and looked like someone’s front room.’ For the main recording at De Lane Lea, Andrew Oldham had disappeared: the manic energy of the summer had been succeeded by a black depression, which he sat out in Paris. The much-maligned Eric Easton oversaw the session, which meant Brian dominated the recording, doubling Mick’s vocals and layering slashing electric slide all over the track.
It’s no coincidence that the one early Stones recording for which Oldham was absent is the song on which Brian is omnipresent; his feral guitar, even his backing vocals, would be toned down on future recordings, just like Stu’s piano had been. I Wanna Be Your Man was a mess, but touched by genius; its trebly distortion and sneered vocals would form the prototype for a whole generation of American garage bands. In retrospect, the single’s cranked-up aggression was a huge leap forward for British rock’n’roll, radically different from the Beatles’ impeccably clean Abbey Road recordings. It would be years before other players – notably Eric Clapton with the Bluesbreakers – mastered the same sound. Although Mick Jagger would attract a lot of press attention when the single, released that November, became a success, Brian remained the undisputed architect of the band’s sound. In interviews for the New Musical Express and Melody Maker he stood out as the one with a mission, a manifesto, and as ‘the most intelligent member of the group’, says NME journalist Chris Hutchins. ‘And, I thought, the least star-struck.’
Tony Bramwell – who had grown up with George Harrison, known Paul McCartney well as a kid, and joined their tiny crew as Brian Epstein’s assistant at his record store chain, NEMS, and then the band’s road manager – continued to keep tabs on the Stones and report back on what he saw. He liked the Stones, organized a welcome party for them at the Cavern, and ended up accompanying them on several dates of their first major UK tour, with Bo Diddley. It was Brian he hung out with, and mostly reported back on. ‘I just liked Brian. It was Brian’s band, and he was a very, very good musician. He looked great, he was cool, he didn’t fuck around on stage – maybe he shook his head a bit. He was the leader; Mick and Keith hadn’t established themselves as [anything] other than a singer and second guitars.’
That late ’63 tour was manic, with hysterical crowds, a generation of kids who felt like they’d been waiting for this moment all their lives; who felt, like Ealing regular Janet Couzens, ‘We were off into the sixties and there was no going back. There’s been this tedium before, that emphasis that you don’t go beyond your station. But now we had confidence in what we felt.’ The Beatles were a beacon of hope, of freedom; the Stones entering the fray proved a tipping point. The genie would never go back in the bottle.
The band’s set was based around Come On, their magnificently upbeat version of Route 66, Fortune Teller and Money. On dates with Bo they’d drop their crowd-pleasing versions of his songs, but none the less, even the shorter version of the set proved electrifying. Half a century on, when we’ve had plenty of time to assimilate the sound of electric blues, those songs still have an energy and exuberance that will never be rivalled. There would be many great Stones tours, but for some observers, including the Animals’ singer Eric Burdon, who would become Mick Jagger
’s leading rival in 1964, this one was the greatest: ‘I remember them as a club band, and that’s the way I want to remember them, that’s when they were at their best.’ He recalls Keith as an impressive rhythm guitarist, the foundation of their Chuck Berry-style songs – but both Keith and Mick were ‘in the shadows. Because on the side is this blond-haired Aryan dude on guitar, and you couldn’t help but look at him. He had this magnetism about him, you couldn’t escape it. But it was twisted.’
Maybe Burdon’s take on the band is tainted by his rivalry with Mick, but in his view, Brian ‘was the one. The one wanting to stretch out and be inventive.’ The pair hung out in the London clubs, talking sometimes about Elmore James and Howlin’ Wolf, but mostly about girls, and in the following years they’d become drug buddies. Burdon liked and respected this blond-haired pioneer. Yet there were parts of Brian that Burdon, and many others, simply didn’t understand. ‘I knew him,’ says Burdon, ‘and yet I didn’t know him.’ Burdon didn’t, for instance, know about Linda Lawrence (she came on few tour dates), and says, ‘I didn’t ever see him with a girlfriend. He seemed to be obsessed with hookers, which was strange. And I’m not sure I ever spoke to him properly, not close, except when we were high. It was strange, hard to explain.’
There was nothing hard to explain about the first step in Brian’s downfall. It all came down to money. A staggeringly small amount of it: five pounds. In context, it was trivial, ludicrous, especially looked at from the perspective of today, when for decades Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have banked most of the band’s performance royalties while keeping their sidemen on a salary.
The Stones’ trip to Liverpool to play the Cavern was on the surface a celebration. The Beatles were away and had arranged a party for the Stones, attended by Cynthia Lennon and other friends of the Fab Four. But the sense of camaraderie was shattered when Stu discovered, during the stay in Liverpool, that Brian was earning an extra fiver compared to the rest of the band. The deal, Oldham would later relate, was organized in secret by Eric Easton – for whom the Stones’ co-manager was already gunning, accusing him of shady business practices.
The sum would become so proverbial that it could have made a good Bible story. For one thing, Bill Wyman’s records show it was a tiny proportion of their overall earnings: each band member was by now making £193 a week. Yet that five pounds was symbolic: for Stu, already disenchanted with Brian, it embodied Brian’s slipperiness; for Keith, it was a betrayal of their gang mentality; and for Mick – well, it was five pounds. The extra fiver marginalized Easton and Brian – and Oldham used it to his advantage.
James Phelge was probably the only insider with no axe to grind. He’d heard Brian boast about the extra money earlier that year. ‘I thought he was fucking joking, but it turned out it was true.’ To Phelge, that stupid fiver marked an irrevocable turning point: ‘They just weren’t really friends after that.’ Brian’s pettiness would be paid back with nastiness: ‘There was a period where if the van was ready for the next gig and Brian wasn’t there, they would drive off and fuckin’ leave him. And it really did seem to stem from that five quid.’
So, the slow decline of Brian Jones started with a five-pound note. Over the next few months his leadership would remain largely unchallenged, but the incident was like the point in an affair when one first notices a lover’s flaw: it’s never possible to go back to that first, carefree relationship. From now on, Brian would be on the back foot, pitched against the Jagger-Oldham-Richards troika. Anyone who’s been in a band will know how it’s impossible to overstate the resentment, hatred even, that one member can inspire once you get it in your head they’re not pulling their weight or not being fair, even when you know that hatred isn’t rational. Worse still, although the Christian tradition suggests that adversity makes us better people, that’s rarely the case. More often it makes us bitter, or prone to self-pity, emotions to which Brian Jones would increasingly succumb. As the games of sexual oneupmanship, misogyny and nankering showed, the Rolling Stones could be a vicious gang. And, as Brian’s ex-bandmate and educational psychologist John Keen points out, ‘Gangs, of animals, of children, do tend to pick on the vulnerable creature in the pack. It performs a kind of group bonding. You see it happening at secondary schools. Brian could be difficult – but I know what he was like, and he didn’t deserve it.’
In spite of the slowly deepening rifts, the months into the spring of 1964 shot by in a blizzard of adrenalin and thrills: the Bo Diddley tour was succeeded after only the shortest of breaks by January’s ‘Group Scene 1964’ package, and then a third set of dates, propped up by Jet Harris and Brian’s old friend Billie Davis. The band was at a peak: distorted guitars, songs played at breakneck speed, Mick stoking the frenzy with his urchin come-ons while Brian channelled a uniquely dark energy, often goading the crowd into stage invasions, relishing the panic it created. ‘You realized it was probably out of control, but there was nothing you could do about it,’ says Keith. ‘But it was exhilarating fun.’
There was an ever-present buzz of rutting sexuality, Mick, Brian and Bill competing to recruit teenage girls, while Andrew Oldham spent much of the time gazing at Jet Harris, who loved camping around and during one particularly debauched night in Manchester sneaked into the lobby stark naked, popped a lampshade on his head, and stood immobile in the corner waiting to see who’d notice. Brian loved the buzz, loved hanging out with all the musicians, sometimes with Mick or Keith, although Mick in particular was usually seen huddled with Oldham. He also loved the camp undercurrent. It was probably on this tour that he first made friends with Michael Aldred, the Ready Steady Go! interviewer. The pair would camp it up together, swapping clothes and sashaying around. ‘The whole thing was utter chaos,’ remembers Billie Davis, ‘and it escalated throughout the tour.’ Brian seemed happier travelling with Jet, Billie and the other musicians on their coach rather than in his own band’s van. ‘He always seemed to be worried,’ says Billie. ‘He was certainly in control of the music, but the whole thing was madness, exhausting, and he seemed frail. And it was constant; there was no let-up.’
When the frenzy did let up, as the third tour came to a temporary halt on 2 February, Brian was optimistic, buoyed up with enthusiasm about sessions for the band’s debut album – so much so that he invited Tony Bramwell, the Beatles’ aide, to some of them.
Every studio engineer who’d worked with the band up to that point had recognized Brian as the custodian of their sound, the one person with an innate understanding of how their live energy could transfer on to record. Their manager claimed to be overseeing the band’s records, but that night Oldham was nowhere to be seen as Brian asked the engineer to roll the tape and the pair listened to a guitar part. Brian plugged his shiny new distinctive pale green Gretsch into his AC30, ready to make it sound better, just a bit funkier, just a bit dirtier; his concentration was intense. As the tape rolled, Bramwell realized that Brian was replacing the guitar part being played by Keith with one of his own; later he saw him patching up the odd bass guitar part or other detail in much the same way. The trade term for this is a ‘sponge job’. In later years, Keith Richards boasted about how he’d done this to Bill Wyman and guest guitarist Ry Cooder – but as far as Bramwell could tell at that point, Keith had no idea that the same thing was being done to his own efforts.
Bramwell got no sense of any internal conflicts as he watched Brian record. Brian seemed focused, in control, happy. This debut album was his baby. Away from the growing competition, thinking purely about how a guitar line should sound, he was relaxed, with none of the growing angst that Billie Davis had seen. Bramwell’s experience was something another friend, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, noticed. Hoppy knew Brian from the Oxford CND scene before they both arrived in London, he photographed the Stones several times and bumped into Brian around the city. In one sentence, Hoppy crystallizes what would become the new reality from 1964: ‘I’d see Brian a lot, but I don’t think I ever saw him smile,
apart from when he had a guitar in his hands.’
All Brian’s ambitions centred on the album; he was obsessed with making it work. ‘I think it’s good . . . I hope it’s good enough,’ he told his friends, as if the record was a vindication of his life so far. The album was for him the ultimate personal statement. There were few concessions to commercialism for, as Bill points out, Brian ‘wanted fame and fortune but didn’t want to sacrifice his musical integrity to get it’.
*
Through the spring of 1964, as the Beatles’ iconography was set in stone in A Hard Day’s Night, the Stones were defined week by week in the New Musical Express and Melody Maker, which followed their every move and sketched their contrasting characters: Mick was businesslike; Bill was boring; Charlie was the jazzbo; Keith the nice guy. Mick scored a good number of interviews, almost always in conjunction with Andrew Oldham, who now sported a shaggy, distinctly Rolling Stones haircut and loved seeing himself in print. But Brian Jones was the visionary, the one in charge of the music, and also, according to Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman, the ‘deep . . . the most expressive Stone’. Inescapably it was Brian who had the sense of mission, to spread the gospel of R&B. ‘I think I’ve finally proved to those people who said I was always doing the wrong thing that I’ve been right all along,’ he told people like Coleman. And when, on 10 April, the NME gave the ‘fantastic’ debut album by the Rolling Stones a laudatory review, it was Brian, alone, who explained its genesis and hoped that ‘people will accept it . . . as good R&B’. He seemed unassailable, the most musically talented Stone, ‘and also the one the girls liked best’, as Robin Pike, his old schoolmate, who turned up for several shows, remembers.
