27: Brian Jones (6 page)

*

The end of the summer of 1966 was a pivotal time in the emotional lives of both Mick and Keith. To the consternation of Brian, who a few months previously had seized control of the awkward triangular relationship between himself, Keith and Mick, the Stones singer now began to hang out at Courtfield Road with Keith. The guitarist was beginning to acknowledge that he had smouldering feelings for Anita, a flame that burned brighter when he discovered precisely how Brian had hurt his hand. His innate psychic abilities heightened – and confused – by his drug intake, Brian was perpetually anxious that something was going on between Anita and Keith.

By now, moreover, it was hard not to pick up on the tension between Brian and Anita. When Brian ran into Ronni Money, the wife of his friend Zoot Money, the keyboardist and bandleader, in the Scotch of St James nightclub, Anita peremptorily ordered, ‘I don't want you talking to this slag!' Brian's response was to punch her on the nose and tell her never to speak of Ronni in such a manner.

The 18th of December 1966 brought a major trauma that affected London's chic young set to such an extent that it earned mention in one of the new songs being worked on by the Beatles. Brian's good friend Tara Browne was killed in a car crash. He drove his Lotus Elan, the most chic of sports cars, straight into a parked truck in Redcliffe Gardens in nearby Earls Court. With him was his girlfriend Suki Potier. She was utterly distraught, and Brian provided personal care to her on a daily basis. ‘He gave me a shoulder to cry on and he picked up the pieces and made me feel a woman again,' said Suki. Later, Brian would have a relationship with her: on and off, the pair dated for approximately two years.

*

Anita, meanwhile, had been cast in the lead role in a film being made by German director Volker Schlöndorff. It was called
A Degree of Murder
, the story of a girl who accidentally kills her boyfriend with his own gun as he attempts to beat her. Shooting was set to start at the beginning of 1967 and Brian was taken on to write the score. He moved to Munich, staying with Anita in Schlöndorff's apartment for the duration of the filming. The director had taken Brian on for the role not simply as a sop to Anita:
[23]
‘I liked Brian and trusted him. You could feel that he had a lot of creativity. He was a poet, an
enfant terrible
it's true, but he was very much in touch with his time and he was also very much in love with Anita, the only actress in the movie – and its soul. She was bound to inspire him. I know he loved her, and I think she loved him. She was certainly in love with his lifestyle.' On the soundtrack Brian drew on his by now familiar panoply of instrumentation: sitar, organ, dulcimer, harmonica, autoharp, flute, piano, violin, banjo and saxophone. Later brought in by Brian to add further textural instrumentation were Yardbirds' guitarist Jimmy Page, renowned session pianist Nicky Hopkins and Small Faces' drummer Kenney Jones.

In London, where Volker Schlöndorff followed Brian to get him to complete the score, the director felt he had become much more moody, an air of permanent upset hanging over him. ‘There was obviously tension within the Stones too. It was very clear that Brian wanted more profile or he would go his own way.'

While the director had become fond of Brian, he was struck by his barely concealed paradoxes. ‘Brian was extremely likeable … Yet he wouldn't often allow you to like him … There was also something definitely devilish about Brian. He'd sense your weakness with incredible intuition and, if the mood took him, he'd exploit it. On the other hand, he could turn around and be incredibly nice to you. I liked Brian, but he was a complicated guy.'
[24]

*

It wouldn't have seemed like a new year if the Rolling Stones had not begun 1967 with more of their by now habitual controversy. On Friday 13 January they released a new single, ‘Let's Spend the Night Together' – a title which seemed a little obvious, immature and humourless in its efforts to create media uproar. Although perfectly catchy, a tiredness also lay at the heart of the tune, with the suggestion that the cod-naughty lyrics were chosen to boost its rather uninspired melody and riffs. No doubt precisely as the group hoped, various American radio stations immediately banned the song, thereby only enhancing its word-of-mouth reputation. The B-side was ‘Ruby Tuesday', a Keith composition about Linda Keith, featuring Brian on flute. In the United States, ‘Ruby Tuesday' began to be promoted more and more, until it became a number 1 record. In Britain ‘Let's Spend the Night Together' remained the A-side, however, and the Stones plugged it on 22 January on the
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
ITV programme. This was a variety show with an enormous mass-market audience that the Beatles had always exploited to the maximum.

When the Stones arrived at the Palladium, behind Oxford Circus, matters did not kick off especially auspiciously. Keith and Brian turned up together, tripping on LSD, and Brian immediately placed a large water-pipe on top of the piano. Such gestures were considered radical in those times.

The London Palladium date was not only intended to plug the single. Two days before it, the Stones had released yet another new album,
Between the Buttons
, the fruits of August sessions in Los Angeles. It was the first album that the Stones had recorded with a conceptual approach. In Britain's
NME
, longstanding Stones' supporter Roy Carr gave it a very bad review. There was no getting away from it – it was a weak album, the songs sounding like outtakes from the
Aftermath
sessions.

But in America it received a largely ecstatic response. The cover of the album was another picture by Gered Mankowitz: an archetypal shot of the group hunched up in their overcoats against the early morning chill, taken on Primrose Hill in north London after an all-night recording session.

There was another significant factor about that Gered Mankowitz shot: on the cover picture for
Out of Our Heads
, which Mankowitz had also taken, Brian was right up at the front of the group. Sixteen months later, for the insubstantial, confused
Between the Buttons
album, he was right at the back, like an afterthought that was fading away.

*

On 5 February 1967, the
News of the World
ran an article in which it alleged that the Stones' singer had taken LSD at the London home of the Moody Blues. In the article a pair of reporters described how they had met ‘Mick Jagger' at Blaise's night club in South Kensington. While there he had taken six Benzedrine amphetamine tablets and brandished a lump of hash. He was also said, highly implausibly, to have admitted to having first taken LSD while on the road with Bo Diddley and Little Richard. ‘I don't go much on it now the cats (fans) have taken it up. It'll just get a dirty name.'

It wasn't Mick, of course; it was Brian, seeing straight through the reporters and sending them up in his customarily supercilious manner. This didn't especially help Mick, and proved even more damaging for Brian, for whom the small episode in a nightclub would ultimately have disastrous consequences, both inside and outside the group.

The next day a writ for libel was served by Mick Jagger on the
News of the World
. As a consequence the Sunday newspaper put even more reporters onto investigating Mick's drug habits.

Now matters began to gather pace. David Schneiderman, a self-styled ‘acid king' whom Keith and Brian had met in New York on the Stones' last US tour, arrived in London. He brought with him, he said, a suitcase full of top-grade LSD. Keith and Brian were out of town, having flown to Munich to watch Anita filming in
A Degree of Murder
.

When Keith returned on Friday 10 February, and learned Schneiderman was in town with his bag of goodies, he suggested a select group should go down to Redlands, a country house in East Sussex he had recently purchased, to sample these wares. The Beatles were invited, but only George Harrison and Patti Boyd could make it. Tired from working on the Schlöndorff soundtrack, Brian and Anita were late. Brian called Keith to apologize, at the very moment that police burst into Redlands. ‘Don't bother, Brian: we've all just been busted!' Keith told him over the phone.

*

Like an executioner's axe, the full force of the British establishment was hovering over the collective neck of the Rolling Stones. Accordingly, assorted members of the cast decided to leave the UK, with Morocco as their chosen destination.

Attempting to create a smokescreen around their eventual destination, Keith, Brian and Anita flew to Paris, checking into the George V hotel. Tom Keylock, who worked for the Stones, took the ferry and drove to the French capital in Keith's Bentley with its black-tinted windows.

Bombing through the countryside south of Paris Brian was aware of an almost palpable psychic bond between his girlfriend and Keith. Attempting to anaesthetize himself to this in the only way he knew how, he passed the first day's journey by pouring copious quantities of French cognac down his throat and chain-smoking joints, each containing enormous amounts of hashish. By the time they were fifty miles out of Toulouse, this intake, as well as the sexual vibes in the car, had caught up on Brian, and he could hardly breathe. Was it an asthma attack? Or something more serious? No one seemed to know. Whatever the cause, he was admitted to the Centre Hospitalier d'Albi outside Toulouse.

At Brian's insistence, the other occupants of the Bentley left him there, continuing on their way through the Pyrenees into Spain. Anita ignored a telegram sent by Brian, asking her to meet him from hospital. In Valencia Keith and Anita spent the night together, but agreed to treat it as a passing whim. Finally, after Anita had spent four more nights with Keith in Marbella, she flew up to Toulouse to meet Brian on Sunday 5 March. Five days later the couple flew back to London for Brian to undergo further medical tests.

On 9 March, Marianne Faithfull – who had replaced Chrissie Shrimpton in Mick Jagger's affections – flew from Naples to Tangier to meet up with Mick. In Tangier the Stones' party took over the entire tenth floor of the Hotel Minzah. The artist Brion Gysin was in the city and came by to hang out with them. On 15 March Brian and Anita finally arrived in Tangier. That night, after they had been tripping, Brian and Anita began to argue yet again. After Anita had taken sleeping tablets and locked herself in her bedroom, Brian left and picked up a pair of tattooed Berber whores. After bringing them back to the hotel, he tried to persuade Anita to have group sex with them, smashing up the room and beating her when she refused. She fled to Keith's room and spent the night with him. The next day Anita sat in a canvas swing by the deep end of the pool, her gaze held by Keith in the water.

That evening they learned that a plane-load of Fleet Street's finest was on its way to Tangier to track down the party. Immediately, they made off to Marrakech.

*

In Marrakech, they checked into the Sadi Hotel. ‘We're all in Marrakech,' Keith said. ‘Cecil Beaton's there, Robert Fraser, Brion Gysin, Mick, and the airs's like heavy, lots of people doing acid. I'm feeling guilty.'

‘They were a strange group,' wrote Cecil Beaton, the photographer, in his diary. ‘The three Stones: Brian Jones and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg – dirty white face, dirty blackened eyes, dirty canary drops of yellow hair, barbaric jewelry – Keith R. in 18th century suit, long black velvet coat and tightest pants, and of course, Mick Jagger. He is sexy, but completely sexless. … None of them is willing to talk, except in spasms. No one could make up their minds what to do, or when.'

The next day Brion Gysin was persuaded to take Brian to the nearby Atlas Mountains, to hear the celebrated pipe sounds of the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

As soon as he had gone, Keith bundled Anita into his car and they drove back to Tangier. Everyone else also left, leaving a shocked, hurt Brian to pay the bill for the entire party. Keith and Anita caught a ferry to Spain.

The couple only drove as far as Madrid, where they took a plane to London. There, Keith and Anita went immediately to the crash pad that Keith still kept in St John's Wood, the scene of his dying relationship with Linda Keith.

Brian flew to Paris to briefly stay with Donald Cammell, the society painter who would shortly co-direct
Performance
, arriving on his doorstep drunk, with his customarily elegant clothes in tatters. Then, in deep emotional pain, he returned to London. He drove over to the flat in St John's Wood and when Keith opened the door, he collapsed on the carpet in front of him, beseeching Anita to return. This was not to be the last such occasion. For a long time Brian refused to accept that Anita had left him, just as he had refused to accept that he was no longer ‘leader of the Rolling Stones'. ‘He never forgave me,' said Keith. ‘I don't blame him.'

Anita's leaving Brian for Keith Richards was devastating to him and Brian's father believed the shock of this altered the entire course of his life. ‘He changed suddenly and alarmingly from a bright, enthusiastic young man to a quiet and morose and inward-looking young man,' said Lewis Jones in 1971. ‘In our opinion he was never the same boy again. I've always been concerned that that was the turning-point in his life.'

The day Brian returned from Paris, the
Daily Mirror
reported that Mick and Keith were to be charged for offences against the drug laws: Mick for illegal possession of amphetamines, and Keith for ‘premises', which found the owner or landlord of any property in which there was illegal drug consumption to be as guilty as those partaking of the particular substance.

*

A week after Brian had finally returned from Morocco on 18 March 1967, the Rolling Stones began a three-week European tour, opening in Malmo in Sweden. After Sweden, the group raced through four dates in Germany: in Bremen, Cologne, Dortmund and Hamburg. Anita Pallenberg, whom Brian had met in Germany, had gone off with the guy who stood on the other side of Mick Jagger onstage. So it was an uneasy Brian who embarked with the group on this tour, while Keith was conscious all the time of Brian's bitter resentment. ‘Mr Shampoo', however, was unaware that at this stage Anita, who had gone to Italy for another film part, in Roger Vadim's sexual science-fiction fantasy
Barbarella
, had not in fact committed herself to Keith – although she had committed to leaving Brian. Just to add to the atmosphere of confusion, despite having apparently won Anita, Keith began an affair with a German model called Uschi Obermaier, who accompanied him to the quartet of German shows. This seemed only to rub Brian's face even deeper into the dirt of his depression, a personal shame that would have been magnified a thousand times if he had appreciated this was the last time that he would tour with the Stones.