The Stones and Brian Jones

The Rolling Stones are very much alive in our house at the moment. Not just because the remaining members of the band released their first new album of original music in 18 years only a month ago. There have been benchmarks. I recently wrote a post for Mick’s Jagger’s 80th birthday, preceded a year earlier by ones on Brian Jones and Ian Stewart and of course a eulogy for Charlie Watts. (My much earlier one on Keith Richard was a bit perfunctory. I’ll do a better one at a certain point strictly in the name of fairness, which I’ll probably peg to his 2010 autobiography). My wife recently read Elizabeth Winder’s Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling Stones, so that’s fed our domestic conversation. My genius friend Tammy Faye Starlight, who performs impressions of both Mick and Marianne Faithfull, is performing a benefit concert for Faithfull (who’s recovering from long form Covid) at Pangea on December 22, 2023.

So when I got a release promoting Nick Broomfield’s new documentary The Stones and Brian Jones, naturally I jumped on it, because it’s precisely where my head was at (I’d even named my earlier piece “The Stones Were Better With Jones”. Some rhymes just need to be made). Broomfield has made films on class, politics, true crime, concert films (like Spalding Gray’s Monster in a Box) and lots of ones on popular music, including films about artists as diverse as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love;Suge Knight, Biggie and Tupac; Leonard Cohen; and Whitney Houston. With a name that sounds so much like “Mike Bloomfield” he had to get around to the blues at some point! And this is a film that needed to be made. The existing documentary about Jones I wrote about in my previous post is pretty cockamamie, full of way out conspiracy theories about the manner of Jones’ death. Broomfield has made numerous films about killers. If there was something to such a story he would have run it down. But, you know, the real story is dramatic enough.

Long-time fans know the arc, but since the climax to this leg of the Stones’ career ended over a half century ago, younger people might be forgiven for not having been exposed to the narrative. Brian Jones was the guy who actually founded and named the Rolling Stones and hired all of the other members. It was originally a straight up blues act, performing covers of songs by American blacks, and that original incarnation of the band was already successful enough to inspire riots and mobs of screaming girls. At this stage, Jones handed over the reins of management to Andrew Loog Oldham, who made a flurry of savvy but cold-blooded business decisions which amplified that initial success a hundred times over.

In his first move, Oldham busted Stewart, the band’s piano player, down to roadie. Then, inspired by the success of Lennon and McCartney, he encouraged Jagger and Richard to try writing their own songs, sensing that that was where there was real money to be made. Astoundingly, the pair turned out to be just about as good as the Beatles at writing hit songs. Unfortunately for Jones, that development immediately altered the hierarchy in the band. He, Wyman, and Watts seemed demoted to a second class status, barred even from talking with the press. The Jagger-Richards originals were pop, however, and not the blues — which is what the band had been formed to promote. Jones was unhappy, but within a few months he managed to bounce back to a central role in the band again, both by experimenting with all sorts of exotic instruments that were often the making of songs during the psychedelic era, and by dating model Anita Pallenberg, who helped turn him into one of the most flamboyantly modish dandies of the era. Drugs and bad behavior drove Pallenberg from the arms of Jones to those of Richard, however. He deteriorated further, was fired from the band, and died at the bottom of his swimming pool less than a month later.

There is a tendency (you’ll find it reflected in my previous post) to regard these developments with indignation — how dare anyone throw a guy out of a project he FOUNDED? But of course by that point, the band no longer “belonged” to Jones in a legal sense. Others owned pieces of the concern by contract. He was VOTED out. Further this film’s three dimensional portrait fills the picture out some. A good deal of what happened had less to do (entirely) with the others shutting Jones out (though you can see film of them doing just that) than with his own constitutional inability to compete. In other words, the others might have been open to his original music if he could muster the boldness to present it (and he did write some). That was how it worked in the Beatles: the members all got material on albums but it wasn’t handed to them, they had to assert themselves. But Jones was sensitive and moody and preferred to brood and be alienated. A rebel by nature, it was logical that he would rebel against the powers that be in the band, the same as he had with those at home and at school.

Those who think they already know the story will derive all sorts of wonderful new insights in Broomfield’s film, I think. The biggest revelation for me was a newfound respect for Bill Wyman, whom I’d been accustomed to belittling after learning things like, for example, that great bass line in “Sympathy for the Devil” was played by Keith Richard. Wyman did, however, write “In Another Land”, one of my favorite tunes on Their Satanic Majesty’s Request. And if Bill Wyman could do that, Good Lord, why couldn’t Jones? At any rate Wyman had a front row seat during the early years and is definitely not inclined to be a Jagger-Richard mouthpiece. He describes Jones’ contributions to individual songs, an account that will impress you mightily. He also taught Mick to play the harmonica, and Richards’ many of the techniques he would bring to certain songs on guitar. It’s a valuable perspective to have. There are also archival interviews with the other Stones that humanize them in the narrative. (In typical fashion, however, while Mick SAYS nice things, it’s hard to square that with actual documentary evidence of him giving Jones the dead eye in social situations.) Also interviewed especially for the film — Eric Burdon! It was rewarding to catch a glimpse the octogenarian Newcastler if only for about a minute.

The film also has rare interviews with some of the women in Jones’ life. He was no Saint when it came to women, to put it mildly, more like a serial parasite, with a downright jaw-dropping track record of impregnating them then dumping them. It’s interesting to hear these women be so protective of him all these decades later in spite of his callousness and cruelty. He really was a Don Juan, and he was worse to some of them than this movie communicates. That’s a piece of the narrative that could do with some beefing up.

Freddie Fox supplies the voice of Jones himself in the film; and some other players in his life, such as his father, are also read by actors. It’s a trend that makes me a little queasy, and I do wish that film-makers would do a better job of clarifying that when it’s the case.

Anyway, the film is must for any real Rolling Stones fans and it opens in theatres today! For more on The Stones and Brian Jones go here.