Brian Jones and the Road to Joujouka (Part One)

 

There he sits, teetering precariously on the edge of Keith’s piano bench, playing the melancholic melody of “Ruby Tuesday” on his recorder. The date is 15 January 1967, and the Beatles had yet to release “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” and, of course, Sgt. Pepper. But Brian Jones was already setting the musical bar as high as it could go, contributing something experimentally feminine and tender to the sound of a group known for its machismo and tales of stupid girls forever trapped under the thumb of their men.

            As Mick botches the low note on which the first line of “Ruby Tuesday” ends, throwing off Keith’s harmony vocal (Brian, reportedly, sings the vocal harmony on the record), Brian steadfastly plays his recorder (and, the melodic crux of the song that he actually wrote, bur for which Mick and Keith took the credit). He’s miming of course—they all are, except for singers Mick and Keith—but Brian has a confidence in the new song that his four bandmates belie, with their camp facial expressions and hippie clothes that just don’t fit well with them.

            Four Stones make fun of psychedelia even as they embrace it, their youthful vigor betraying a childishness that demonstrates an unwillingness to embrace the culture that they helped create. Mick’s and Keith’s cries for satisfaction and endless critiques of women addicted to fashion or prescription drugs—there was always something wrong with women—found their antidote and became palatable because Brian repeatedly yanked the vulnerability out of his soul and added a layer of emotional depth to the Stones’ music.

            Would the music of 1966 have sounded so disturbing, so naked, and so vital without Brian? “Paint It Black” couldn’t have been as dark and paranoid without his razor-sharp sitar melody; “Under My Thumb” would have been yet another misogynist anthem without his marimbas, which made Mick's sexist words seem too easy, trite, and light; his dulcimer on “Lady Jane” gave the tune an Elizabethan vibe that somehow represented the delicate fears of the women whom Mick calls up for execution; and his guitar feedback blasts on “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” brought sonic mimesis to the song’s chronicle of sexual chaos.

            But 1967 would be Brian’s make-or-break year, not only because it would send him on the road to Joujouka. You could tell that much from his performance on Ed Sullivan. Whereas Mick caved in to the corporate pressure to change his lyrics—he sang, “Let’s spend some time together,” instead of “Let’s spend the night together”—and offered up a rolling of his eyes as protest. But Mick's eyes were just a gesture, and they somehow played into his camp take on psychedelia. (Eight months later, Jim Morrison told Ed’s “family-oriented audience” that they could, indeed, “get higher.”)

            Mick, the former London School of Economics student and future marketer of a Rolling Stones credit card, thought himself greater than the cultural moment and movement that he represented. Brian, conversely, knew that he was a servant, a messenger, an angel of a new awareness. Whereas Mick and Keith were ensconced in tradition—Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and the like—Brian had completely absorbed these influences by 1966 and wanted to move on. The great American bluesmen, he figured, were avatars of mind expansion, visionaries of the dark night and the even darker pain that they and their ancestors had undergone under the whip of slavery and Jim Crow. Brian knew, utterly, that these brave men had created new forms to express the new (and pulsing raw) pain that they felt in their bones and had seen with their eyes. They weren’t pop stars—the Beatles and Mick and Keith were pop stars—but men who blew their very souls into their mangled harps and plucked their brittle steel strings with the work-hardened calloused hands of men who knew what coarse cotton felt like in the act of being picked.

            Perhaps that’s why Brian looked like an angel. Look at him when he and Mick introduce Howlin’ Wolf—“one of our greatest idols”—to British TV in 1965. Look at how he tells Mick to shut up so that Wolf can get up on stage where he belongs. Look at how he nods his head in time to Charlie’s beat whenever he plays “The Last Time,” a blond-headed angel of cool and confidence, somehow sexually available but as distant as Apollo—as ivory-skinned, as white-clad, as poetic.

            But, most of all, look at the way that he subverts the authority of manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham and his adoration for all things Mick and Keith by transforming half the cuts on Aftermath—the Stones’ crucial LP of 1966—into an avant-pop masterpiece that truly mirrors the innovative spirit of Waters and Wolf, of Walter and Berry, by avoiding blues clichés.

            Some people say that Brian—and, therefore, the rest of the Stones—was imitating the Beatles and their equally experimental Revolver LP, which also appeared in 1966. But Brian had the Beatles beaten by four months. “Paint It Black,” “Under My Thumb,” “Out of Time,” “Lady Jane,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” “I Am Waiting,” “Goin’ Home,” and “19th Nervous Breakdown” were already all over the airwaves before Revolver hit the shops.

            And Brian and the Stones were not only redefining what rock and roll could do in the studio, but unlike the Beatles, they were playing their songs live. Whether staring or smirking, posing or running, Brian was magnetic. The girls wanted to fuck him, and the boys wanted to be him. Patti Smith herself, in a mood of giddy poetic remembrance, wrote about grabbing Brian’s ankle when she saw the Stones play at a high school auditorium in 1964 New Jersey. Smith’s speaker—Smith herself?—ends up soaking wet, in tears of beatific vision or in post-orgasmic flutter, it doesn’t matter.

            But perhaps what does matter is that by January 1967, when Brian and the Stones played “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Ruby Tuesday” for Ed and his crowd, the angel looks crestfallen. His eyes look tired under his blond bangs and floppy white hat. His eyes speak volumes about how he’s leaving something—maybe everything—behind: the band he started, his friends and flatmates Mick and Keith, and quite possibly the music that because it flowed so effortlessly and unimpeded from him, his life.

            As early as 1965, Brian had told an interviewer that he felt that there was more to life than the Rolling Stones. It’s simply unimaginable to think that Mick and Keith would ever have the courage to say the same thing. But, by 1967, Brian knew that the Stones were mortal—and they were. (To be continued...)