“It wasn’t true”: Why Keith Richards believed Brian Jones was overrated
It’s a shame that great bands go on to end up hating each other. I mean, there are very few examples on the contrary. Everybody from The Beatles, The Smiths and Pink Floyd all pushed their greatness as far as they could with the underlying tensions that existed. Even brotherly love couldn’t keep Oasis from spending nearly a decade in creative exile. But unlike all of those bands, The Rolling Stones managed to keep on going, touring throughout the decades and putting their underlying hatred to one side for the sake of music.
Like the Gallagher brothers, the relationship of the band’s two protagonists, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, was somewhat brotherly, connected by an unwavering sense of love and loyalty, but not immune to personality irritations that neither could shake and both would be willing to address during inter-band squabbles.
While it threatened the livelihood of the band on several occasions, for the most part, it was petulant. In fact, Richards developed a way to live with his irritation for the frontman using his imagination. In his 2011 memoir Life, Richards explained that he developed a codename for Jagger so that he could moan about him, to his very face: “He became Brenda or Her Majesty. We’d be talking about ‘that b**ch Brenda’ with him in the room, and he wouldn’t know.”
But the pair had a deep understanding of one another’s abilities. Underneath it all was a telepathic kinship that meant their writing process was bulletproof. There was a shorthand whereby Richards understood the charisma of Jagger’s performative style that his writing process could be informed, Jagger’s phrasing guided melodies, while the frontman could prepare chorus lines and hooks with a deep understanding of Richards’ style.
This reliance on one another was ultimately born from the more inconsistent nature of the fellow guitar spot. After finding Ronnie Wood in 1976, the band spent five years playing with Mick Taylor after the death of their founding member and fellow guitarist, Brian Jones. Many fans attribute the Stones’ development of a bluesy style to Jones and his sliding guitar technique, but frankly, Richards wasn’t having any of it.
“Because he’s dead, I can say, ‘Oh, Brian was a fantastic musician’, but it wasn’t true. Brian wasn’t a great musician. He did have a certain feel for certain things, but then everybody in the band has that for certain things, too. And there was a nice bit of chemistry there for a while, which unfortunately didn’t stay.”
Jones was no different from his musical counterparts of the late 1960s. Fiercely creative and hedonistically curious, he combined his growing career success with a penchant for substance abuse. Lighthearted at first, it soon became crippling and hugely counterproductive to the bands creativity which is easy to attribute to Richards’ memory of the guitarist.
When he sadly died, drowning in the swimming pool at his East Sussex home in 1969, Richards was somewhat unsurprised. The tragic death was further saddened by the predictability of the event. The band clearly believed Jones’ inclination to party was informed by some sort of underlying tension that existed within him. Richards said Jones, “Always had to have an enemy, he always had an imaginary foe.”
A continued career in The Rolling Stones would have undoubtedly provided him with a healthier enemy to focus on, for the band wasn’t immune to a sense of unhealthy tension. Sadly, that was a dynamic we never got to see play out.
