by Paul Trynka
Back in the winter of 1963/64, when Mick and Keith were working on their tentative compositions, Brian had come up with his own material, mysterious songs including Sure I Do and I Want You To Know, rumoured to exist as acetates. Brian contributed to the first Jagger-Richards songs – in particular it seems he wrote the haunting keyboard riff, played by Jack Nitzsche on the recorded version, on one of the Stones’ first great original songs, Play With Fire. Thereafter he was simply cut out of the loop.
Why? Andrew Oldham’s PR partner, Tony Calder, has the simplest explanation. ‘Look – Andrew would have you believe he was the first one to realize Mick Jagger’s potential. But I think it’s simply that Andrew fancied Mick more than he did everybody else. Brian developed this thing that Andrew always favoured Mick – and he was absolutely right.’
In the very first days of the Jagger-Richards partnership there’d also be band compositions floating around, as well as the songs Brian had written more or less solo. ‘There were definitely acetates of his stuff,’ says Calder. ‘I played one to Andrew and said, “This is not a bad song!” Andrew’s response was “Fuck off!” And of course Mick wasn’t interested in singing it. They were cruel. Cruel fuckers.’
The contrast with the Beatles was stark. John and Paul might patronize George, but they deferred to Brian Epstein, who was careful to run the Beatles as a partnership of equals. ‘Brian was meticulous like that,’ says Paul McCartney’s friend Barry Miles, ‘because he recognized, in part commercially, that each had their fans. In America, for instance, Ringo was the most popular for a while. They all had to have their time on a record, or in the films. But the Stones never had that kind of management style.’ Oldham’s shtick, in contrast to Epstein’s, was to cut out other band members so that the ‘Nanker Phelge’ band credit was gradually wound down in favour of ‘Jagger-Richards’.
Brian’s own faults – his unreliability, his choice of accommodation and, as Phelge puts it, ‘that stupid five quid’ – were all reasons to reject his early attempts at songwriting. But it wasn’t just Brian; in the wolf-pack’s natural tendency to pick on the less dominant males, the lead Stones turned on Bill Wyman, too. The difference was that Bill rolled over, exposed his stomach, wasn’t a threat. ‘They did everything they could to unload Bill,’ says Phil May, ‘but he simply bit his lip and went through it. They tried to jettison him in the early days but he kept his head down and didn’t make waves. Yet he was an integral part of the band!’ In those early days, say May and Dave Thomson, the art student who became one of Brian’s closest friends, it was Oldham who was most intent on cutting Brian out. ‘I remember a journey back from Birmingham, and all the way back Andrew was, “It’s time we got rid of him”,’ says Thomson. ‘Mick was going along with it, and Keith was neither one way or the other. People talk about Brian’s paranoia – but I was to find out his reasons were one hundred per cent genuine.’
Dawn Molloy, who was seeing Brian more and more often, recalls him as embattled but unbowed over that time. She particularly remembers Keith’s hostility and occasional aggression, yet Brian’s sense of humour – ‘mischievous, kind of devilish’ – sustained him. Dawn, who lived close to Chester Street, had become utterly besotted with Brian, who had used by now well-honed techniques to draw her in: he told her about Linda, how he loved her like a sister, his very openness a ruse. He knew how to talk, telling her about his childhood, asking about every detail of her own life, treating her as his own, fragile, valuable possession, and ‘he was very, very sensual’. Dawn had no wiles to resist his power; but he was silly, funny, too. ‘There were these funny things. For instance his hair kinks in a certain place, and he would get really annoyed by it. He’d always be meticulously clean, with clean shoes, and he couldn’t really deal with a dirty hotel. Then he’d spend ages in the bathroom, inspecting himself . . . he used to get annoyed because underneath his hair, his sideburns were ginger.’
There was a childish, escapist aspect to Brian’s naughtiness – he was ‘devilish’, but playfully so. But Dawn recognized the fragility, which meant he seemed particularly vulnerable to band rivalries and aggression. His psychological stamina already seemed insufficient. ‘I was getting the sense he didn’t like being in a pop group,’ says Dawn. ‘His mind was always going, he wanted to play music . . . it was sad there was no one there to protect him, to be his friend. I was sad for him sometimes. It was no fun.’
*
The pressures continued to mount into the spring of 1965 as the band completed a frenetic British tour, a brief trip to Copenhagen – where Brian saved Mick from electrocution by pulling out the plug on his microphone – and then to Paris, for three sell-out shows at the Olympia, opening Friday, 16 April.
Paris was fast becoming one of Brian’s favoured haunts. It was in this city that another dark, heady element would be added to the already mind-bending Stones alchemy.
For the Olympia shows, the Stones shared a bill with the original Ziggy Stardust: second-string Brit rocker Vince Taylor, who had become massive in France and who would soon lose his marbles thanks to LSD, wander round Charing Cross Road obsessing about UFO landings and eventually run into a young David Bowie. Vince’s percussionist was another wild child, Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, the son of the painter Balthus – his impressive moniker usually shortened to ‘Stash’. As usual, Brian was the reach-out Stone, and he got himself caught up in a wild weekend with Stash and an eclectic array of people that included Stash’s model actress friend Anita Pallenberg, gallery owner Robert Fraser (yet another key figure in the Stones menagerie), French singer Françoise Hardy and the skinny, ravishingly elegant actress/singer Zouzou, all of whom wandered off to the Parisian nightclub Chez Castel.
Zouzou liked the look of Brian, but took pleasure in playing hard to get. As she took in his blond bob and languid charm, he fixed his gaze on her. ‘I love that shirt,’ he announced. ‘Would you like to swap with mine?’ He followed her to the toilet, repeating his request. The chat-up line had worked for Brian many times – it had won him more than a few girls and he’d also blagged quite a few shirts from boys too, for as an emerging dandy he reckoned he had a kind of droit de seigneur on cool clothing, borrowing choice items and never returning them. Zouzou wasn’t impressed by the white acrylic polo neck that was Brian’s current fashion staple ‘but he wouldn’t let me out of the toilets! So I said OK, give me yours.’ Soon the two were staring into each other’s eyes and murmuring quietly. Brian had obtained some potent grass from a source unknown which sent his imagination spiralling off into all kinds of bizarre, dark locations. ‘I heard you had a cannibal restaurant [in Paris],’ he asked a puzzled Zouzou at one stage.
It was a heady, confused rush of experiences. The atmosphere became headier still when the group moved on to a dinner party at the apartment of the writer and artist Donald Cammell, who would be a potent figure in Stones mythology, partly because he wrote the script for the movie Performance. A scion of the Scottish shipbuilding family, he’d hung out with the occultist Aleister Crowley as a kid, drawn beautiful illustrations for children’s books in his teens, won a scholarship to the Royal Academy at sixteen and now, aged thirty-one, was a wannabe film director, arch manipulator and, some reckoned, an aspiring pimp.
It was at Stash’s instigation, says the percussionist, that Anita Pallenberg was there. He had met her earlier in the summer: ‘she was extraordinary – right from the first time I met her: I’d seen her asleep, looking dazzling. It was a very odd way of meeting somebody.’ Brian was too engrossed in Zouzou to exchange more than a couple of words with Anita, but at Cammell’s he ended up sitting next to Stash, who found him intense, charming, the Stone who could hold the deepest conversation. But he was also ‘spooked’, says Stash, who would become one of Brian’s few true friends. The atmosphere in Cammell’s exotic but sombre apartment had a marked effect on him. ‘Who’s that woman?’ he asked Stash, pointing at Cammell’s girlfriend, Deborah Dixon. ‘S
he’s so pale.’ He repeated this over and over, his eyes flicking in her direction as he continued to spook himself, convinced that she was some sort of ghoul. ‘It was an attack of the horrors,’ says Stash. ‘He was prone to it, especially when he was high. So he spent much of the evening terrified of this very, very beautiful woman.’
Zouzou also remembers the bizarre atmosphere, and Cammell trying to involve Brian in some kind of sex game with Anita, Brian laughing and putting Zouzou’s hand on his heart, which was racing in fear or excitement. It was nearing dawn when he made his way back to his small hotel on the Rue des Capucins, with Zouzou in tow. When they arrived a small group of girl fans were waiting for him with their little Kodak Instamatics, and they managed to snap his photo – a blond, dark-eyed spectre in the Paris gloom.
Maybe the spooks were gathering. There was no rest before the band’s third tour of North America, which opened in Montreal on 23 April, and it was after just a couple of days that Brian decided his endurance was at an end. With no one inside the band he could turn to, he decided simply to disappear. In a funk, pondering whether or not to quit, he took refuge with New York DJ Scott Ross, one of the Stones’ most consistent champions on the East Coast. ‘He was in a tail-spin. There was a lot of conflict between the three of them, Mick, Keith and Andrew on one side, and him on the other. A lot of backstabbing and a lot of criticism. He was the originator in that band, but with that triumvirate against him, he didn’t have much of a chance.’ Brian, it is said, was famously over-sensitive. In Life, Keith blamed Brian’s paranoia for his estrangement from the band, his belief that ‘there was a conspiracy to roll him out. Which wasn’t true at all.’ Ross, a first-hand witness whose memory is in a good state, begs to differ. ‘I like Keith,’ he says, ‘but I disagree. One time I was in a hotel room in New York, me and Brian in one room, and in the next there was Mick and Keith – both of them getting at him, ganging up on him. I don’t think he was overreacting. He was simply outnumbered.’
With the Stones organization unaware of his location, Brian and Ross wrestled with his predicament while holed up in his apartment on West 85th, just off Central Park. The pair walked around the park, where Brian passed unrecognized, but Brian felt most secure simply sitting in the apartment.
‘I can’t play, I simply can’t do it,’ he informed Ross, with a blank finality. ‘I can’t record. It’s all out of my control.’
‘It’s a big step, leaving the group. What do you want to do?’ Ross asked him.
‘I don’t know.’
The pair discussed whether Brian should form his own band. ‘He talked about doing bluesier music, but he hadn’t thought it all through, it wasn’t something he had nailed down. He just wanted out, to get away from the conflict.’
To Ross, who knew all the band well, ‘I simply didn’t know how to get it resolved. It was beyond any kind of resolution. I think that Andrew had poisoned the well of the relationship with Mick and Keith, and there was no chance of reconciliation.’
In the end, with no alternative, no way even to get home to Britain, Brian faced up to his demons and rejoined the band, in time for their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. But there was more resentment over his disappearance – ‘attention-seeking behaviour’ is what Andrew Oldham called it – which festered until the next crisis just days later, on 6 May in Clearwater, Florida. As usual, Bill and Brian invited girls up to their motel rooms after the show. In the morning, Brian’s girl appeared in tears telling the band that Brian had hit her. The other Stones asked roadie Mike Dorsey ‘to sort him out. And I did,’ says Dorsey. Bill remembers Dorsey pummelling Brian’s ribs, cracking a couple, but Dorsey describes a more sophisticated punishment: ‘He used to wear a belt and an Indian collar. I held him by the collar and belt out the hotel window and said, “If you ever do that again, I’ll drop you.”’
This wasn’t the first instance of violence. Although Brian had never hit her, Pat Andrews remembers one time when she was in physical fear of him, back in Cheltenham. ‘I’d been talking to a couple of guys I knew from somewhere, and he got very jealous. He did want to hit me.’ Pat ascribed Brian’s extreme jealousy to insecurity – ‘I couldn’t figure out why he was like that . . . until I met his parents.’ Linda Lawrence, Scott Ross and others insist that, if he did occasionally lash out in 1964 and 1965, his behaviour was no worse than his fellow Stones. ‘It was normal behaviour, like teenagers pushing people’s buttons,’ says Linda. ‘And they were all doing it, even though everyone talks now as if it was just him.’
Whether that explanation is true or not, Brian’s innate tendency to jealousy and aggression was exacerbated by his drinking. Keith Altham, later the Stones’ PR and a good friend of Ian Stewart, came to share Stu’s dismissal of Brian’s demons, drink and insecurity: ‘It was that old thing – they’re drunk and don’t know what they’re doing. But that’s an excuse – and you can’t go on excusing somebody for bad behaviour. I think there was a kind of selfishness about him that was part of his downfall.’
As Brian nursed his wounds, and his humiliation, there came a potent symbol of that downfall. For it was at the Clearwater motel that Keith woke up in the middle of the night with a tune in his head, put it on tape, then went back to sleep. Keith wasn’t convinced by the song: he worried it was a one-riff wonder, or that it was a rip-off of another tune he’d heard. Later he mentioned it was Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ Dancing In The Street. In fact the main riff was taken directly from the Vandellas’ Nowhere To Run, as indeed was the rhythm, complete with the exhilarating, stomping, on-beat drums of the definitive take of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, which the band nailed at RCA on 12 May after an abortive first attempt at Chess. Brian voted for Satisfaction as a single, against the objections of both Mick and Keith, depending on who you believe.
The blaring fuzzed guitar line marked Keith’s ascendance as a sonic innovator. There was subtlety there, too, the way the lead guitar riff elegantly morphed into a rhythm pattern – an indication of how, with endless practice, Keith was now outstripping Brian as a guitarist. More significantly, the lyrics, stripped down, cynical and subversive, marked Mick’s ascendance as the band’s spokesman, for their impact exceeded anything Brian, Mick or even Andrew Oldham could deliver in a press interview.
Satisfaction was the perfect encapsulation of Brian’s problems: it brought money flooding in and, more importantly, a cultural impact of which he’d long dreamed, but at the heavy price of losing the leadership of the band he’d created. There are stories he hated the song so much that he’d play Popeye The Sailor Man during live renditions. That wasn’t the reason, says Keith: ‘Oh no, I used to join in with him. It was like, why not, they won’t know the difference.’ Brian’s relationship with Mick was similarly conflicted. Brian remained essentially loyal even as Mick threatened to supplant him, never voicing his frustrations in public. But in one pivotal show, one that exemplified all his achievements to date, the frustrations spilled over. Still, the backstage bickering couldn’t prevent the enormity of the effect Brian Jones had on the world.
It was on 20 May 1965 that Brian Jones built a bridge over a cultural abyss and connected America with its own black culture. The founder Stone introduced Chester Burnett, aka Howlin’ Wolf, on ABC’s Shindig! and thus engineered an event that fulfilled just about every ambition of his twenty-three-year-old life. This was truly a life-changing moment, both for the American teenagers clustered round the TV in their living rooms, and for a generation of blues performers who had been stuck in a cultural ghetto.
Ken Kubernik, the West Coast teenager who was watching that evening, was one of millions of kids who knew names like Chester Burnett and McKinley Morganfield only from the writing credits on the first Stones albums. He was part of a generation that was ‘primed’ for this moment: ‘Seeing Brian on that show, introducing Howlin’ Wolf to a white teeny-bopper audience, it was like Christmas morning for us. The next day in school, that was
all anyone talked about. I don’t think there’s been anything that radical on TV since then. This was a profound paradigm shift – the Stones in general, Brian in particular, introducing our own culture, back to an entire generation of baby boomers. We’d have had no possibility of being exposed to Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters without them.’
Brian was a figure unlike anything previously seen on American TV, introducing another man who was just as unfamiliar and strange. With his long blond hair and soft-spoken, sincere manner, he was a spectacle quite unlike any of the quip-firing Beatles, the only real Brits Kubernik’s generation knew about. ‘We started because we wanted to play rhythm and blues,’ Brian informed interviewer Jimmy O’Neill, ‘and Howlin’ Wolf was one of our greatest idols.’ More than any other moment, Brian hogged the limelight. He was the champion of the rarest R&B, the boy who’d given his life up for it, and he wasn’t letting Mick take any of the credit. As O’Neill asked Mick to add a few words, the Stones’ ex-leader interrupted, ‘It’s about time we shut up and we had Howlin’ Wolf on stage!’ and the camera panned to the towering presence of Chester Burnett, asking America’s teenagers, ‘How many more years I’m gonna let you dog me around?’
