18.06.2015

Stoned and dethroned

Paul Trynka Sympathy for the devil: the birth of the Rolling Stones and the death of Brian Jones Bantam Press, 2014, pp368, £16.99

When I was around 10 I opened up a book my dad owned about the Rolling Stones (Roy Carr The Rolling Stones: an illustrated record London 1976). One of the Stones in the photographs was a blond-headed man who stood out from the other four. In one picture, he was looking at the camera with a small garden fork in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other with an impish grin on his face. Noticeable also were the big puffy bags under his eyes. This, at least to my 10-year-old imagination, wasn’t a run-of-the-mill human being.

This person was Brian Jones, one of the original members and guitarists in the Rolling Stones. I learnt from my dad’s book that tragedy had surrounded him and that Jones had died very young (at 27 years) in 1969; I also knew this because my dad had a picture of my step-mum standing by Brian’s grave in Cheltenham.

It was only when I got older, around 17, and I started to listen to the Stones (initially their 1960s output) that my dad deemed I was a suitable acolyte for another level of the myth around Brian; that he was more than just some kind of wayward 1960s fashion symbol. Here was someone who was a brilliant instrumentalist before he got too wrecked on alcohol and drugs. For this, my dad cited such audio moments as slashing guitar intros and outros on ‘Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadow?’ (1966); and Brian’s doleful slide guitar on ‘Little red rooster’ (1964).

And so the myth goes on recurring down the years since his death; the stack of books about his life keeps growing; while a set of implausible conspiracy theories also continues to circulate. Ironically, at first glance, there is a certain market for Brian Jones, as the Rolling Stones continue on the ascent they have been on since his death in 1969 to becoming ‘the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world’. This ascent has become steadily more bizarre and grotesque, as Jagger, Richards et al have turned into pensioners belting out unsentimental and commodified renderings of the songs of their rebellious youth to millions of people across the globe. The ghost of Brian Jones continues to hover in the wings as a symbol of what the Stones were in the 1960s, suggesting an underlying dissatisfaction (bad pun intended) with this state of affairs.

The Rolling Stones were originally founded in 1962 by Brian Jones, who was from Cheltenham in England. Already something of a bad boy (he had made a schoolgirl pregnant and went on to father a host of children by different women), Jones was an enthusiast for American rhythm and blues (R&B). Formed in the shadow of older British practitioners, such as Alexis Korner, the Rolling Stones were the spearheads of the British R&B boom. Jones (at this point on guitar and harmonica) was joined by Mick Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards (guitar), Bill Wyman (bass) and Charlie Watts (drums). Although the guiding musical force behind the band’s early recordings of R&B covers, Jones was steadily marginalised, as the group’s rise in the popular music charts continued into 1964 and 1965 - as Jagger and Richards monopolised the songwriting of huge international hits, such as ‘(I can’t get no) Satisfaction’.

Jones, however, continued to play an important role in the group’s sound until around 1967 (indeed, it has been suggested frequently that many compositions credited to Jagger-Richards were in fact group compositions). In 1967, the British establishment persecuted the Stones in a number of well-publicised drug busts, with Jones becoming an enduring target. This was combined with a number of epic trips to Morocco, one of which ended with Jones being abandoned by Jagger and Richards and Anita Pallenberg, Brian’s girlfriend of the time, who left him for Richards. This persecution and the souring of inter-band relationships escalated Jones’s drug and alcohol use, which worsened medical conditions such as anxiety.

By 1968, Jones had become a much more peripheral figure in the group, leading to his effective sacking in June 1969. The next month Jones was dead as a result of drowning in his own swimming pool at Cotchford Farm in East Sussex - the official verdict being ‘death by misadventure’. Without Jones, the Stones did a major US tour in the fall of 1969, the first iteration of the so-called ‘greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world’ shtick that would become all too familiar.

Contested

Since that time, the history of Brian Jones and the Rolling Stones has been a contested one. For Jagger and Richards, Jones shifts from being an object of pity (usually Jagger), who was just too out of it to play and not really interested in the group, to one of relative scorn (Richards). Richards, in particular, puts the death of Jones in an inevitablist frame of reference, stating that it was just something that was bound to happen. Charlie Watts has portrayed Jones as an unlikable person addicted to excess. Whatever degree of empathy is shown to Jones (and Jagger has begun to express some regret at the treatment of his former guitarist in recent documentary films such as Crossfire hurricane), Jagger and Richards have, in general, downplayed his contribution to the band’s music.

This has not been a one-way street. Probably the best book about the band, Stanley Booth’s True adventures of the Rolling Stones (first appearing in 1984), was more sympathetic to Jones in the period of the 1967-68 drug busts, portraying some of the psychodrama of his everyday life without using this as a stick to berate Jagger and Richards. A more forceful note of dissent was raised by the group’s former bassist, Bill Wyman, in Stone alone: the story of a rock ’n’ roll band (1990). While this is mostly to be regarded as one of the worst rock autobiographies ever (unless you are vexed by such issues as what brand of cigarettes Jagger smoked or how much was in Wyman’s bank account at the end of every month), its author did illustrate that, despite Jones being a difficult personality to contend with, the Rolling Stones were very much Brian’s creation and that this influence was unpicked by a cabal of Jagger, Richards and manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Wyman quickly became somewhat estranged from the Stones after the book’s first appearance, although he did not officially depart until 1993.

Even Jagger and Richards themselves have hinted at points that they had lost something with Jones’s passing. In 1989, after something of a mid-1980s hiatus, the group felt obliged to return to Morocco to record with the Master Musicians of Joujouka with whom Jones had worked in the late 1960s (the excellent Brian Jones presents the pipes of Pan at Joujouka was released after his death in 1971). The song that emerged, ‘International drift’ on the 1989 album, Steel wheels, was execrable, but the BBC documentary made to accompany the visit was interesting because of its movement - partly a reluctant celebration of the impact that Jones had had on the band; partly an attempt to minimise that influence; and, secretly, an acknowledgement that the Stones’ music had gone awry in subsequent decades.

A more effusive outpouring of emotion on Jones’s behalf was made by Genesis P Orridge (formerly of ‘industrial’ pioneers Throbbing Gristle) and Psychic TV, who released a song entitled ‘Godstar’ in 1985. This dealt with the life of the dead guitarist under the pretext of the lines, “You were so beautiful/You were so very special/I wish I were with you now/I wish I could save you somehow.” This, loosely, has become the unacknowledged mantra of a fairly large body of fans and one that generally suggests, in a reversal of the Jagger-Richards narrative, that it was Jones who was betrayed and let down by the group’s latter-day leaders. This, in turn, has led to the production of various conspiracy theories about the death and a dreadful film from 2005, Stoned, which tried to bring one of these ‘murder’ conspiracy fantasies to life. There are various Brian Jones fan clubs in existence and there is even an awful bronze bust of him in Cheltenham, which seems rather ironic to anyone who’s spent time there.

Paul Trynka, the author of Sympathy for the devil, steers a path through the morass of conflicting narratives around Jones, examining and rejecting the various conspiracy theories and painting a picture of an anxious, brooding and difficult musician who was beset by a host of personal troubles, exacerbated by abuse of alcohol and drugs. Critically though, Jones is not cast as a foredoomed character. He continued to play a crucial role in the music of the Stones until at least 1967. Even after Anita Pallenberg left him for Richards in 1967, Jones was still capable of a recovery, only finally being unpicked in his last years by continual harassment by the police and his use of Quaalude depressants. (For an illustration of the degraded physical spectacle that Jones had become near his end, see the film footage of him in The Rolling Stones rock and roll circus from December 1968.)

The continuation of this messy debate is, as stated before, due to the evolution of what was an expression of intense British teenage enthusiasm for R&B and, more broadly, Americana, in the context of a dreary post-war British context, into a modern-day commodified form that is a sheer, relentless repetition of what went before: that is, the Rolling Stones as they are in 2015 and as they have been for the last 40 years or so.

Shifts

The Rolling Stones began (and remained) as copyists - initially brilliant copyists, taking older forms of black music to be repackaged for millions of white teenagers. In doing so, they became supreme ‘pop’ musicians (good pop music having the never-ending ability to regurgitate and reshape existing forms). Even their biggest hit, ‘Satisfaction’, was an assemblage of advertising slogans and soul riffs - all derivative, all brilliant. After a period of stylistically indifferent drifting around the ‘peace and love’ era and its attendant psychedelic sounds in 1966-67 (which, ironically, as we shall see below, gave Jones a last chance to shine), the group returned to recycle Americana in a stunning series of albums: Beggars banquet (1968); Let it bleed (1969); Sticky fingers (1971); and Exile on Main St (1972). The template of this music was broadened to include folk, blues, country and gospel.

This series coincided, however, with another shift. During 1967’s drug busts, the Stones, building on an earlier image that pitched them as unwashed, delinquent opposites to the lovable Beatles, had been cast as anti-authority figures. (The establishment does seem to have been out to get the Stones and the severity of the sentences for fairly minor offences was critiqued by William Rees-Mogg, then editor of The Times, in the famous ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel’ editorial in 1967.) Jagger and Richards, although resisting the establishment, essentially boiled the issue down to a question of personal morality: ie, it was no-one else’s business what they chose to do in private. Of course, this was perfectly true on one level, but such a stance practically ignored the huge social consequences of the issue at hand, as the country debated the rights and wrongs of the so-called offensive behaviour of the Rolling Stones. Jagger, who always seemed to be, at heart, a conservative, summed up his existential predicament rather well in ‘Street fighting man’ (1968): “But what can a poor boy do/Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band?” Leaving aside the fact that Jagger did not exactly come from the poor side of the tracks, this is exactly the path the Stones followed.

At the start of the 1968-72 period on Beggars banquet, the Stones had cast a demonic image (‘Sympathy for the devil’, ‘Stray cat blues’), with flashes of social insight and empathy for the ‘common people’ on ‘Street fighting man’, ‘Factory girl’ and the somewhat trite ‘Salt of the earth’ (“Say a prayer for the common foot soldier/Spare a thought for his back-breaking work”). This social emphasis was not a new development for the band, given that earlier albums, such as Aftermath (1966), had also offered up a set of rather carping insights into the world around Jagger and Richards. Beggars Banquet even gave us a song with a positively Dylanesque cast of outsiders and misfits in the form of ‘Jigsaw puzzle’.

As the group’s great cycle of Americana began to work itself through successive albums, this social sensibility began to disappear, to be replaced by a less-demonic sense of good-time hedonism (the singles, ‘Honky tonk women’ and ‘Brown sugar’, are emblematic of this shift). By the time Exile on Main St had been released in 1972, the Rolling Stones were still able to produce brilliant, rough-hewn and sprawling approximations of blues, gospel and soul, but the songs spoke of little except a sense of debauchery and excess. Even when touching on more pure intentions, the sense of instant gratification was present: “Then you don’t want to walk and talk about Jesus/You just want to see his face.” It’s clear that the Stones were in a very insular ‘rock star’ space and this was reflected and reinforced by Keith Richards’ increasing dependency on heroin.

Other factors pulled the band into a calmer, but more secluded existence. At the end of the 1969 US tour there was an attempt to leverage the Stones’ standing in the counter-cultural movement of the time through the ‘organisation’ of the disastrous Altamont free concert in California. This resulted in the death of fan Meredith Hunter (with many other spectators being injured) at the hands of Hells Angels, who had been given responsibility for security at the event. These events were captured in the Gimme shelter film made by Albert and David Maysles. What strikes one, viewing the film in retrospect, is how out of place Jagger is, as the mayhem erupts around the band at Altamont. He comes across as a somewhat pathetic, helpless character, and a very English one - although to his credit he did make an attempt to stop the violence. Jagger’s shock and horror is also palpable, as he is shown watching footage from the concert.

No-one can blame Jagger, Richards et al for not wanting to be part of another Altamont, but it was also reasonably clear that the Stones were not going to be pitching themselves from that point on as any kind of counter-cultural phenomenon, but, rather more prosaically, as a rock band pure and simple.

By the early 1970s the Stones had become tax exiles - just about the most respectable type of bad boy you can be. Following Exile on Main St, Goats head soup (1973) was half-good or half-bad, depending on your disposition; while the two albums that followed it - It’s only rock ’n’ roll (1974) and Black and blue (1976) - were desperate affairs. The great cycle of Americana had been worked through and there was nothing left for the Stones but to dilute their magpie disposition with progressively weaker illustrations of songwriting (occasionally bolstered by half-baked and sometimes embarrassing borrowings from funk, reggae and disco, as the decade wore on).

This was the foundational era for the Stones as they exist today - a concert machine for recycling ‘golden oldies’ on an ever grander and more lucrative scale. There has been little attempt to elaborate any large-scale innovations or evolve any kind of ‘mature style’ (which even Bob Dylan has managed fitfully over recent decades). Instead, we have a group of pensioners perpetually frozen in a successful attempt to sell a pale copy of their youth to children raised up on their myth. These audiences only make the demand for a competent reiteration of a vague nostalgia, even if they are not old enough to have experienced the 1960s at first hand. The last thing anyone would expect at a modern-day Rolling Stones concert is a surprise.

Human toll

It is hardly to be wondered at that this situation has provoked an opposition of sorts that clings to some kind of ‘purer’ Rolling Stones from when Brian Jones was alive: ie, the one who passed away before the group’s fall from artistic grace becomes a symbol of musical purity. But what exactly is being clung to in the shape of Jones?

There is a very human form of sympathy for Brian as a victim of the forces of commodification. In 1965, Jones, speaking in the Charlie is my darling documentary, said:

Let’s face it, the future as a Rolling Stone is very uncertain. My ultimate aim in life was never to be a pop star. I enjoy it, with reservations, but I’m not really satisfied either artistically or personally.

This is not the voice of the proselytiser of R&B from two years previously: rather the words of someone slowly ground down by an industry that takes a grievous human toll. Those forces of commodification that Jones is inferring here manifested themselves in the more general pressures of being in a multi-million-selling pop group in the 1960s; and in human form in the shape of Jagger and Richards, whose consistent emphasis on forward momentum (even when this led the Stones into blind alleys in 1966-67) reflected market demands. There is an archetype in modern culture of the member of the rock group who gets sick of the music business and burns out. Jones is merely a more pervasive and famous example of this general phenomenon. ‘Music industry equals sickness’ is a widely understood formula beneath the hype and glitz that attend so many adolescent dreams of stardom. Interestingly, in latter years, it has been Richards, post-heroin, who has taken on the mantle of the Stone voicing most unease with Jagger’s commercial emphasis; albeit in the form of treating live performances as some kind of eternal life-support machine, which is only the same old market pressure rearticulated.

There is also the matter of Jones’s achievements as a musician. It is clearly his musical voice that transforms early Stones recordings. Take, for example, ‘I wanna be your man’, a Lennon-McCartney throwaway gifted to the band in 1963. Otherwise completely unremarkable and subject to a murky recording, Jones electrified the whole thing with a juddering slide-guitar riff that sounds weirdly displaced (kind of like Elmore James does Catford).

But it was in the group’s mid-1960s recordings, when it drifted stylistically, that Jones began to assert himself musically once more, demonstrating an ability to play a whole panoply of instruments that transformed a fairly mundane set of Jagger-Richards originals into a more memorable sequence of songs. The obvious example would be the punky sitar accompaniment on ‘Paint it black’ (1966). Compare Jones’s handling of the instrument to George Harrison’s more polite usage in The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian wood’ (1965); Jones carries the whole song, while Harrison merely embroiders it (to be fair to Harrison, he would get much better in subsequent recordings).

Similar demonstrations of Jones’s inconsistent genius can be heard on Aftermath (1966), the first Stones album to feature a full suite of original Jagger-Richards compositions. Lyrically, many of the songs reflected a closed world of airports, hotels and groupie girls, with a somewhat carping and snide view of the social backdrop at large. ‘Mother’s little helper’ seems to mock the use of prescribed drugs by bored suburban housewives, while ‘Stupid girl’ has a more obvious target in the form of female fans and groupies.

In the middle of all this, Jones, seemingly bored with the guitar, threw down a variety of textures and shapes on an exotic cast of instruments. Lyrically, ‘Under my thumb’ and ‘Out of time’ were blasé put-downs of women, but became much cooler and ironic after Jones’ application of marimba. Without him, such songs have merely become somewhat tiresome and dated and the Stones are still regularly massacring ‘Under my thumb’ on stage to this day without any noticeable sense of irony. Similarly, ‘Lady Jane’ (my favourite as a child), a rather twee ballad, was prettified beyond recognition by Jones’s use of a 19th century Appalachian dulcimer.

Few of the songs on Aftermath would have lingered long in the memory without the intervention of Jones. When his influence waned on certain recordings of this period, such as the 1967 single, ‘Let’s spend the night together’, then the Stones merely fell back into musically directionless clichés.

During the long drug-bust-strewn year of 1967, the Rolling Stones made a brief and unsuccessful foray into psychedelia - peace and love really wasn’t their thing given that their image had been constructed to emphasise a more confrontational stance. Only Jones seemed to have any idea of what sounds might be required, with his mellotron (a keyboard instrument that was an early precursor of the modern-day sampler) providing an ethereal, creepy vibe to tracks such as the ‘We love you’ single (the film of which portrayed Jones on the brink of drug-infused oblivion, ironic as the song would have had little focus without him) and ‘2,000 light years from home’, the stand-out track on the derivative mess that was 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Jones was not the only musician in 1966-67 to play exotic instruments or to explore more textured sounds. What did stand out was his ability to foreground those textures and to condense them into a three-minute pop song. In that sense, Jones was on a par with The Beatles, the masters of this practice, who also saw fit to utilise his talents on some - admittedly throwaway - recordings. Jones also composed, produced and arranged the soundtrack to a 1967 cult West German film, A degree of murder, starring Anita Pallenberg.

It could be objected that this really is not an awful lot to point to in terms of some kind of ideological resistance to the commodification of rock music. Clinging to someone such as Jones as wreckage from the great musical denouements of the past has a certain irrationality. We have a wayward dandy; a guy who could play lots of different instruments well; and one who was rather fond of altering his mind with substances. Yes, Jones was clearly persecuted by the authorities, but there was no attempt to make himself into a martyr. Rather, as Trynka shows, he was more interested in dodging the bullets, which helped to isolate him even further.

Cheated

But if Brian Jones is a somewhat weak flame to throw against the forces of corporate darkness, then that is not really his fault. The composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), once described pop art as “shameful for mankind … garbage art, which celebrates material impermanence and decay …”

This is an extreme view, but it does present a core of truth about pop music. Its beauty has been in its transient and portable form, but that, in turn, means a regression on the part of the producer and the listener. Jones, even as someone who had tried to embroider the pop form in the most intelligent manner possible with R&B and other exotic infusions, had obviously begun to disinter the truth of his musical existence with latter dabbling in electronica and Moroccan field recordings. The limitations of Brian Jones are in themselves limitations of an art form that travels far too lightly to become a purveyor of deep cultural import.

These are also problems with the 1960s themselves. The latter-day evolution of the Rolling Stones has been part of a wider trend, whereby everything from this era in terms of music, fashion and social rebellion has been recuperated into the mainstream in one form or another. Recycling the music of the 1960s is a huge industry, while rebellions of the era such as anti-racism have been incorporated and tamed by the bureaucratic structures of the state in a number of countries across the world. International rebellions, such as the one that occurred in 1968, were clearly not nothing, but were much more ephemeral in historical terms than some leftists would have you believe.

It is instructive to read practitioners in the British punk movement of the late 1970s make essentially the same complaints about the structure of modern society and the boredom of everyday life that had been made by the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. While the supposed ‘year-zero’ approach of the punk movement to the past was revealed to be hyperbole (punk groups had the same ‘pick-and-mix’ attitude to the past as most pop groups have), the fact that it had to define itself against the same old targets would suggest that the 1960s was somewhat inconsequential.

In Britain at least one could make a case for arguing that the 1960s was a decade with strong reactionary elements. This is an anecdotal point in regards to the growth of social freedoms, but my dad has told me that, while he did grow his hair long, keep up with fashions and play loud rock music as the decade wore on, the sense of social disapproval was nearly as strong. Once it became known in our village that he liked the Stones, he was initially subject to half-serious inquiries about his bathing habits; the implication being that, as the Stones were ‘filthy’, there was a chance he might be too.

Moving away from anecdotes, this idea can be expanded. In 1968, another English group that had emerged in the same broad period as the Stones, The Kinks, released a flop concept album called The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, which was a weird precursor for John Major’s later lament for the England of warm beer and long shadows on cricket fields. However, singer-songwriter Ray Davies was not just engaged in an act of wilful perversity against the prevailing rebellious wind of 1968: rather, as writer Andy Miller points out in a book with the same name as the aforementioned album (2003), such pieces were lodged in a broader reality of reaction; or, at the very least, conservatism. The Labour government of the time was launching an ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign as a spur to home-based industry; and Enoch Powell was urging repatriation of black immigrants, while porters from Smithfield meat market held up signs stating: ‘A George Cross for Enoch.’ Ray Davies was obviously not an artistic equivalent of Enoch Powell, but both had been nurtured by the same nostalgic compulsion.

If Brian Jones is an ineffectual symbol of rebellion, then that could merely be a sign that such rebellions really were not up to much in the first place. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Howard Phillips