Brian
Jones is to the Rolling Stones what Leon Trotsky was to the Russian
Revolution: organizer, ideologist and victim of a power struggle. Jones
founded the group, gave it its name and recruited the schoolboys Mick
Jagger and Keith Richards, who then marginalized him, eventually
expelling him from the band. Since his death in 1969, a month after he
was forced out, Jones has largely been airbrushed from the group’s
history.
Paul
Trynka’s biography “Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones”
challenges the standard version of events, focused on Mr. Jagger and Mr.
Richards, in favor of something far more nuanced. Though Mr. Trynka
sometimes overstates Jones’s long-term cultural impact, his is
revisionist history of the best kind — scrupulously researched and
cogently argued — and should be unfailingly interesting to any Stones
fan.
Specifically, “Brian Jones” seems designed as a corrective to “Life,”
Keith Richards’s 2010 memoir. Mr. Trynka, the author of biographies of
David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and a former editor of the British music
magazines Mojo and Guitar, has interviewed Mr. Richards several times
over the years and obviously likes him, but also considers his memory of
events highly unreliable.
“History
is written by the victors, and in recent years we’ve seen the
proprietors of the modern Rolling Stones describe their genesis, their
discovery of the blues, without even mentioning their founder,” Mr.
Trynka remarks in the introduction. Without naming Mr. Richards, he also
expresses his distaste for an assessment that appears in “Life,” that
Brian Jones was “a kind of rotting attachment.”
The
portrait of Jones that Mr. Trynka offers here is bifurcated. Though he
is impressed with Jones’s “disciplined, honed sense of musical
direction” and his dexterity on guitar and many other instruments, he
does not hesitate to point out his subject’s more unpleasant personality
traits: He was narcissistic, manipulative, misogynistic, conniving and
dishonest about money. It’s not accidental that this book is called
“Sympathy for the Devil” in Britain.
Mr.
Trynka attributes Jones’s downfall to a conjunction of factors, some
related to those character flaws but others external to him. Much has
been written about the drug busts that swept up Mr. Jagger and Mr.
Richards in the mid-1960s and their court battles, though Jones seems to
have been even more of a target, because he was such a dandy and so
successful with women.
But
as Mr. Trynka tells it, Jones did not receive strong legal advice or
fight charges as hard or as successfully as the Jagger-Richards team.
After his first arrest, he pleaded guilty, which drove a wedge between
him and other band members, who feared it would mean they could no
longer tour abroad, all of which left him feeling crushed, isolated and
vulnerable. That, in turn, increased his consumption of drugs and
alcohol and made him less productive as a musician.
Nevertheless,
Mr. Trynka demonstrates convincingly that the original Rolling Stones
were Jones’s band and reflected his look, tastes and interests, not just
the blues but also renaissance music and what today would be called
world music. (He recorded the master musicians of Joujouka in the
mountains of Morocco.) In “Life,” Mr. Richards describes his discovery
of the blues-tinged open G guitar tuning, familiar from hits like “Honky Tonk Women”
and “Start Me Up,” as life changing, and says it came to him via Ry
Cooder in the late 1960s. But Mr. Trynka notes that Jones often played
in that tuning from the band’s earliest days and quotes Dick Taylor, an
original member of the Stones, as saying, “Keith watched Brian play that
tuning, and certainly knew all about it.”
Some
of Mr. Trynka’s account is not new, having appeared in “Stone Alone,”
the often overlooked 1990 memoir of the Rolling Stones bassist Bill
Wyman, or other books written by band outsiders. What makes Mr. Trynka’s
book fresh and interesting, and gives it credibility, is the length he
has gone to find witnesses to corroborate and elaborate on those
stories.
It’s
not just that Mr. Trynka has sought out those who worked with the band
on the creative side, such as the singer Marianne Faithfull, the
arranger Jack Nitzsche and the recording engineers Eddie Kramer, Glyn
Johns and George Chkiantz. He has also interviewed those with more of a
worm’s-eye view: drivers, roadies, office staff, old girlfriends and
former roommates like James Phelge, whose surname the band would
appropriate to designate songs that were group compositions rather than
Jagger-Richard numbers.
“Brian
Jones was the main man in the Stones; Jagger got everything from him,”
the drummer Ginger Baker, who played in the band at some of its earliest
shows and went on to become famous as a member of Cream, says in the
book. “Brian was much more of a musician than Jagger will ever be —
although Jagger’s a great economist.”
Citing
those present at the creation, Mr. Trynka contends that Jones had a
hand in composing some well-known Stones tracks, including “Paint It,
Black” and “Under My Thumb.” He also claims that “Ruby Tuesday,” a No. 1
hit early in 1967, is actually a Jones-Richards collaboration — written
not by Mr. Richards in a burst of inspiration and heartbreak in a Los
Angeles hotel room, which is how the story is told in “Life” and
elsewhere, but, according to Ms. Faithfull and Mr. Kramer, “labored
over” by the pair in London for weeks.
“I
used to say to Brain, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ ” Stan
Blackbourne, the accountant for the Rolling Stones at their mid-1960s
peak, recalls in the book. “ ‘You write some of these songs, and you
give the name over as if Mick Jagger has done it. Do you understand,
you’re giving ’em thousands of pounds!’ All the time I used to tell him,
‘You’re writing a blank check.’ ”
Mr. Trynka also looks into the circumstances of Jones’s death, on July 3, 1969, in the swimming pool at his home
in East Sussex, once owned by A. A. Milne, but after all the Sturm und
Drang that has come before, the subject is somewhat anticlimactic. In
numerous books and in films like “Stoned,” it has been suggested that
Jones was murdered, but Mr. Trynka painstakingly examines the flaws in
each of the theories, and ends up close to the official verdict, “death
by misadventure,” because of drug and alcohol consumption.
“The
official coroner’s verdict on Brian’s death was perfunctory and lazy,”
Mr. Trynka concludes. Nonetheless, “I’ve come to share their belief that
Brian’s death was most likely a tragic accident” and to believe that
“many of the existing theories that his death was in fact murder rely on
unreliable witnesses.”
In
the end, with the advantage of 45 years’ perspective, Mr. Trynka
maintains, it is Jones’s music that matters. “It’s understandable why
the survivors resent Brian Jones beyond the grave,” given his founder’s
role, he argues, and also writes: “Brian Jones got many things wrong in
his life, but the most important thing he got right.”
BRIAN JONES
The Making of the Rolling Stones
By Paul Trynka
Illustrated. 371 pages. Viking. $28.95.
http://www.nytimes.com
