by Paul Trynka
But the band’s increasing exhaustion and occasional squabbles seemed to affect Brian more than the others. In those early months of 1964, with Mick, Keith and Oldham mostly holed up at Mapesbury Road, Bill out in Penge, and Charlie still living with his parents, Brian had precious few confidants. One of them was Nicky Wright, a fast-emerging photographer who worked mainly around the King’s Road fashion scene, for Dezo Hoffman’s studio, and who for a brief time became the Stones’ main photographer (he was soon shouldered aside by Oldham and replaced by Gered Mankowitz, another great photographer who happened to be the son of Expresso Bongo writer Wolf Mankowitz). He’d seen the band many times throughout 1963 and hung out with Brian in west London, mostly talking about clothes, girls and cars. It was Wright who designed and photographed the debut album cover, a stark, evocative image that showed Brian in the foreground in sharp focus, a searching gaze directed at the camera, and Mick set somewhat behind and to his left, while a sullen Keith, Charlie and Bill brought up the rear. This reflected Wright’s perception of the band.
Wright liked Keith and Charlie, but Brian became his closest friend and he shared his excitement as their following grew, and enthused with him about the making of the album. Brian liked fame, he liked women, but the recording of their first LP was something more important, Wright knew, something that promised a longed-for justification. Wright often saw Brian, Mick and Keith take the piss out of each other, and heard jibes about Brian being a short-arse – all normal band behaviour, he reckoned. Never once did Brian signal any worries about internal power struggles – until the winter of 1963. Wright had a small cottage in Whitehill, Hampshire, in the grounds of his family’s house, where Brian turned up regularly in his green Humber Snipe to take refuge. As they drank late into the night, Brian would become ‘more and more morose’, says Wright, ‘complaining how he wasn’t being listened to.’ When they smoked dope together, Wright found Brian playful and funny, but alcohol, he realized, unleashed something darker. One night, sitting in the tiny kitchen with Wright’s brother Patrick, Brian shouted, ‘This will show them!’, grabbed a knife and started to draw it across his wrist. A mêlée ensued during which Patrick punched Brian on the chin to put him out of action. The golden-haired Stone went out cold.
Brian’s mood didn’t improve, and later that night the drama escalated into pure farce. Still apparently intent on ending it all, Brian decided to jump out of his bedroom window. ‘The silly sod was so drunk he’d forgotten the window was on the ground floor,’ says Patrick. Nicky and Patrick heard a rustling sound, ran outside, and realized Brian had fallen into a large bush just below the window. But they could find no trace of him there nor in the gardens surrounding the cottage. Nicky, says Patrick, became panicky and phoned the local police station to warn them that ‘a famous rock star is mentally deranged and rampaging through the countryside’. Eventually a portly sergeant arrived with several uniformed officers, and they were about to search the grounds when Brian emerged from some nearby shrubbery.
As Brian approached, Nicky worried how the sergeant would react to what was indisputably a criminal offence – wasting police time. He had reckoned without Brian’s charm.
‘I’m so sorry, officer,’ he said, his handsome face a picture of sincerity. ‘I’ve been an absolute cunt.’
Taken aback by the rock star’s humble behaviour, the gruff sergeant gathered up his officers and left.
Nicky Wright doesn’t claim to be an objective observer – he has no love for Andrew Oldham – but he sees Brian not as a flawed character but as a man who, when attacked, turned on himself. ‘Things got to him.’ If he’d been more politically astute he would have formed alliances within the band rather than outside it. But he wasn’t. As his grip on the band started to loosen, so did much of his fragile self-esteem. Although Nicky stayed firmly on Brian’s side in 1964, Patrick came to dread his visits. ‘Initially I think we were all fairly thrilled to have a rock star staying. The novelty wore off as we realized – Brian sucked. He was forever belly-aching that no one understood him or the pressure he was under. It became very boring.’
*
The elusive warm English summer had finally arrived, and there were few more beautiful places to experience it than Surrey, home to Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and James Phelge.
Phelge, whose name famously adorned many of the Rolling Stones’ songs before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards managed to lock them all down for themselves, is a living embodiment of the Stones’ lost camaraderie. The man who famously greeted the Stones with his underpants on his head, or pissed on them as they made their way up the stairs at Edith Grove, was, in those early days, more integral to their rebel, outcast vibe than their manager, or even their rhythm section. Fast-talking, wiry, he’s still an engaging raconteur, reclining in his easy chair facing a window that looks out on to a leafy garden. The font of stories seems bottomless, punctuated only by regular cigarette breaks, each tale highlighting a fluid, ever-changing situation in contrast to the rather static, repetitive versions you hear from today’s surviving Stones.
Most of the band’s circle have been split into factions for decades, like rival religious sects; Phelge pre-dates that split, so is one of the most objective observers of their genesis. His stories are from an era when five musicians dreamt of success rather than argued over the spoils. When Keith or Mick discuss Brian, they have pat answers; Phelge describes a more intriguing human who was powerful but vulnerable, resourceful but unreliable. At one point, as we continue to grapple with the issue of why Brian Jones became irrevocably sundered from his fellow Stones, he utters a simple, resonant truth: ‘Brian was never satisfied.’
What drove Brian Jones forward, what inspired him to champion his beloved, obscure R&B, was dissatisfaction. A teenager’s claustrophobia, the sense that there had to be something better – this was at the root of his rebelliousness; and given that the Stones inspired Dylan, Iggy’s Stooges and others, his frustration and angst were the inspiration for the sixties counter-culture. Brian Jones, as much as any single figure, helped destroy the rotten, complacent establishment.
Yet a horrible irony would underlie this profound achievement. Brian invented the Stones, hot-wired their music, out of this sense of dissatisfaction. But success didn’t ease his frustrations, it confirmed them. For as Phelge observes, ‘With Brian it was never good enough. Because it wasn’t perfect. Then because it wasn’t perfect, he’d find fault all the way through.’
Brian Jones’s life up to the spring of 1964 had been a quest for vindication. Thereafter it was a tragedy, for vindication brought no happiness, only sorrow.
5
How Many More Years
THE FATES OF Andrew Oldham and Brian Jones were always closely intertwined, and never more so than in the beautiful autumn of 1964, when all their bravado and bullshit seemed to be paying off. Brian had finally exported his beloved R&B to its birthplace – a cultural realignment that would have profound and long-lasting implications. Where Brian saw America as the birthplace of the blues, Oldham regarded it as the home of the hustler, and he was just as keen to make his mark on the nation. Just like Brian, the moment he won was the moment he started to lose, as he signed his own Faustian pact.
For Brian, the timespan between his great triumph and the realization that his life had spun out of control would be dizzyingly short. At the end of 1964, the song that embodied his pioneering vision would top the British charts, yet its recording would mark a new humiliation, and by the following spring he’d be contemplating a future outside the band he’d formed.
*
As James Phelge noted, the key turning point in Brian Jones’s life was the way that ‘everything broke wrong’ when the band moved out of Edith Grove. There was no masterplan that meant Mick, Keith and Andrew Oldham ended up living together at Mapesbury Road. But the trio’s time in the flat marked Oldham’s most crucial contribution to popular culture: he forced Mick and Kei
th to write together, triggering a complex relationship that has endured, with much griping and oneupmanship, for half a century.
These days we’re all familiar with the character templates of the controlling Stones – Mick cool and managerial, Keith swaggering and piratical. Yet that view underplays the intricacy of their relationship, a mix of admiration and suspicion that stretches back to the time they bumped into each other on the platform of Dartford railway station with half an hour to kill, when Keith said to his Wentworth Road pal, ‘I haven’t seen you for fucking ages – and what’s that under your arm?’
Today, Keith still recalls his boyhood affection for Mick, but it’s mixed with a retrospective wariness owing to how Mick played on the authority he’d amassed thanks to being one year above him at school, and his being in possession of an impressive record collection. Keith’s little stash of vinyl at that point consisted of ‘half-price bullshit cover versions’, so Mick’s possession of the real thing was a big deal. ‘He shows me these Chess records, and I was like, wow,’ says Keith. ‘He held sway over me for quite a while, [because] he was already internationally inclined, and had got it all together.’
Keith’s almost puppy-dog respect for Mick endured for several years – until challenged by the arrival of Brian Jones, whose musical and sexual experience made both Mick and Keith look like wannabes. Today, Keith often indulges in cold-hearted mockery of Brian, but his influence lingers: ‘Brian Jones was the first one to play me so much Jimmy Reed – and Robert Johnson. It’s just that he couldn’t handle he wasn’t the guy writing the songs.’
Keith remembers the crucial time when he and Mick became the guys writing the songs as ‘that night we got locked in the kitchen at Mapesbury Road’. It’s a symbolic moment, for neither Mick nor Oldham remembers it that way. In fact the Stones had already written several songs as a band, including Little By Little and Off The Hook, all credited to ‘Nanker Phelge’. Mick and Keith had also started working on ideas with Gene Pitney, one of Oldham’s PR clients, in January 1964 as a duo. Oldham’s innovation wasn’t in getting the Stones to write, it was in marketing the Jagger-Richards brand as a rival to Lennon-McCartney. ‘He was obsessed that it had to be a duo, like the Beatles,’ says Oldham’s PR partner Tony Calder. ‘That’s why it had to be Jagger-Richards. It was exactly the same with the Small Faces, where everything was Marriott-Lane, even though Stevie [Marriott] wrote all the songs himself.’
Slowly, the Nanker Phelge songs were dropped, while Mick and Keith continued to work at their craft. Many of their early efforts were shallow sub-Spector ditties, but they kept at it. Keith’s magical moment in the kitchen came in April 1964, by which time Oldham had become obsessed with the luminously hypnotic Marianne Faithfull, ‘an angel with big tits’ whom he’d met at a party on 27 March. Marianne would become a key part of Stones mythology; inspiring the first great Jagger-Richards song was only the beginning of her legacy. Oldham kept badgering the pair to come up with a song for his new protégée. ‘It was probably a desperate act on his part,’ says Keith. ‘But sometimes the mother of invention is necessity and as the sun was coming up in the kitchen, we had As Tears Go By. Six weeks later it’s in the Top 10.’
That one song transformed both Andrew Oldham’s fortunes and the balance of power within the Stones. It therefore marked the beginning of the end of Brian’s dominance of the band. Yet while Oldham is always ready to put down Brian – ‘the cunt in the barrio’ – he maintains that, while Brian sensed the change in the balance of power, he never betrayed his feelings. ‘Brian may have resented me, but he never showed it,’ he says today. ‘And if he did we never confronted or handled it. We were all too busy.’
When the Stones landed in New York on 1 June 1964, there was little inkling of the success that lay ahead for the Stones’ writing team. Oldham arrived in the US full of big talk – but he, more than anyone, was aware their success was patchy, and unlike the Beatles, they were short of material. ‘The Stones landed in America without vinyl legs. The lack of them in the UK was handled with balls and front. In America, except for the cities where they took to us like the Sex Pistols, it was embarrassing – until we got our hands on Time Is On My Side and It’s All Over Now.’ Oldham was adamant that cover versions of blues songs would not get them to the top of the charts. But during the very first appointment in their tour diary – a press conference with Murray the K’s WINS radio show – Murray suggested the band cover the Valentinos song It’s All Over Now, just released on Sam Cooke’s label. ‘Things happen in weird ways,’ says Keith. ‘It was Murray the K who said, “This sounds up your alley.”’
The Stones’ first days in the States were surreal. Their plane had touched down to five hundred screaming fans, and some wag had decided that the band should appear alongside a couple of Old English Sheepdogs. One of the first questions fired at them as they met the press was whether they ever washed. Cool as a cucumber, Brian stood up, raised his arms and retorted, ‘Want a smell?’ After a hectic day, and a couple of hours’ sleep, it was on to Los Angeles, initially for a crushing disappointment when they were pilloried by Dean Martin on their first primetime TV show: ‘their hair isn’t long – it’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows’. But it didn’t matter. The next day they hit the Strip, met up at RCA studios with arranger Jack Nitzsche – soon to be one of Brian’s closest friends in the band’s circle – and then came the Stones’ first US performance, a brilliantly frenzied show at San Bernardino.
In the UK, the music press often focused on Brian owing to his role as the band’s founder and spokesman, despite the way Oldham constantly pushed Mick forward. In the US, how the Stones got together was irrelevant. American teens loved Brian because he was the coolest. By October, the blond hair he shampooed religiously every day formed a perfect golden halo for those slightly sinister cheekbones, while his choice of clothing grew more and more distinctive, skinny stripey long-sleeved T-shirts or a slim-lapelled stripey jacket over a white polo neck. Brian would become the model for dozens if not hundreds of upstart garage bands across the nation.
In Hollywood especially, as teenage fan Ken Kubernik puts it, ‘everyone was watching Brian’. Mick was popular – Americans loved his cheeky, earnest persona, and that he didn’t wear the obligatory shirt and tie on TV – but nearly everyone on the LA scene focused on the saturnine Stone. ‘Mick and Keith were considered bit players by everyone I knew, until well into the sixties,’ says Kubernik. ‘Brian was at the centre of everything, everyone wanted to ape his fashion; then there was the fact he was blond – there are all these tropes you can tie into it.’
There were many shaky moments during that first brief visit – mocking radio and press interviewers, half-full venues in Omaha and Detroit, Oldham’s awareness that the Beatles had been there before them, with two tours and a massively influential movie under their belt. But all such memories and musings were erased by their visit on 10 June to the Chess Studio, at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, the home of the music they’d worshipped for so long. More crucially, with resident Chess engineer Ron Malo, they recorded those two definitive singles, It’s All Over Now and the cover of Irma Thomas’s Time Is On My Side. The recordings were a level of magnitude tougher than their previous work. ‘The sound was the thing,’ says Charlie Watts. ‘It was such a great room and the engineer [Malo] was fabulous, a bit like [Dave Hassinger] at RCA. They had a much better idea of the sound of rock’n’roll.’ The playing was on a new level, too, Brian and Keith’s guitar parts meshing perfectly, Brian’s chunky Gretsch arpeggios anchoring Keith’s urgent guitar solo on Time Is On My Side.
Keith’s curious memory from the first two days in Chicago is a vision of Muddy Waters, the famously regal King of Chicago, whitewashing the studio, paint splattered down his handsome face. It’s evocative, but just that, a vision, for Waters was too proud a man for such menial work. Yet Keith’s recollection that the Stones were accepted as equals, as buddies, by the Chess musicia
ns is completely accurate. For Brian, the mocking American establishment were just another bunch of Ernies and nankers; it was the musicians who worked at Chess, like Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy, who became real friends. Dave Myers, who along with Willie Dixon was virtually house bassist at Chess, is just one of several who remember a strange bond with the Stones founder. ‘He was a good guy, in a world of motherfuckers who thought we all came from the cottonfields,’ he remembers. ‘It’s a strange world, where the only people who ever did anything for us were Europeans.’ Like the musicians in Hollywood, Myers saw Brian Jones as key to the Stones. On TV shows like Mike Douglas’s, where Brian joked alongside Mick, the Stones’ singer was still often tentative; Brian was the cool, confident one, ‘the deep thinker’. But even with the lousy quality of black and white TV in 1964 you can make out the heavy bags under his eyes.
*
Brian Jones wasn’t the only one looking dark around the eyes. Andrew Oldham had already ducked out of the fray for a couple of weeks in the aftermath of I Wanna Be Your Man. A similar bout of mental exhaustion followed that summer of 1964. Oldham’s stress levels, the delusions of grandeur, turned up the heat on the Stones’ chemistry. He’d become enraptured with Phil Spector, bought a pair of identical shades and ramped up the tough-guy act he’d already learned from the impresario Don Arden. ‘He could be a real bully,’ says NME journalist Chris Hutchins. ‘I received quite a few threatening phone calls late at night, which I believe were instigated by him.’
