Brian Jones

Born:
Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones
February 28, 1942
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England

Died: July 3, 1969
Hartfield, Sussex, England

Brian Jones, a gifted and versatile young musician, formed The Rolling Stones in London, England in 1962.  His musicianship and magnetic stage presence were a driving force behind the band's phenomenal success in the sixties.  Jones was the prototype British rock star in every sense of the phrase.

His efforts are often overlooked by fans, and he was eventually overshadowed by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who spearhead the current band. 

The following biography was researched, and excerpts taken, from Wikipedia.  Images are from several sources.

Early Life

Jones was born in the Park Nursing Home in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, during World War II.  He suffered from asthma his entire life.  His parents, Louis Blount and Louisa Beatrice Jones, were of Welsh descent, and middle-class residents of the town. 

Brian had two sisters: Pamela, who was born on 3 October 1943 and died on 14 October 1945 of leukemia, and Barbara, who was born in 1946.

Brian's parents were both very interested in music, and it seems their interest had a profound effect on young Brian.  In addition to his job as an aeronautical engineer, Brian's father played both piano and organ, and led the choir at the local church.  Jones's mother Louisa was a piano teacher and started teaching her son the instrument at a very young age.

Eventually Brian required formal lessons as he progressed too quickly for his mother to continue teaching him.  Jones' new music instructor recognized his potential, and informed his parents that he had exceptional musical abilities. 

He soon learned how to read music, and eventually took up the clarinet, becoming first clarinet in his school orchestra at 14.

In 1957, Jones was first exposed to the jazz musician Charlie Parker.  This sparked a lifelong interest in jazz music and Jones persuaded his parents to buy him a saxophone.  As with many instruments he attempted to learn, Jones initially played endlessly, only to find he became somewhat bored with the instrument after a while.  He would then search for another instrument to play.  Two years later his parents gave him his first acoustic guitar as a present for his 17th birthday.

Jones attended local schools including Dean Close School, from 1949 to 1953 and Cheltenham Grammar School for Boys, where he started in September 1953 after passing the Eleven-plus.  Jones was known as an exceptional student, getting very high marks in all of his classes while doing relatively little work.

He enjoyed badminton and diving but otherwise was not very skilled at sports.  However he found his schooling to be too regimented and formal, and refused to conform when he reached adolescence.

He was known to eschew wearing the school uniforms, refusing to wear his mortarboard, and angering teachers with his behavior.  As a result, he remained very popular and well-liked with the students, while the teachers would often cane him.  This open hostility towards authority figures got him suspended from school on two separate occasions.

Dick Hattrell, a childhood friend of Brian's, is quoted as saying about the guitarist: "He was a rebel without a cause, but when examinations came, he was brilliant".

All this came to an end, however, when in the spring of 1959 (aged 17) Jones impregnated his girlfriend, a 14-year-old Cheltenham schoolgirl named Valerie.  Jones encouraged her to have an abortion, however she wanted no further contact with Brian and instead chose to have the baby boy adopted.

The child was given to an infertile couple upon his birth and Brian quit school and left home, travelling throughout northern Europe, including Scandinavia, for the summer.  During this time, Jones later claimed, he lived something of a bohemian lifestyle, busking and playing guitar on the streets for money, living off the kindness of others.

While Jones was fond of telling others about his trip throughout Europe, it remains uncertain as to how much of his story is real and how much is embellishment. Other friends and acquaintances spoke of Jones merely staying with relatives outside the UK, yet to hear it from the musician himself, he had no money, no home, no friends and no family after he left England.

Upon his return, Jones became much more interested in various types of music.  He was taught classical music at a young age, and he always preferred blues (particularly Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson), however he soon took an interest in country, jazz and rock 'n roll.

He began playing at local blues and jazz clubs in addition to busking and working various odd jobs, and used the money he earned to buy more instruments.  He was also known to steal small amounts of money to pay for cigarettes, which got him fired from jobs on several occasions.

Despite the unwanted attention he received from impregnating his girlfriend at a young age, Jones showed no signs of changing his lifestyle.  A second child, who Jones named Julian Mark Andrews (his mother being Jones' then girlfriend Pat Andrews) was born in 1961.  He sold his record collection the day his son was born to buy flowers for Pat and clothes for the new born and lived with them for a while.

The Rolling Stones  [ top ]

Jones eventually left Cheltenham completely and moved to London where he met and befriended fellow musicians Alexis Korner, future Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones, future Cream bassist Jack Bruce and others who made up the small London Rhythm n' Blues scene that the Rolling Stones soon dominated and spearheaded.  He became a proficient blues musician, for a brief time christening himself "Elmo Lewis", and Bill Wyman claimed he was one of the first guitarists in the UK to play slide guitar.

In the spring of 1962, Jones recruited Ian "Stu" Stewart and singer Mick Jagger into his band.  Jagger and his childhood friend, Keith Richards, met Jones when he and Paul Jones were featured playing Elmore James' "Dust My Broom" with Korner's band.  On his initiative, Jagger brought guitarist Richards with him to the rehearsals, and he also joined the band. 

Jones' and Stewarts' acceptance of Richards and the Chuck Berry songs he wanted to play coincided with the departure of blues purists Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight who had no tolerance for Chuck Berry. 

As Keith Richards tells it, it was Jones who came up with the name "The Rollin' Stones" (later with the 'g') while on the phone with a venue owner.  The voice on the other end of the line obviously said, 'What are you called?'  Jones went blank.  The Best Of Muddy Waters album was lying on the floor, and Track One was Rollin' Stone Blues.

The Stones had their first gig on 12 July 1962 in the Marquee Club in London with the following line-up: Jagger, Richards, Jones, Stewart, bass player Dick Taylor (later of The Pretty Things) and drummer Tony Chapman.

Throughout much of 1962 and 1963 Jones, Jagger and Richards shared an apartment (referred to by Richards as "a beautiful dump") in Chelsea, London at 102 Edith Grove with James Phelge, a future photographer whose last name would later be used in some of the band's writing credits. 

While they lived there, Jones and Richards spent day after day playing guitar while listening to blues records (most notably Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters & Howlin' Wolf), and Jones showed Jagger how to play the harmonica properly.

The four Rolling Stones then went searching for a steady bassist and drummer, and after several auditions and try-outs they settled on Bill Wyman on bass (mainly because he had two large VOX AC30 guitar amps and cigarettes).  After having played with Mick Avory later of the Kinks, Tony Chapman and Carlo Little for a few gigs, jazz-influenced Charlie Watts from the Alexis Korner group Blues, Inc. was chosen to play drums. 

Watts was  considered by fellow musicians to be one of the best drummers of the London music scene.

Charlie Watts described Brian's role in these early days: "Brian was very instrumental in pushing the band at the beginning.  Keith and I would look at him and say he was barmy.  It was a crusade to him to get us on the stage in a club and be paid half-a-crown and to be billed as an R&B band".

The group played at local blues and jazz clubs around London, eventually forming a solid fan base despite strong resistance from traditional jazz musicians who felt threatened by the Stones' popularity. 

While Mick Jagger was the lead singer, Jones, in the group's embryonic period, was the leader, promoting the band, getting them shows around London and negotiating with venue owners.  Jones would often act more as an entertainer in these early days, playing several instruments including vocals, rhythm guitar, slide guitar and harmonica.

During live performances around this time, and especially at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, Jones was frequently a more animated and engaging performer than even Mick Jagger.  Jagger initially stood still while singing, mainly by circumstance, as there was hardly any room for him to move at all.

While acting as business manager, Jones arranged to have himself paid 5 pounds sterling more than the other members of the group, a practice which did not sit well with the rest of the band and created resentment against him.

Fame and Fortune  [ top ]

As the Stones' popularity grew, they came to the attention of Andrew Loog Oldham.  He met the band in April 1963 at the suggestion of Record Mirror music writer Peter Jones (no relation) and soon became, with Eric Eastman, their co-manager. 

Oldham, who had worked briefly as the Beatles publicist, was an admirer of the Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange, as well as the film Expresso Bongo.  He cultivated an image for the band as unruly and slightly menacing, a kind of blues-inflected, rough-edged answer to the more amiable Beatles, using the novel's protagonist and his gang as his inspiration.  It was Oldham who coined the phrase "Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?".

Piano player Ian Stewart was pushed into the background by Oldham for two main reasons: Oldham felt that Stewart, a somewhat burly Scotsman, did not fit in with the image he wanted of the group; and Oldham felt that six group members were too many for audiences to remember clearly.  Stewart remained the Stones' road manager and principal keyboard player until his death in 1985.

Oldham's arrival also marked the beginning of Jones' own slow estrangement from the band, one which saw his prominent role progressively diminished as Oldham sought to shift the Stones' centre of gravity away from Jones and towards Jagger and Richards.

Until this time all of the songs in the group's repertoire were either blues covers or instrumentals credited to "Nanker Phelge", a credit that indicated the song was a Jagger/Jones/Richards/Watts/Wyman composition.  Oldham, and everybody in the group, recognised the financial benefit of writing one's own songs, as with the Lennon/McCartney team, coupled with the simple fact that playing covers wouldn't keep in the limelight for years to come.

Further, Oldham wanted to make Jagger's onstage charisma and flamboyance a central focus of the band's live performances.  Jones saw his influence over the Stones' direction slide as their repertoire comprised fewer of the blues covers he would have preferred and more Jagger-and-Richards-penned originals, and as Oldham began asserting increasing managerial control, displacing Jones from another key role.

On 23 July 1964 Jones fathered another child out of wedlock, this time to girlfriend Linda Lawrence.  Jones named this child Julian Brian Lawrence.  Julian would adopt the surname Leitch after Lawrence later married the folk singer Donovan on October 2, 1970 (right).

Jones is said to have named both sons Julian in tribute to the jazz saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley.

Jones playing his custom mando-guitar

Throughout his career Jones showed a musical aptitude, having the ability to play a myriad of instruments, due to his training on the piano and clarinet in his youth. As soon as the Stones earned enough money to record in profesional, well equipped recording studios, like Olympic Studio and the RCA and Sunset Sound Recorders studios in Los Angeles, Jones started experimenting with different wind and stringed instruments at a rapid pace.

Throughout his years with the band he played guitar, slide guitar, piano, sitar, tamboura, organ, dulcimer, mellotron, xylophone, marimba, recorder, clarinet and several other instruments. In total he is known to have played at least 15 instruments with the Stones.

Brian's signature guitar is a teardrop-shaped prototype Vox Phantom Mark III, though he used many others throughout his career.  He was fond of Gibson electrics (various Firebirds and ES-330 models), along with the Rickenbacker 12-String model made famous by George Harrison.

Brian contributed significantly to the 1960's sound of the Stones, playing slide guitar on "I Wanna Be Your Man", "Little Red Rooster", "Doncha Bother Me", "No Expectations", "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "I'm Moving On". 

He supplied the main guitar riffs on "The Last Time", "Get Off of My Cloud", "19th Nervous Breakdown", and "Mona".  Sitar on "Paint It Black", tamboura on "Street Fighting Man", marimba on "Under My Thumb", "Out Of Time" and "Ride On, Baby", recorder and piano on "Ruby Tuesday", dulcimer on "Lady Jane" and "I Am Waiting", accordion on "Backstreet Girl", mellotron on "2000 Light Years From Home", "She's A Rainbow" and "We Love You".  He played  saxophone and mellotron on "Citadel" and autoharp on "You Got The Silver".

It was Brian Jones who played blues harp ("harmonica") on most of the Stones' recordings throughout the 1960s. He also contributed saxophone to the Beatles' "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)".

In the Stones' early years, Jones was also a back-up singer for the Stones, particularly from 1962-1964. Notable examples are "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Walking The Dog". Jones' backing vocals can also be prominently heard on "Come On", "Bye Bye Johnny",""Money"", "Empty Heart" (alongside Jagger and Richard) and others.

Jones and Keith Richards excelled on what is known as "guitar weaving", later dubbed the Ancient Form of Weaving, that has become a signature part of the sound of the Rolling Stones throughout their career. It involves both guitarists playing rhythm and lead parts at the same time, without ever really differentiating between the both styles. This style of playing is also known as the "Chicago" style, as it can be heard on albums by Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, with Hubert Sumlin as the main exponent.

Keith Richards maintains that what he and Jones called "guitar weaving" grew out of this period, from listening to Jimmy Reed albums:

We listened to the team work, trying to work out what was going on in those records; how you could play together with two guitars and make it sound like four or five.

Jones and Richards perfected what they heard on the '50's Chicago Blues albums. The best examples can be heard on the first album The Rolling Stones and Out of Our Heads. Starting with the 1966 album Aftermath, the 1967 albums Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request showcase Jones's multi-instrumental talents throughout. The 1968 album Beggars Banquet and the 1969 Let it Bleed have Jones mostly missing, and feature the guitar weaving by either Richards alone or with session musicians like Ry Cooder or Dave Mason.

Around 1968 Jones purchased Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, the former home of Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne.

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