27: Brian Jones (4 page)

By locking himself away outside London, Brian Jones had made a further tactical blunder, removing himself from the centre of power within the Rolling Stones. His timing was off: concerned that the Stones were little more than a high-end covers group, Andrew Loog Oldham was urging Mick and Keith to write their own material. Their co-manager knew he needed a songwriting partnership in the group to push the Stones to the top. He also was aware that Brian Jones, the blues crusader, was too concerned with musical integrity to be bothered about this. ‘Andrew knew he had to bring Mick and Keith together. His problem here was in breaking Keith's natural musical partnership with Brian: from the beginning, as the two guitarists, they had interlinked their lines and worked really well together,' explained Bill.

Almost as soon as Mick and Keith had left Edith Grove for their flat in Mapesbury Road, Andrew Loog Oldham had also moved in with them. Now he had the Dartford pair under his eye. Andrew's constant physical presence in the lives of Mick and Keith split the Rolling Stones into two factions. As the team of Jagger, Richards and Oldham began to run roughshod over everyone else in the group, Mick and Keith would travel to gigs with Andrew in his car, while the rest of the group would be driven by Stu in the van.

*

That autumn Andrew Loog Oldham secured the Rolling Stones a support slot on a tour that the Everly Brothers were headlining; the fact that Bo Diddley was also on the bill was a further bonus that certainly did not go amiss. The tour was colossally successful for the Stones, climaxing at the Hammersmith Odeon where, playing on home ground, they had a formidable reception. The Everlys had paper cups thrown at them.

Unfortunately for Brian Jones, it was during these dates that the rest of the group learned Brian was being paid an extra £5 a week for being leader of the group. He had also expressed a desire to stay in more expensive hotels than the rest of the Stones. ‘He had this arrangement with Easton,' Keith said, ‘that as leader of the band he was entitled to this extra payment. Everybody freaked out. That was the beginning of the decline of Brian. We said, “Fuck you.”'

Anxious for a new song, the Stones had covered a Lennon-McCartney tune, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man', for their second single, released in November 1963. But the success of the Liverpudlian songwriting team had fired the ambitions of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – and motivated the mind of Andrew Loog Oldham. The first fruits of Mick and Keith's efforts to emulate Lennon and McCartney were essayed at Regent Sound on 20 and 21 November. The Stones recorded demos of six songs written by the pair at Mapesbury Road. They included ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday', which soon became a hit when recorded by Gene Pitney. Tucked in at the end of the sessions was another song, ‘Sure I Do', one of two numbers demoed by the Stones that bore the credit ‘B. Jones'. No other artist, however, picked up Brian's song.

At the end of January the Stones went back to Regent Sound to record ‘Not Fade Away'. Armed with glasses of Scotch and Coke, the group transformed the session into a party. Buddy Holly's ‘Not Fade Away' had a Bo Diddley-like arrangement – the Stones took it and emphasized that beat, with Keith on acoustic guitar, Brian on harmonica and Stu on piano. Alan Clarke and Graham Nash of the Hollies, whose crafted harmonies had inspired the Stones to import something similar into their own sound, were on back-up vocals, and Phil Spector, the most revered of record producers, was shaking maracas. With Mick Jagger, Spector also came up with ‘Little by Little', the B-side, a song they dashed off at the session, which was credited to Phelge-Spector. Spector's presence certainly added sharper focus to both songs; although Andrew Loog Oldham was nominally at the production helm, the Stones essentially had their third single, a blast of high-end energy, produced by the most visionary pop music producer of the day.

Four days after recording ‘Not Fade Away', with Brian Jones on the tune's distinctive harmonica parts, the Stones returned to Regent Sound studio on 25 February 1964 and recorded three more songs, including ‘Good Times, Bad Times', a song which Mick and Keith had written. Brian was visibly disturbed that this was a Jagger-Richards composition. Although he was writing in Windsor, Brian never showed the rest of the group his material – his inferiority complex was too great. ‘It was a pivotal moment in Regent Sound when Mick and Keith presented their first wares for the Stones to record,' said Andrew Loog Oldham in his autobiography
Stoned
.

Soon the Rolling Stones were off on their fourth tour of the UK, one that ran from 1 April to 31 May 1964. For two shows in Bristol the Stones played with the magnificent, black leather-clad Gene Vincent. Perhaps a harbinger of coming events, Brian missed the first Bristol show.

On 26 April 1964 James Phelge went round to Mapesbury Road, for a trip to Wembley's Empire Pool, where the Rolling Stones were performing at the annual
New Musical Express
Poll-Winners' Concert. At the flat he told Keith that Brian had complained that he and Mick wouldn't consider recording any of his songs. Keith laughed, calling out this news to Mick in the kitchen: ‘Fuckin' Jonesey's been moaning to Phelge that we won't record his songs. Fuckin' typical.'

‘They're fuckin' crap,' called out Mick.

‘Everything he writes ends up sounding like a fuckin' hymn. They're all dirges of doom. You'd need a fuckin' Welsh choir to record 'em,' continued Keith.

In May 1964 Keith started going out with Linda Keith, a top British model. Brian's response to Keith's first proper relationship was to behave with extreme pettiness. One night on tour Keith hammered him, blackening his eye, after Brian had eaten Keith's portion of chicken while the guitarist was having sex with Linda. The group took to calling Brian ‘Mr Shampoo' after he announced to
Rave
magazine that he washed his hair twice a day. ‘Brian was so sensitive, really. At the beginning it was a joke, because he was so sensitive about everything,' said Mick Jagger in 1971. ‘When people used to go on about us being dirty, we used to laugh it off. But Brian got really hurt when people suggested he didn't wash his hair – which he did … I never quite understood what Brian wanted to do. He was very shy, and we didn't try and bring it out of him, properly. It wasn't a question of forcefully stifling him … He was very funny.'

On 1 June 1964 the Rolling Stones disembarked at New York's Idlewild airport from BOAC flight 505, their first visit to the United States. Mick was the first to step off the plane. At the airport press conference, he was asked, ‘Who's the leader?' ‘We are,' he responded, perhaps to Brian's surprise. ‘All of us.'

On 24 October, the Rolling Stones began their second US tour at the Academy of Music in New York, with an afternoon and evening show. The next day they appeared on the
Ed Sullivan Show
, performing ‘Time Is on My Side', their first substantial US hit, co-written by Mick and Keith. The third date on this second US tour gave the Stones more national television exposure: an appearance on the
T.A.M.I.
(‘Teenage Awards Music International')
Show
, shot at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in southern California. Although there was a balance of white acts – the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, Lesley Gore, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas – the Stones found themselves topping the bill with a five-song set over a host of their heroes: Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Chuck Berry, and – most of all – James Brown and the Famous Flames. During the two days of rehearsals, Brian Jones and James Brown built a friendship – later Mick and Keith would both become good friends with him. Mick, meanwhile, assiduously studied the foot movements of the Godfather of Soul.

A week after the second Stones album appeared in the British shops at the end of January 1965, the Stones began a tour of Australia, New Zealand and the Far East. On the way to Australia they stopped in Los Angeles, where time had been booked at RCA Studios in Hollywood. There they recorded two new Mick and Keith songs: ‘The Last Time' and ‘Play with Fire'.

In Sydney the Stones played to 35,000 people in seven nights. There had been a shift in onstage roles: although until now the back-up singers had been Bill and Brian, Andrew Loog Oldham was pushing Keith to sing with Mick, wishing to promote them as a double-act.

In the late winter of 1965, the Stones played another UK tour. The final date of this tour, at Romford ABC, was marked by an incident milked by Andrew for maximum publicity. Returning from this Essex show to nearby London at 11.30 that night, Mick, Brian and Bill were refused permission to use a toilet in the Francis Service Petrol Station in East Ham. ‘Get off my forecourt,' said the attendant. ‘Get off my foreskin,' replied Brian. About ten yards up an adjacent side-road, the trio's micturitions were splashed about a nearby wall.

Just over three months later, on 1 July, a private summons was issued against the three members of the Stones, alleging ‘insulting behaviour' at the East Ham filling station. At the court hearing, on 22 July, each of them was found guilty of this charge and fined £5, with 15 guineas costs. The next day's
Daily Mirror
reported the case: ‘Wyman asked if he could go to the lavatory, but was refused. A mechanic, Mr Charles Keeley, asked Jagger to get the group off the forecourt of the garage. He brushed him aside, saying, “We will piss anywhere, man.” This was taken up by the group as a chant as one of them danced. Wyman, Jagger and Jones were seen to urinate against a wall of the garage.' Across the country, schoolboys mimicked their chant as they urinated in inappropriate locations.

On 14 September 1965 the Rolling Stones played the Circus Kronebau in Munich, where Brian Jones first met Anita Pallenberg. They spent the night together, with Brian in tears for most of their time together over the way he claimed he was being treated by Mick and Keith.

*

The Stones' new photographer, Gered Mankowitz, went with the group on their next, 48-date, US tour. Gered had a great time, enjoying an unprecedented creative burst. In this concentrated period with the group, the photographer was able to clearly observe the group's various members, especially Brian, who drew considerable attention to himself through his actions. ‘The general atmosphere was pretty good. But it was there that Brian began to show serious oddness in his behaviour. He did a few very strange things. I saw him nearly bottle somebody in a club, for no reason other than that the guy was being persistent and an irritating pest, wanting a piece of Brian. And Brian just completely blew his top and smashed a bottle and was stopped from bottling this guy. That was a nasty incident that showed a side and an aggression that came as a bit of a surprise. I think it was in New York, because the way the tour was organized, we had no social life anywhere else at all. They used to fly out after the show, and travel through the night, and arrive at places at three or four in the morning. So there were no fans, no groupies, no partying, no fun. It was only in some of the major cities, where perhaps we were based for two or three days, that there was some fun and some sex and some drugs and some rock 'n' roll going on.'

‘For most of the time it was hard graft and a rather dreary routine. So this incident with Brian was in a club, and it might have been New York and it might have been Nashville. We were in Nashville for two or three quite good nights. Brian disappeared. He got out of a limousine in a traffic jam and just disappeared. And they carried on without him and announced that he was ill. And he reappeared two or three nights later. I never really understood what went on. But there was clearly something about Brian that was odd and strange, and he was having a lot of struggles.'

‘I don't think I felt the band were judgmental about Brian. They were just affected. They'd find themselves without him. And they had to do a show, and this was at a point in their career when everything really counted. If one member of the group is seriously dysfunctional, the impact on everybody else is … he's putting everybody on the line. I remember Stu grabbing him once in the wings as he came off and lifting him off the ground, and telling him that he was letting everybody down, not just himself.'

‘During this nine-week tour, I began to see this other side of Brian. In Florida they broke for a couple of days. Anita Pallenberg joined Brian there, and then left after a couple of days. But he invited me up to his room, and he said, “I've got two tabs of acid left, and I wonder if you would like to have one.” I said, “No, I'm not interested in acid, thank you very much.” So he said, “Oh, okay. I'll tell you what: you take both of them and I'll write down everything you say.” He was really out there, Brian. He was experimenting, he was ahead of them, he was freaking. In New York he was hanging out with Bob Dylan: that was the tour when there were the famous lost tapes when they were hanging out in his room. He introduced me to Bob Dylan. And then there was a tremendous power failure black-out and their idea of laying down a few tracks never happened. And they just got completely out of it. As everybody did that night. Brian was showing the character faults that he clearly had.'

‘He could be very interesting. He was capable of being incredibly charming and incredibly polite. Beautifully mannered. But then he'd turn, and he could be incredibly unpleasant. Very cliquey: he'd whisper in front of you, he and Anita would whisper. He loved to have the feeling that he had one over on you: that he knew something that you didn't know. And there was something weaselly about him that made him difficult.'

‘However, the band seemed to forgive him his transgressions very, very quickly. It wasn't like an irritating sore. Although I wasn't privy to business meetings and discussions, and I don't know whether there were moments when they all got together and had terrible screaming matches. But certainly the feeling was that they forgave him, and that everybody was trying to work together. And when it all worked, it was fantastic. I think that was what was holding everything together. When it all gelled, it was so good – and Brian was such a crucial and integral part of that. Brian had this huge fan base, and his fans were more focused. And it made it more important to try and live with his oddness. But the seeds were being sown.'